intervention #7


explication through the trailer


                      


Arthur Mas, Martial Pisani


english version by Craig Keller

Film Socialisme [Film Socialism] which JLG seems to have just finished editing, should be out in a few more months. For a little less than a year now, an initial trailer has been available on the Web. Godard has always liked to create the trailers for his feature films himself, ironically transforming the objects of his film into publicity instruments. At once true short-films and tools of interpretation, these film-trailers serve less to present the film to come than to distribute the keys to them in advance. Curious relationship of the small to the large of which Godard has just put forward the paradigm: to the notion of trailers considered as films in-and-of-themselves set entirely apart from the feature-length work, has now just been added the idea of trailers containing the entire feature-length work. At the end of March, in fact, four new Film Socialisme videos appeared. These are genuine compressions of the film which play back, in just a few minutes, the entirety of the image-track in fast-motion. These four versions of the film differ by their duration (thus by their speed of playing back the images), by their soundtrack, and by the number of titles that appear on-screen. Thus two forms of trailers, which respond in two timeframes to the curiosity elicited by the new Godardian opus.   all the stories / histories that might have been What is the subject of Film Socialisme? Godard responds as he always has: his film is not one, but several. The histoire(s) are written in the plural and the parentheses put the unity of the subject in doubt. Even from the time of the trailer of A bout de souffle, Anne Colette's voice-over announced with an effect of advertisal exaggeration «the pretty girl», «the boy villain», «the revolver», etc. The filmmaker therefore substituted for the canonical narrative model of the trailer an inventory of characters, objects, archetypes or references from the film. The titles of Film Socialisme once again promise the moon and the stars: things [des choses]; gold [de l'or]; bastards [des salauds]; stories/histories [des histoires]; Egypt; Palestine; Odessa; Hell as; Naples; Barcelona; things said [des paroles]; animals [des animaux]; children [des enfants]; legends [des légendes]. The indefinite article might be read like the Latin "de" (i.e., "regarding..."), and the trailer like an enumeration of possible topics. In the course of one sequence from Chapter 1A of the Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard takes it upon himself to recount "all the stories of the films that were never made." On the image-track, a halo of white light illumines segments of film from Bezhin Meadow — Antoine de Baecque recalls in Godard (Grasset, 2010) that JLG and JPG had taken on the project to reconstitute frame by frame Eisenstein's censored and banned film. On the soundtrack, the opening measures of the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 21, "Absence," unfurl. The absence, of course, is that of the works that were mutilated (Bezhin Meadow), that disappeared in various cinematheque fires (Stroheim's The Honeymoon), that were suppressed for obscure legal reasons (King Lear, out-of-circulation since 2002), or that were simply left in an unfinished state (Welles' It's All True). It is also, and especially, that of the projects which Godard was never able to get off the ground. Among the multitude of unshot scenarios, «Les Animaux» [«The Animals»], absent from the Histoire(s) du cinéma, finds a singular echo in the trailer for Film Socialisme. The synopsis, developed over twenty or so lines and recorded in the second volume of the filmmaker's texts and interviews, describes in the manner of a visionary fable four eras successively governed by socialists, women, children, and animals. If socialists and women aren't mentioned in the trailer's titles, the sequential placement of the last two groups is telling. If we're to believe Alain Badiou, the central portion of the film would likewise pose the question of giving children the right to vote. Children who, in the abandoned scenario, took power from the women and the socialists before aligning themselves with both groups against the animals... Another story makes its return in the Film Socialisme trailer: that of the producer Ludovic Brecher, better known by the name Louis Dolivet. A native of Romania, Dolivet in his early years was assistant to the notorious Willi Münzenberg, propaganda chief of Comintern for the West in the period between the two wars. At the end of the Forties, he retired from the political scene and set out on a career in the movies. Producer of, among other films, Mr. Arkadin [1956] and Play Time [1967], he remained a friend and political mentor to Orson Welles throughout the Fifties. What's more, Dolivet appeared in a shot in Arkadin, used once again fifty-five years later in the trailer for Film Socialisme. We're at the second minute of the trailer and Dolivet's face, filmed in Wellesian low-angle, a cigarette in his mouth, immediately follows a shot of a corrida excerpted from Jean-Daniel Pollet's Méditerranée [1963]. In the lower right corner of the frame there appears the name Barcelona in white capital letters. And yet, anyone who can clearly recall Welles' film knows well that the scene doesn't take place in Spain, but in Paris, on the pont Alexandre III. Godard is building