The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard

Introduction

xiii Introduction Nicole Côté Few filmmakers have had such pervasive and lasting influence, across artistic and intellectual fields, as Jean-Luc Godard. With a career in cinema spanning over fifty years and a hundred or more distinct works in numerous media, Godard has had an impact that cannot be overestimated, not only on the evolution of cinema worldwide, but on creative fields as diverse as television, video art, gallery installation, philosophy, music, literature , and dance. This collection marks an initial attempt to map the range of Godard’s legacy across these different fields. It arises from the international conference “Sonimage: The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard,” held September 16–18, 2010, at the University of Regina (Canada), in honour of Godard’s 80th birthday, and features fourteen essays, selected from the most original papers presented, that together delineate the impressive scope of Godard’s interdisciplinary influence on philosophy, society, culture, and the arts through film. The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard takes a close look at how Godard opens the gates of possible pasts and futures with the breadth of his imagination, spanning the social and the personal, the emotional and the conceptual, as reflected in various works in the arts and humanities influenced by him. Indeed, Godard’s cinema is just as invested in the past as it is in the future, the two being searched as earnestly as the present. Paul Ricoeur, in his article “Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination,” helps us understand Godard’s concerns with this widened present, as he brings together ideology and utopia within a single conceptual frame, where ideology preserves a human order that could otherwise be smashed by historical forces, and where utopia, with its vision of alternative societies, works as the most formidable critique of what is. Since ideology works towards social integration, and utopia, towards social subversion, both must be kept in a state of tension to produce a stable yet progressive society, says Ricoeur.1 Godard has indeed been preoccupied with both forces, documenting throughout his career the precarious maintenance of certain rituals (the repeatable): work, love, daily life. His recurrent interest lies in the recent past as history—that is, the shaping of the world through events brought about by various circumstances—as well as in utopic impulses Introduction xiv taking over culture as tradition and helping it progress. However, several authors in this anthology consider Godard’s representation of history as cyclical in its eventuality, a paradoxical and quasi-fatalistic stance that would link history, events driven mainly by utopic impulses, to ideology as understood by Ricoeur. Hence, perhaps, the conjuring function of cinema, its capacity not only to witness history in an ever-renewed attempt to memorialize various representations of it, but also to invent what could have been, what could still be: utopia. Godard has been interested in utopias throughout his career, from Alphaville (1965) to his more recent exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie (2006). As Christina Stojanova and André Habib rightfully note, the overt/covert utopic impulse foregrounds the messianic inspiration in Godard’s oeuvre. Utopia, a “nowhere” from which to take a good look at reality, actually denaturalizes it, thus opening the realm of the possible.2 In his Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Fredric Jameson notes the denaturalizing function of utopia: “utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness. The fundamental dynamics of any Utopian politics will therefore lie in the dialectic of identity and difference.”3 Indeed, a definition of difference being that which is not considered part of the self—and therefore has not yet been included in identity, identity necessarily entailing an exclusionary logic— the artistic vision could widen identity, since it allows a glimpse of “oneself as another.” An art as rife with utopic impulses as Godard’s condenses the possibilities of experiencing otherness, renewing art, and seeking a more inclusive universal. Godard’s cinema invites a revisiting of reality that enlarges it by the same token, offering new models of perception with its paradigmatic (“parametric,” say Long and Lapointe) linking of images, as is perhaps most obvious in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). One could say that Godard has steadily been working at enlarging the realm of cinema’s identity, making of it the (post)modern genre par excellence of reflection, despite his aversion to technology’s encroachment on our minds and to Hollywood’s commodification of cinema and recent history . Were...