Resurrected Images: Godard’s King Lear

Resurrected Images: Godard's King Lear Marc Robinson The image will appear in a time of resurrection. -Saint Paul, quoted in Godard's Lear Accessibility and conservatism are qualities rarely associated with Godard, yet his recent King Lear edges toward both as he redefines their often pejorative meaning. Beneath the silliness that gives this Lear its buoyancy, Godard risks a self-exposure, spurred by Shakespeare's text toward an ingenuousness almost never seen in such a subversive director. For this Lear moves past Shakespeare to chronicle an entire culture's demise, the waste of which Lear's tragedy is but a symptom. Sensing impoverishment in his and others' arts, Godard emerges from his characteristic cool detachment to voice a passionate plea for a reversal-for a rescue of what is about to disappear. In Lear, he evolves an inclusive form of conservatism, distant from one that strengthens culture only by guarding its borders. As though impatient with the easy talk of those who profess concern for cultural health, Godard does the manual labor any act of restoration entails. He transforms his film into a vessel for storage-one anxiously positioned between property and loss. While Godard's Lear is not Shakespeare's, these issues originate in the play. Lear's relationship to his kingdom corresponds to Godard's stance toward his own film: like Lear, Godard has been manipulated by those around him, threatened and abused until he nearly divests himself of his property. Knowing that his own story illuminates Lear's, Godard opens his film with a fragmented account of how this Lear came to life. The intertitle that flashes by early on gives a clue to Godard's view of those events: "KING LEAR: A PICTURE STABBED IN THE BACK." Godard's voiceover monologue describes the stab: crass producers of blockbuster movies com20 mission Godard to film Norman Mailer's adaptation of Lear. Mailer drops out of the project-or is dropped (we never know which). Producers threaten to cease production; bully Godard to deliver the goods; Lear finally emerges bearing the scars of its battles. Most visible among them is the aborted sequence that opens the film, Mailer and daughter Kate discussing the justfinished adaptation, then returning to Provincetown, never to be seen again. Only a director aware that issues of property and power can connect otherwise unrelated situations could turn such Hollywood gossip into a starting point for King Lear. Throughout the rest of his film, Godard depicts the attempt to put together the pieces of his beleaguered project: Godard's Lear is about the act of reclaiming his film. In his own journey of reclamation, Shakespeare's Lear sought a similar resolution. Having begun his film by exposing its production history, Godard extends his interest to the processes generating literature: he also depicts the making of Shakespeare's Lear. And just as he brings himself into the film, contributing voiceovers and appearing as a Gloucester-like seer, he also includes traces of the playwright. Peter Sellars plays William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth, a devoted relative intent on keeping his namesake's work alive. He's on a mission to gather all the words Shakespeare wrote, now ostensibly lost and no longer remembered. When we first see him, he's sitting alone in a seaside restaurant, notebook open, slurping soup as he tries to recall play titles: "As You Wish to Have It?," he wonders, "As You Want It?" When snatches from King Lear's text waft through the film, often spoken by disembodied voices, Shakespeare, Jr. snags them and jots them down, carefully reassembling the play. His notebook will never leave his side for the rest of Lear, marking him as one for whom truth and even salvation lay within the realm of language: "I must have the words," he says at one point, pleading for others to tell him what has been said. Against Shakespeare, Jr.'s compulsion to reclaim the written word, Cordelia represents the virtues of silence. As played by Molly Ringwald with charming indolence-casual, not solemn-Cordelia first appears in the same restaurant sitting with her father (Burgess Meredith) and meandering through scattered scenes from the play. When Lear finally...