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159 C h a p t e r 6 CONCLUSION Ibegan this book by contrasting the fame of its two subjects: Jean-Luc Godard, the hero of the French New Wave, and Anne-Marie Miéville, the interesting but less well-known Swiss filmmaker. What I have tried to do throughout is to show that, together, they have been something else entirely—neither a hugely popular golden child nor a regional curiosity. Together, they have been a pair responsible for the most searching and nuanced negotiations of cinematic form in postwar Europe. Together, they understood the changes that television and video had brought to cinema, the ways in which that transformed medium could refresh ideas both about the local/quotidien and the political/spiritual, and the ways that these sorts of dialectic relationships could, at the same time, forge a new kind of montage and a new kind of realism. And they understood all this in a way they never seemed to in the work they did on their own. There are films that Godard made on his own that move in these directions: Lettre à Freddy Buache (1981), Passion (1982), JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (1994). That is also true of some films Miéville made on her own: Papa comme maman (1977), Nous sommes tout encore ici (1997), and Après la réconciliation (2000). These, like those Godard films above, are highly sophisticated both at the level of cinematic form and of ideological and philosophical rumination. But the films that they made together, from Ici et ailleurs (1974) to Liberté et patrie (2002), are quite different. The difference lies not simply in the evidence of collaboration, although that is often integrated into the works themselves. It can be summarized following in three statements: their work together is rooted; their work together is dualistic; and their work together is moderate. I will explain the last one first, since it seems so counterintuitive. Really, it takes us back to Serge Daney’s idea of “Le paradoxe de Godard,” which I discussed in Chapter 1. “There is nothing revolutionary about Godard,” Daney wrote in that 1987 essay, “rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present” (“Le paradoxe de Godard,” 7/“The Godard Paradox,” 71). That has been most true when he has worked with 159 160 Chapter 6 Miéville, a figure whose arrival as a collaborator ended the pseudo-revolutionary silliness of his Dziga Vertov period and its immediate aftermath. That set the tone for a collaboration that both evolved over the course of almost thirty years and retained a core set of formal and philosophical concerns. In terms of both form and ideology, the work that Godard and Miéville have done together never fully departs from conventions of realist representation. At the level of visuals, the work is never fully abstract, and at the level of structure, it never departs from something that is either recognizably narrative or essayistic. This is in vivid contrast to Godard works like Meetin’ WA (1985) or King Lear (1987), both of which are interesting in some ways but neither of which are more than superficially engaged with the generic conventions of documentary or narrative.1 The opposite is true of a Miéville film such as Lou n’a pas dit non (1994), which has very little in the way of formal distinctiveness and often feels like an unintentional spoof of a talky, pretentious art film. When they have worked together, though, they recognized the rules but sought to radically reform them, evincing both impatience with dialogue-heavy illusionist narrative and a desire to enrich and disorient realist form without ever fully displacing it. In this way, they are at the core both Modernists and Bazinians. Colin MacCabe, in his contribution to a recent anthology on Bazin, argues that Modernism is central to his poetics, writing that: For Bazin, in all great cinema there is a fundamental “gain” of reality, the ability to allow the spectator to explore reality further. This notion has little to do with empiricism because the reality that the camera grasps is not independent of that camera.... In the sequence of essays that constitute the first volume of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Bazin moves between documentary and fiction while trying to elaborate the criteria by which films develop the ontological possibilities of the image ... (“Bazin as Modernist,” 70) That is not a bad way of describing Godard and...

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