The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard

3 Jean-Luc Godard and Contemporary Dance: The Judson Dance Theater Runs Across Breathless

37 3 3 Jean-Luc Godard and Contemporary Dance: The Judson Dance Theater Runs Across Breathless John Carnahan PHRASES the following essay is an experiment in interdisciplinary criticism, towards importing a vocabulary for figure movement on film from the language of dance and performance art. It is inspired by a desire to describe the striking autonomy and clarity of figure movement in Jean-Luc Godard’s films, a quality that seems to me as much a signature of Godard’s direction as his aphoristic dialogue and essayistic narratives. The reader is asked to see Godard as a choreographer and maker of performance events, parallel in era, and often parallel in theory and practice, to contemporary choreographers like Merce Cunningham. Specifically, I will use instances of admitted and likely influence that link Godard to the Judson Dance Theater—an influential nouvelle vague of 1960s dance that included Carolee Schneeman, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Lucinda Childs, among others—as an occasion to point out sympathies between Godard’s movement direction and contemporary choreography. A broader concern of this essay is to suggest the influence of the film medium on contemporary thinking about movement in general. The common ground between Jean-Luc Godard and the Judson choreographers, I would argue, is that they are both students of gesture as reproduced and analyzed by film. This convergence of interests is strongly demonstrated by the Judson group’s citation of Godard in Yvonne Rainer’s Terrain (1963). But before turning to the sourcing of the Judson choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s 1963 Terrain from Godard’s 1960 film Breathless, I would like to begin by considering the cinematic qualities of Rainer’s more famous (and more easily viewed, on the internet) 1966 composition, Trio A. In this now-classic composition, dance subtly and literally incorporates cinema—an aesthetic that was heralded, three years earlier, by Rainer’s sourcing of movement from Godard’s Breathless. Godardian Legacy in Film, Music, and Dance 38 Trio A is a sequence of movements to be performed in a continuous motion, which usually requires about four and a half minutes. The dancer must avoid repetition, eye contact, and above all, shows of effort, as opposed to what Rainer calls (her emphasis) the actual effort needed for the movement. Her distinction can be explained as follows: if I point out something to you on the Champs-Élysées, as your friend, my body enacts a muscular cycle to raise, sustain, and then release my arm; but if I point out something on stage, as a dancer, I will belabour the marshalling, sustaining, and ceasing of effort in order to portray that I am pointing. Dancers call this cycle of effort and/or of display a “phrase.” If you see someone evidently phrasing, and then evidently repeating the phrase, he or she must be dancing, as opposed to merely moving. Trio A is merely moving. This quality of movement was also called “ordinary” or “task-based” by Rainer and her colleagues in the Judson Dance Theater. Trio A seeks the “ordinary” by suppressing phrasing and repetition. As Rainer writes, One of the most singular elements in [Trio A] is that there are no pauses between phrases … the end of each phrase merges immediately into the beginning of the next with no observable accent.… What is seen is a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions.… Endurance comes into play very much with its necessity for conserving (actual) energy (like the long-distance runner). The irony here is in the reversal of a kind of illusionism: I have exposed a type of effort where it has been traditionally concealed and concealed phrasing where it has been traditionally displayed.1 In Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, Carrie Lambert-Beatty suggests that the showy phrasing and “heroic” postures the Judson dancers questioned may have been partly an artifact of dance’s documentation by still images. Snapshots of artists like Vaslav Nijinsky or Martha Graham in mid-motion show how dance is supposed to look, so dancers try to produce , and their audiences try to find, what Rainer calls “moments of registration .” Although Trio A’s “phraseless continuum of movement”2 also looks gesticulating and blurry in photographs, in a viewing of Sally Banes’s “antispectacular” film document, “in which a stationary camera frames a bare space where Rainer performs at a deliberate pace and...