Sunday, July 29, 2007

A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)'

A few remarks on A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie), 1979) by Jean-Luc Godard:

Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



Interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Deanna Kamiel, from 1980:



• Introduction to one method of making genuine cinema. For any who find Godard obscure or "avant-garde" (how I hate that term!), this is the contrechamp, twenty minutes long (shot on PAL video) and easy to digest, pitched for rewatching. It marks the moment in Godard's oeuvre in which the video-based works shifted in focus from the analytical pedagogy to the leçon de choses; here, filmmaking's the thing. How does a film get made? One makes images, edits sound. If one can understand this, then one can understand A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie).


"What I would like to show you is a way of seeing. For example: superimposition, and cross-fades. And then slow-motion, slow-motion either during superimposed images or a regular shot, to see if there is something to see, about which something can be said, that might alter the ligne du récit. The ligne du récit should take off from what has been said, what has happened. The plot should flow out of what's happened."


• One makes images, edits sound.


"Start with a sequence of images — the image of a sequence."


Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



• A few years ago Godard said that "these days every kid who picks up a DV camera thinks he's Stanley Kubrick." Now more than ever, our technology allows the gesture to come first, the thought second. Of course to make a good movie it should be the other way around. To think is to work, and then one can build; over time of craftsmanship, the thought and the gesture become one and something (something else, or something more) happens. There are good, meaningful, mysterious and spacious images. But always still human, artisanal, framed, made. It's a lesson that goes back to Lumière, Monteiro, Hou, Costa. Work the image. To which Godard frequently adds: "The Image will come at the time of the resurrection."


"Sometimes we should dig deeper into the images, the way we dig deeper into the story, the story of something in the body."


Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



• Don't use the image to "illustrate" the thought. Think, then construct the image. An image is strong when it's capable of doing its own thinking.


"All things may happen differently — re-examine the sequence — if there's motion, it doesn't mean the dialogue necessarily creates the motion — there's another way to do it: just motion; an event; 'work'. The dialogue can be something separate."


Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



• And yet if Godard's image-track in A Few Remarks... seems at all illustrative, the exception is proving the rule in a very full sense. The images glissading beneath Godard's voice-over and sound-track are instructional, but only insofar as they are comparative, both in relation to the voice-over, and in contrast with the voice-over; in relation to one another, and in contrast with one another. That they seem to depict, occupy, and create a third space beyond their own relationships to the narration and to one another — i.e., a woman arranges flowers while a man recounts a real-or-imagined scenario based around a crime-thriller, in which he may or may not assume a dramatic role — that is, whether small video-narrative or JLG-screen-test, a small documentary and a fiction — reveals a new quality which incorporates (as though all this were mathematical process of proof) thesis and antithesis, and forms synthesis: the images are illustrating the thoughts, while the images operate, function, cogitate on their own. (The relationship between two images forms a third image in the mind's eye, and this is montage.) — These are images instructional, comparative, and computational. Thus, these are strong images.


"Sometimes we shouldn't use shot-countershot, which stems from the idea of a dialogue, or ping-pong — this idea of a 'match' as opposed to an event, really."


Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



• The signatures of every good artisan differ, and A Few Remarks..., in discussing universal principles, allows us a way of articulating the manner in which Godard's cinema might be distinguished from that of other filmmakers. I'll take one cross-section: American filmmakers. Above I spoke about the time when thought and gesture combine, and I think that in the American cinema or, more broadly, in American art, this combination — no, commingling — of thought and gesture is facilitated by a peculiar trauma specific to American life. So this comes first — then a natural flow. To think is to build, and from this merging-that-is-collapsing: Gus Van Sant, Abel Ferrara, Jerry Lewis, Barbara Loden, Harmony Korine, Charles Burnett, David Chase, Vincent Gallo, Shirley Clarke, William Greaves, Samuel Fuller or John Cassavetes — cogito ergo sum. It's difficult to explain The American Danger to the rest of the world; talk's so cheap. — If, as Godard puts it, "the silence of speed" is perceived in the face, the silence we American filmmakers must carve from that which surrounds us grants us our speed.


Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:



• Closing benediction, with remembrance of Fernando Pessoa: JLG suggests that first one see, then find the thought in seeing. ("To see if there's something to see.") I would add that the part that's not there, that's the silence of the speed of thought. Seshadri wrote in his New Yorker poem after 9/11, "This is you at the speed of light." You are thought, then light is thought, and you are light.

"I might have bored you a bit, but that doesn't bother me — that's creation. We're in the servants' quarters, and we're far from the masters. And that at least was something."

Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film Sauve qui peut (la vie)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1979:


Image from The Wit of the Staircase by Theresa Duncan, July 10, 2007:



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10 comments:

  1. "One makes images, edits sound." I see what he means: there is no frame for sound, you record every sound coming from every direction. And the great and influential power of the Godardian image lies in his making manifest the idea that the will of the filmmaker, not the needs of the fiction, is behind the selection of the frame. But, to me, that strongly, strongly implies the existence of the world outside the frame. Why such a radically anti-Bazinian statement from a filmmaker who played such an important part in the Bazinian revolution?

