‘1750 Percussion Rifles’ (1)
Work of the Document, Rights and Duties of Cinema

Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt

1. ‘1750 fusils à capsules’, in Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Caravane Labatut (inventaire)’, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 453. Written in Aden on 3 November 1887.

2. Founded in 1895, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) was closely allied to the French communist party during the events of May 1968 and remains one of France’s largest trade union federations.

3. The Rhodiacéta textile factory in Besançon was the site of a major strike in February-March 1967. Documented by Chris Marker and Mario Marret in À bientôt, j’espère (1967), it anticipated many of the political, social and cultural concerns that were to come to the fore during and after May 1968. À bientôt, j’espère and the remarkable subsequent films made by the Rhodiacéta workers themselves under the ‘Groupe Medvedkine’ banner have recently been released on DVD by Éditions Montparnasse (www.editionsmontparnasse.fr).

4. The director of Darty, France’s largest electrical appliance retailer, commissioned Godard and Miéville to make Le Rapport Darty (1989). The company subsequently refused to allow it to be shown.

Document, information, communication (sign vs signal)

Jean-Luc Godard’s œuvre is a torrent of ideas, of invention, of freedom, of liberating power, of idealistic devotion, of ambition, of rigour, of melancholy, and of amour fou for intelligence. With Godard, cinema becomes a critical tool, a workshop in which to study the configuration of phenomena, a construction site on which to work at displacing the limits of the symbolic world. The exhibition ‘Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006’ reminds us that for Godard the word ‘cinema’ covers a prodigious variety of practices, and that every constituent element of his project (critical and theoretical texts, video scenarios and essays, short and feature-length films, television films and series, commercial commissions and advertisements, poems, books, sound compositions, as well as his countless interventions in the media) is simultaneously a self-contained piece and an integral component of an experimental installation under continual development. From the point of departure of a reconfiguration of the corpus in the light of ‘Voyage(s) en utopie’, and while recognising that the ongoing organic evolution of Godard’s project in as yet unforeseen directions will require other modes of enquiry in the future, we have sought in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents to start documenting his work, so many aspects of which remain hitherto neglected.

6. The L’Express questionnaire is reproduced in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, pp. 20-21. At the end of her book La Nouvelle Vague: Portraits de la jeunesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), Françoise Giroud reproduces all of the L’Express questionnaires and the responses they generated. These provide a compendium of Godardian scenarios, motifs and slogans. On the history of statistical sociology, see Alain Desrosières, La Politique des grands nombres: Histoire de la raison statistique (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).

‘Send your reply to the "Nouvelle Vague", 91 Champs-Élysées, Paris’

The nature, functions, and formal and symbolic properties specific to the document are deployed in Godard’s work in completely new ways. At the core of his enterprise, we find a spirit of contradiction and contestatory energy which have never dimmed – let us recall that Godard’s first critical move, in the context of Bazin’s editorship of Cahiers du cinéma, was to mount a defence of American genre cinema. To the apparatus of statistical sociology, popularised in the late 1950s in the guise of the survey, and normalised thereafter in France as an instrument of power, to the simplistic and prescriptive representations which dissolve the complexity of the human into an apparently incontestable multiplicity of numbers, to these so-called ‘exact’ images (this is the adjective employed in the questionnaire published in L’Express on the 3 October 1957 which announced the arrival of the ‘Nouvelle Vague’, at that point still a sociological rather than cinematic banner), Godard opposes his local, polemical and polysemic images, which assume the risk of singularity, heterogeneity, discontinuity, depth and irreducibility. ‘Send your reply to the "Nouvelle Vague", 91 Champs-Élysées, Paris’: in a way, Godard’s films constitute a series of stinging responses to L’Express’s questionnaire, which determines not only numerous Godardian synopses, but above all his formal inventiveness in the realms of investigation, questioning, and displacement of the problem, which always involves, first and foremost, a calling into question of the very terms of the research. (6) The absence of signature on À bout de souffle (1960) demonstrates, among other promises, a mischievous and subversive obedience to the magazine’s invitation: ‘Your reply can be totally anonymous’. In anthropological terms, one might say that at the moment of the foundation of the industrial public opinion factory – and hence of collective imagery – society began secreting its own antidote, one destined to create, safeguard, and deploy all forms of imagery (realist, critical, allegorical, documentary, etc.) within a medium that was still popular, and that this antidote was called Jean-Luc Godard. In humanist terms, one might say that faced with the growing communications empire, in its capacity as a malignant enterprise in subjection which produces its own standardised models of individuation, it was a question, through Godard, of preserving something of the question of the creature, not in the sense of an out-moded type of belief which was in the process of being discarded, but that of an open interrogation of the question of the Subject, whether it be individualistic, lyrical and affectionate as in the 1950s and '60s, or, at the other end of the œuvre, universalist, epic and disindividualised as in the stream of sublime essays which flows from Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) to L’Origine du xxi^e siècle (2000) or Dans le noir du temps (2002). With, for the artist, anonymity as point of departure (À bout de souffle left unsigned, just like, three decades later, in 1991, Allemagne neuf zéro, the matrix for ‘Voyage(s) en utopie’), the credit sequence as playground, and self-portraiture as stick of explosive. In aesthetic terms, one might say that it was not only a question of a creator of images permanently deploying his critical invention to oppose the reifying instructions broadcast in supposedly collective representations, but above all of conceiving and contributing to the symbolic field in new ways. This involves a radical shift: representation is not limited to imitating, validating, confirming, and comforting, but works to analyse, dissipate, modify and destroy. At the peak of such an ambition, during the Dziga Vertov Group years, traversed in the company of Jean-Pierre Gorin, representation was called on to participate directly in changing the world, ‘small screw in the revolution’, little sister of armed struggle. And undoubtedly it did effect change. It changed things in concrete terms in the realm of the history of political struggle by spreading its spirit of revolt throughout the western world. Certain of the Essex university students in British Sounds (1969), for example, formed the Angry Brigade activist group. And it changed things more generally and profoundly through its own means, in the realm of representation, by endowing the most industrial of art forms with the startling bursts of its formal propositions, ambition, and magnificent ideals, all worthy of Byron in Missolonghi. In this sense, artistic creation indeed remains placeless, utopian, because it stems entirely from what the world is not; but, simultaneously, it is everywhere, injecting itself into every calcified joint between power and representation, which it corrodes like acid. Travels in utopia, explorations of the powers of cinema, but also travels from utopia, infecting a great social body resigned to its dominance with doses which are never quite lethal enough.