a connection here between text and image to which historians of cinema will pay close attention in order to uncover the key. Financed largely by Filmorsa, Dolivet's company based out of Tangier, Mr. Arkadin was co-produced in equal measure by two foundations in Madrid: Hispano Film, then Cervantes Film; as such, several sequences of the film were shot in that country, with certain ones shot in Barcelona. There also exists a deeper link that binds Dolivet to Spain, a secret and novelistic link that gains in poetry what it most assuredly loses in historical truth, and about which Godard shared some words a few months before the broadcast of the Histoire(s) du cinéma. In that interview [1], the filmmaker argues that Dolivet, via Willi Münzenberg, would have come into "a little bit of money from the Bank of Spain that Stalin had taken to keep out of harm's way." For Godard, who received this anecdote from Jacques Tati during an encounter shortly before Tati's death, "Stalin supported the Spanish War in order to get hold of that money" which, handed over in part to Dolivet, would have allowed the financing of Mr. Arkadin and Play Time. The filmmaker concludes: "It's a story that I would have really liked to show: what's the true connection between Mr. Arkadin and Play Time? It's the gold stolen by Stalin from the Bank of Spain and from the Spanish republicans. [...] I would have been able to put this story in the first episode [of the Histoire(s)] where I talk about 'all the histoires' of the cinema." In trailer #1, Dolivet's image appears a few seconds before the shot of a gold piece posed upon the front page of the Spanish daily El Mundo. Alain Badiou said the same thing more or less in an interview a few months ago: Film Socialisme is a film about gold. So the question isn't as much about taking this anecdote seriously as it is about using it to catch a glimpse of the starting points for a cartography of the imaginary that belongs all to the filmmaker. The films cited in the trailer invoke the stopovers on the cruise. Gregory Arkadin's plane crashes near Barcelona. The Battleship Potemkin inevitably evokes the famous set of steps in Odessa with which it's become synonymous. Méditerranée serves as a guide through the landscapes of Greece and Egypt while the images from Nanni Loy's Le quattro giornate di Napoli illustrate the supertitle that inscribes the Italian city on the itinerary of this voyage along the Mediterranean. From the trailer, the cities and the countries at which the ocean-liner lays over are presented all at once as locations in History and in cinema.     and the ship sails on   To whoever had questions about the topics covered in Film Socialisme, Godard responded with a long list of subjects. To whoever was wondering what the film might look like, the director has now divulged every shot. In this trailer which exists in a single version no longer, the totality of the images from Film Socialisme can be found, compressed into four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Videos no. 3, 4, and 5 proceed similarly, at varying speeds. Godard pays indirect homage here to Gérard Courant, auteur of the Cinématons, who in 1995 created a Compression d'Alphaville, a reduction of the film's ninety-nine minutes into a quarter of the running-time. A construction in three parts is thus divulged by the Film Socialisme trailer: the sea-cruise as such is followed by a mysterious central section, then comes a reprise of the six ports of call by way of a montage of film excerpts and archival images. Notre musique [2004] already proposed a tripartite composition — based on the Divine Comedy model — but it was the first segment, «Hell» / «Inferno» , which presented itself in the form of a collage of films, direct appendix to the Histoire(s) du cinéma. Redistributing the elements of a history of the cinema across a Mediterranean crossing — this seems to be the undertaking of the new Godard. What connection might there be between Film Socialisme's philosophical cruise with passengers of some repute and touristic stopovers, and the solitary descent into Hells that makes up the Histoire(s) du cinéma? First, a trilingual play on words, present in the five trailers: "Hell as," evoking at once the word "hélas" in French ["alas"], "hell" in English, and "Hellas," Greece. A Godardian comparison ensues, with the director connecting in an article the auteur of Méditerranée with Eurydice's lover ("Pollet, more courageous than Orpheus" [2]). After all, in a 1986 interview for Microfilms, Godard explained to Serge Daney that "the history of the cinema that it creates for itself" should be taught to students, the filmmaker testifying for them his philosophy like Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook returned from their expeditions. The project of a cruise-film is thus linked intimately to that of the Histoire(s) du cinéma, and it's under the aegis of images from Méditerranée and Mr. Arkadin that JLG embarks upon his voyage.         [1] « Une boucle bouclée », nouvel entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard ["A Closed Circle": New Interview with Jean-Luc Godard] by Alain Bergala, in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, pp. 9-22. [2] « Impressions anciennes » ["Former Impressions"], in Cahiers du cinéma no. 187, February 1967.

«Why don't you speak about a film before it's finished? You're a movie critic.

A movie critic's not just a journalist.»



Jean-Luc Godard to Pauline Kael.