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  2. Just to clarify, "one builds images, edits sound" was my own formulation extrapolated from the Godardian ether/ethos... Regardless, you're spot-on with zeroing in on the implication of a (particular) world beyond the frame — 'whence else' come the materials with which the filmmaker fashions the image?

    Dan, I have to defer to you on things Bazinian — does AB suggest that the fiction, or the plasticizing within the frame that figures the fiction, annihilates (through exclusion) the world outside the frame, by the filmmaker's selectivity or "definition" of the world? — cf. "Things are already there — why invent them?" as JLG quotes in the 'Histoire(s)'. And yet if not invention, what's exactly occurring when Godard builds a graveyard out of cleaning products on the lawn at the end of '2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,' or has Marina Vlady look into the camera? The "framing"-device in Godard, above all else, maybe even the camera itself, is rhetoric — and this leads us back to the will of the filmmaker.

    (Side-note: Do the implications of all of this selectivity and arrangement ["Montage, mon beau souci"] ultimately lead us back to "The Ontology of the Photographic Image"? That's not rhetorical, I'm really asking, since I only remember bits and pieces of that essay... which I nevertheless consider subconsciously-hugely influential for myself...)

    One of the things that crops up in my mind whenever I think about this stuff is the sort of tenuous connection that the label "realist" ever holds for a particular filmmaker, or artist. You mention "the will of the filmmaker," and this for me is exactly the area (a maybe radically anti-Bazinian place at that) wherein any pegging of Godard as "post-Rossellinian" or "realist" cracks the plaster. I detect a porousness between the frame and outside-the-frame, between 'what is there' and the constructive/formulating imagination (hand-in-hand with the will) of the artist, that blurs any line (mostly a 'critical' one) between "realist"/"magic-realist" beyond all definition. I guess one lesson is: taxonomy only carries us so far; and another would be: "realist" and "Bazinian" are not interchangable... Neither the deep-focus of 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Magnificent Ambersons' nor the mise-en-scène of Chaplin precluded the element (and power) of fantasy in either OW or CC — a 'reality' of which AB was of course very aware.

    And this maybe takes us back to the selection of the frame... Care to help close this circle?

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  3. Craig - don't know if I'm addressing your questions properly, but I'll just throw out a few thoughts that might or might not clarify my earlier post.

    I certainly wouldn't want to put Godard in Bazin's shadow and leave him there: "Godard" is a whole lot of things, and he strained at the Bazinian bit more than some other Cahiers figures. But it does seem to me that the Godardian image, which was so fantastically influential (I'd trace all of today's master-shot, "minimalist" art cinema back to it, for instance), was an illustration of Bazin's ideas about cinema.

    Bazin famously compared the cinema to the flashlight of the usher in the theater, revealing part of a vast whole. If I had to sum up what I called the Bazinian revolution, I would say that Bazin rejected the prevalent idea that cinema was a visual art, and substituted for it the idea that cinema is a fulfillment of our primeval need to represent the world without human intervention. So, for Bazin, visuals and sound were part of the same endeavor, both subsumed to that je-ne-sais-quoi that makes the cinema image more than just a simulacrum of the world, but instead a peculiar object that, at least in some ways, is ontologically identical to the world.

    To me, Godard's contribution was that he felt empowered to show that "usher's flashlight" as a naked thing in itself, separable from the fictional constructs that generally govern the presentation of the image.

    "Montage mon beau souci" was seen by some as a break from the Bazinian aesthetic, but I don't think that aesthetic was as restrictive as all that, and I think Godard's ideas about cutting actually illuminate Bazin in interesting ways. One example I remember is the comical cut in Alphaville where Godard shows a car positioned to run over someone's head, then cuts to Lemmy Caution driving the car, which rises in the air as if going over a big speed bump. This is exactly the kind of cutting that Bazin argued (in his piece on The Red Balloon) cannot represent the relationship between the car and the person run over by it. But this fact is exactly what makes the cut funny: we know that Godard removed the actor and substituted some other object, and yet he uses film convention to splice together the action, inadequately. You could see this as a Bazinian joke.

    I don't think Vlady looking at the camera is a rebellion against realist film representation, which, as Bazin acknowledged, is a relative concept. For Godard, the camera look was another way of acknowledging what he always underlined with every shot: that someone on a set had turned on a camera and was letting it run.

    Enough for now - refocus me if I've gotten off the track.

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  4. It should also be noted that Godard was and is a student of Roland Barthes. Meaning: "the death of the author is the birth of the reader". He was a post-structuralist. And ironically, since this was a rather novel idea in the realm of film making, the style was defined by HIM. The Auteur Theory is a cruel joke.