Inventions of the document

We have not sought to cover Jean-Luc Godard’s entire œuvre, which would be an impossible task in the context of a single volume, but to indicate the remarkable variety of documents, and of ways in which they are treated, in and around his work: explicit or implicit iconographic or literary sources; vestiges of work; self-contained artworks; critical instruments; aesthetic models and projects ... From the scenario to the letter which replaces a film, from the visual reference point to the filmstrip itself, from the seminal image to the unpublished manifesto, from abandoned rushes to the user’s guide to a film, from the article forgotten in the production archives or presence in a friend’s film to the trailer transformed into a piece of film criticism, from the magazine which preserves censored images to the book containing dialogue cut by the censors, the reader of Jean-Luc Godard: Documents will find numerous examples of documents, each of which is briefly contextualised. Symmetrically, at Dominique Païni’s initiative, we have also sought to explore how this corpus touches other artists whose proximity to Godard’s œuvre – structured by dialogue and steeped in solitude – is well known: as the reader will discover, the responses of Manfred Eicher, Augustin Gimel, Philippe Grandrieux, Monte Hellman, Ange Leccia, Macha Méril, Carole Roussopoulos, Rob Tregenza, Peter Tscherkassky, Peter Whitehead, and Hanns Zischler demonstrate considerable elegance and emotion.

It should also be noted that the prioritisation of documentation over interpretation emerged as a self-evident necessity, without prior discussion, at the same moment that Alain Bergala embarked on his initiative to publish the scenarios and working documents relating to Godard’s films of the 1960s. Faced with the scale of the corpus (which the reader will find established more fully in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents than hitherto), with its highly fertile speculative nature, and with the issues which Godard’s œuvre constantly engages, a collective need emerged: that of better establishing certain basic facts. And this need could only be met collectively.

Over the course of this methodological voyage many formal inventions have been discovered relating to the production and treatment of documents, which we nevertheless recognise are but an initial sample of those that remain to be identified and considered. To resume, we suggest that with Godard, every gesture, every aspect of his practice, every phase in the creative process, from conception to distribution in the public sphere, is transformed into a proposition about art. But the term ‘art’ here does not refer to pre-constituted ideals or existing circuits of symbolic exchange, but rather to a mode of permanent research, always critical and sometimes violent, into the totality of the beliefs and rules relating to representation – its parameters, tools, forms, functions, and myths. With Godard, ‘art’ remains the everyday term for a novel mode of practice as creative rebellion. In this, the author of Histoire(s) du cinéma has produced the notion of the art in the 20th and 21st centuries just as Francisco de Goya, Friedrich Schiller or Arthur Rimbaud did for their times.

Translated by Michael Witt.

This text is an English version of the introduction to Nicole Brenez, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James S Williams, and Michael Witt (eds.), Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006). This book, commissioned by Dominique Païni and designed by Augustin Gimel, is the official catalogue of the exhibition conceived by Godard for the Pompidou Centre, 'Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006: À la recherche d'un théorème perdu', which runs in the Galerie Sud from 11 May to 14 August 2006.