About Me
For Ever Godard
Tate Modern, London, 21-24 June 2001For the last fifty years, Jean-Luc Godard's work in cinema and video has innovated, provoked and inspired. Since the completion in 1998 of Histoire(s) du Cinema, an eight-part videographic experiment incinema history, Godard's recent work on film and video has featured strongly in debates about audiovisual art and culture, especially regarding questions of historical memory, technological change, andthe future of cinema in all its forms. This historical moment provides the perfect opportunity for a critical reassessment of Godard's entire corpus and its key role in film culture. It is the aim of FOR EVERGODARD to meet this challenge.FOR EVER GODARD was a four-day international conference held at Tate Modern, London, 21-24 June 2001. It is the first event of its kind ever to be devoted to Godard's work in Britain. It brings togetherboth well-established commentators and the younger generation of critics working in the fields of film and television, art history, cultural studies, philosophy, music, and literature. It draws on talent frommany different countries and from different intellectual backgrounds.The sessions are based on the following themes:01. Museum
02. Memory
03. Question
04. Thinking
05. 'Godard'
06. Composition
07. Citation
08. Sacred
09. Music
10. Figure
11. Lyric
12. Media
13. History
14. Change
1. Museum
Speaker: Antoine de Baecque (Cinematheque francaise, Paris): 'Godard in the Museum'
Godard has always been interested not only in painting but in the way that painting is displayed, both in formal and ideological terms. In certain of his films (Les Carabiniers, for example), he has proposedideas and images of the museum, whether this be the imaginary galleries of Andre Malraux (for whom Godard has a particular fascination), or the real spaces of the Louvre (in Bande a part) or MOMA (inone of his and Anne-Marie Mieville's most recent works, The Old Place). Antoine de Baecque will examine how Godard's work, especially Histoire(s) du Cinema, has both destabilised and reconstituted therelationship between the museum and the moving image. He will also ask how Godard's artistic signature might itself become part of a museum culture. How might Godard's work feature in the museum?And how far might it help us to rethink the museum itself? De Baecque's responses to these questions are informed by his experience as project-director for the new 'musee du cinema/Henri Langlois' atthe Cinematheque francaise.4. Thinking
Speaker: Peter Harcourt (Carleton University, Canada): 'Analogical Thinking: Organizational Strategies within the work of Jean-Luc Godard'
Referring to the ideas of the Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy which reoccur in films as diverse as JLG/JLG, King Lear and Histoire(s) du Cinema, Harcourt explores the notion of analogical thinking i Godard'swork. He argues that even if disjunctively one image leads to another, by means of a process of collage, analogies possess their own form of narrative logic and bypass the sequential linearity of rationalthought. Image precedes idea, idea suggests space, space sanctions character, and character enables dialogue. The less concerned they are with narrative, the more Godard's films are dependent on thisway of thinking to unify their disparate elements. By taking Scenario du film Passion as exemplary of Godard's need to 'see' before he 'writes', Harcourt reveals that this extraordinary fictional essay is notonly about the process of conceiving a feature film, but also an innovative idiolect within cinema.5. 'Godard'
A panel discussing questions of self-portraiture, autobiography, voice, and the status of the filmmaker as creative artist.
Panellists: Richard Brody (filmmaker, New York), Nathalie Heinich (C.N.R.S., Paris), Roland-Fran..ois Lack (University College London), Muriel Tinel (E.H.E.S.S., Paris)
Chair: Wendy Everett (University of Bath)6. Composition
A panel on the relationship between cinema and the visual arts, including the question of Jean-Luc Godard as painter.
Panellists: Jean-Pierre Gorin (filmmaker, San Diego), Sarah Wilson (Courtauld Institute, London), Gerard Fromanger (artist, Paris) Chair: Cerith Wyn Evans (artist, London)7. Citation
Speaker: Monica Dall'Asta (University of Bologna): 'Godard and his Angel'
Dall'Asta interrogates Histoire(s) du Cin..ma in the light of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, a tradition that can be traced back to Nietzsche's reflections on the 'use and disadvantage of history forlife'.
Dall'Asta reveals that as a montage of quotations, Histoire(s) du Cin..ma constructs a (hi)story - or a history that is also a fiction - from a specific, unrepeatable point in time, endowed with the power ofmobilising the whole past and identified with the moment of cinema's death. Yet by indicating a purely cinematic method for the making of history, Histoire(s) du Cin..ma also shows that cinema will live in thefuture as a praxis of audiovisual film history, when the memories stored in the archives will finally become the matter of montage.Speaker: Leslie Hill (University of Warwick): 'A Clandestine Companion: Godard and Blanchot'
Hill explores the presence and influence of Maurice Blanchot in Godard's later work, and most specifically the actual figure of Blanchot in the climactic final moments of Histoire(s) du Cin..ma. Hill brings tobear Blanchot's literary and philosophical work on three central concerns in Godard's cinema: the question of history and the last man; the theme of the ghost in relation to a politics of the film image; andfinally Godard's citationality, his constant play with titles, quotations, and other textual
fragments, a massive question that can best be articulated by reference to Blanchot's notion of the neuter.9. Music
Speaker: Laurent Jullier (University of Metz): 'JLG/ECM'
Jullier explores the symbiotic relationship existing between Godard's sound-work and the German record label ECM, which has released the sound-tracks of a number of his films. He argues that if thesound-tracks of Godard's films play freely on the effects of unintelligibility and concealment, these same characteristics effectively disappear when they are transferred onto CD. Does this mean that aGodard film risks being transformed into one long video clip? Jullier argues that Godard remains a fundamentally modernist filmmaker since his soundtracks never feature the musical equivalent of hismanipulation of images, voices and noises.
Jullier considers why it should be that music retains its integrity in Godard's work and is never subjected to the techniques of serialism, free jazz or cut-up. Respondent: Nora Alter (University of Florida)12. Media
A panel on cinema's relations with television, video, and digital technologies, including comparison between Godard's work and the projects of Chris Marker and Aby Warburg.
Panellists: Fran..ois Jost (University of Paris), Catherine Lupton (University of Surrey Roehampton), Maurizia Natali (Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I.), Hilary Radner (University of NotreDame) Chair: Ian Christie (Birkbeck College, London)13. History
Speaker: Marc Cerisuelo (University of Paris): 'From M..pris to Histoire(s), or the Godardian fiction of cinema'
Cerisuelo argues that Le M..pris is not only the first 'metafilm' of the New Wave but also the first chapter in Godard's 'critical history' of cinema.
The film reveals the true ambivalence of Godardian discourse, for although it is (among other things) remarkably lucid about the present condition and the legitimacy of cinema with regard to cultural history,it is also resolutely historicist and haunted by the nostalgia of a golden age and the certainty of an end. Cerisuelo traces the workings of Godard's double critical discourse through its link to the Frenchtradition of the genre (from Diderot and Baudelaire) and its resistance to a universalist or objective model. He reveals in the process the limits - precisely historicist - of such a narrative.*****Organisers:
Michael Temple (Birkbeck College),
James S. Williams (University of Kent),
Michael Witt (University of Surrey Roehampton)Advisory Committee:
Andrew Brighton (Tate Modern), Ian Christie (Birkbeck College), Jill Forbes (Queen Mary College), Catherine Grant (University of Kent), Colin MacCabe (University of Exeter), Paul McDonald (University ofSurrey Roehampton), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck College), Jeremy Ridgman (University of Surrey Roehampton), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago), Hilary Smith (British Film Institute), Cerith Wyn Evans(London)