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  5. Dan —

    Very interesting observation, tracing the origin of the modern master-shot cinema ("le cinéma du plan-séquence" by another name) back to Godard rather than to Antonioni. To make the connection with the latter mystifies me slightly, but over the last week or two it seems like lots of folks have felt pretty comfortable doing so. Of course, I have the impression the whole exercise is a futile way to score points on behalf of a hypothetical "Antonioni cause" versus a hypothetical "Bergman cause". As though "who's influencing more directors 'stylistically' wins," when of course not only is the premise ludicrous but the presiding thesis diseased. There's so much that's uniquely personal inside, and specific to, the work of (this is the gang one gets the impression are being implicitly pointed to as examples of the Antonioni influence) Hong, Tsai, Tarr, Sokurov, Jia, Van Sant (and we could go on... it seems like just yesterday GVS was being pegged as an acolyte of Tarr, because he happened to mention at a press conference having seen a few of BT's films... but the two couldn't be more dissimilar either in temperament, aesthetic, or dramatic subject-matter), that I have a hard time seeing even something so aggressively "stylistically-modernist" (because of the urban architecture and ethnological photography) as L'eclisse as the ur-film for any picture by those directors. Ask Tsai who his great forefather is and you're liable to hear (others aside) Truffaut; ask Hou and there's a good chance he'd tell you (others aside) Dreyer. (And were you able to ask Dreyer, you would have heard — again, others aside — Sir Arne's Treasure. ) What does Bloom call all of this? The mis-reading of the forefathers, due to influence (performance) anxiety, or summat? Bill Krohn would know... — Anyway I always had the sense that Bloom's position got pretty conjugal with the notion of "diminishing returns," so whatever. It's all lies anyway.

    As for one of Godard's breakthroughs being the calling attention to the flashlight itself (anxious mechanism), you're right. I would add that part of the agenda for Godard was, and remains, not only a revelation of the 'device' for revelation's sake, that is, to get a better glimpse at the metaphysics of the cinematograph (although that is part of the agenda), but also a means to "include everything" in a film, in which the confines of the frame, or the framework of a fiction, remain all too definite, as "closed-off" as they can be liberating.

    clm — Dan's note on Bazin's remarks about representation without human intervention (is there such a thing as representation in search of an author?) would seem to jibe to some extent with the position of Barthes, although the whole "death of the author" trip was never so cut-and-dry (let alone sexy) as its 'signifier' would have us believe (neither in Barthes nor Derrida). Like Godard says, we're far from the masters, and right now I'm pretty far from Barthes, whose S/Z first came my way a decade back in school... and, just out of circumstance, I haven't gone back to him since.

    According to Colin MacCabe one's entire understanding of Dziga-Vertov-Group-era Godard/Gorin would seem to hinge on a familiarity with Louis Althusser — but again, I'm spit-shining in the barn.

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  6. From Craig:
    ~"clm — Dan's note on Bazin's remarks about representation without human intervention (is there such a thing as representation in search of an author?) would seem to jibe to some extent with the position of Barthes, although the whole "death of the author" trip was never so cut-and-dry (let alone sexy) as its 'signifier' would have us believe (neither in Barthes nor Derrida)."~

    Couldn't agree more. I apologize. I should read the rest of the comments before joining in. Also, I should have noted that this was Godard's datum point and not the end result. He's since changed. It was a noble effort. I think this type of storytelling will come back with a vengeance, given the super-pluralism of the web. Thanks for the response. Your site is fantastic.

    And forgive my writing. I have a penchant for destroying the English language!

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  7. I'm trying not to get embroiled in that Bergman/Antonioni stuff....

    I love Antonioni (and have a lot of respect for Bergman too), but his plan-séquence shooting feels to me like an extension of the classical cinema, where shot length and composition are strongly motivated by dramatic considerations. The Godard shot feels like something different. The drama, such as it is, and the story, such as it is, may be out there somewhere, plaintively suggesting camera and frame choices, but Godard's will has fixed the frame where he would have it. So we wind up with something that, among other things, alludes to the filmmaking process: watching early Godard sometimes feels a lot like watching the rushes of a film in progress, where we see the entirety of a shot that would usually be harvested for a few key moments and cut together into an assembly.

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  8. Craig,
    Where did you get a copy of this? I'm beginning to do research for a paper about Godard's use of sound during this period, and I want to see as much work from the late 70s to the early 80s as I can. I've had trouble locating this one.

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  9. Ted -- the film is included as a "supplement" (I hate that term; Quelques remarques... is every bit as "main" a "feature" as the "main feature") on the UK DVD release from Artificial Eye of Sauve qui peut (la vie), sold under the title "Slow Motion." You can find it here at Amazon UK.

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  10. Thank you very much. I've just ordered a copy.

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