Jean-Luc Godard and Walter Benjamin: metahistory, dialectical images and worldly theology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the recognition of Walter Benjamin’s influence on Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema, little in-depth comparative work has been conducted on this relationship to date. The article provides a close reading of Godard’s documentary political filmmaking and articulates it with a large spectrum of Benjamin’s texts, from the early writings and unpublished fragments to his latter and best-known work. The article looks beyond methodological confluences between Benjamin’s historiography and Godard’s cinema, enabling the viewer to consider philosophical, philological, metahistorical and aesthetic issues that chart new points of analysis for further comparative work. The first sections examine the importance of dream and spectral appearances in the redemptive historiography of both authors; the middle sections problematise dialectical thinking, image and language, investigating the specificities of both Benjamin’s and Godard’s practices and theoretical approaches; the final sections consider the theological and Messianic interpretation of historical time, analysing the importance of ethical and political aspects in the work of both authors. By exhaustively mapping the specific moments in which Benjamin’s passages appear in Godard’s films, the article offers a way of entering into some of the most enigmatic formulations of Benjamin’s historiography, while opening up Godard’s documentary cinema to new readings.