The place of nature in Godard's late films

Abstract

Be nature as it is! What do I care? Since Jean-Luc Godard's return to feature filmmaking with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), one of the striking features of his style has been the presence of images of nature punctuating the rhythm of the films. This feature of Godard's work has proved difficult to make sense of, as the images of nature often seem uncoupled from thematic or narrative motivation. While it might make some sense for a discussion of philosophy and theology in Je vous salue, Marie (1985) to be interrupted with shots of celestial bodies, why is a scene at a gas station intercut with shots of reeds waving back and forth? Why does Godard move from a scene at a mental hospital in Prénom Carmen (1983) to a shot of waves coming into the shore at a beach – a location which is not given an orienting context for half the film? What are all the vaguely symbolic shots of the sun setting over a lake doing in Soigne ta droite (1987)? I'm going to argue that nature needs to be seen less as a topic within the films – that is, as something about which Godard has an opinion (like industrial capitalism) – than as a central part of his thinking about and within cinema itself. My focus will primarily be on Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (Germany 90 Nine Zero, 1991), where the use of nature is intimately connected to an analysis of German history and culture. In many respects, Allemagne 90 neuf zéro is uniquely positioned at the fulcrum between the two parts of Godard's late career: at the end of a decade of films that prominently employ images of nature, and at the moment when the video project of Histoire(s) du cinéma is coming to fruition. (Indeed, Allemagne 90 neuf zéro is the first film in which Godard employs the video manipulation of found footage so frequent in his late video works.) I will focus on certain scenes to argue that, as Godard becomes increasingly interested in the intersection of the history of cinema and the history of the twentieth century – perhaps the central topic of Histoire(s) du cinéma– he draws on models of analysis that emerge from his explorations of nature and its intersections with history.1 1 I discuss these issues at greater length in my forthcoming book, A Feeling of Light: Cinema, Aesthetics, and the Late Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Part of the reason that critics have had difficulties with nature in Godard's late work has to do with the dearth of historical models of analysis. When Hegel, for example, comes to think about the role of nature in art, he finds only two possibilities for its use: either nature can be treated as a kind of thing in itself, separate from human activity, or it can be used as a corollary to the moods of characters (a version of the pathetic fallacy).2 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (2 vols; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 2, 831. It's a binary that Novalis nicely sums up: ‘at one extreme the sentiment of nature becomes a jocose fancy, a banquet, while at the other it develops into the most devout religion, giving to a whole life direction, principle, meaning.’3 3 Novalis, The Novices of Sais, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Archipelago, 2005), 31. Indeed, the majority of discussions of nature in Godard's late films follow one of these two strands.4 4 For representative examples of each interpretive tack, see Stam, Robert, ‘ The Lake, The Trees’, Film Comment, 27: 1 (1991), 63– 6; and Yosefa Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertollucci (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 88–99. The problem is that such interpretations have assumed that nature is distinct from the rest of the film: set apart from the realms of history and politics, as well as from cinema. This proves inadequate to what I hope to show to be the complexities and ambitions of Godard's sustained engagement with nature as something dynamic, with a life or history of its own. There is, however, a tradition within cinematic aesthetics that can be of help in starting to come to grips with Godard's use of nature. Oriented around a reworking of the relation between foreground and background – the idea that the background should be of equal importance to what happens in front of it – this tradition has gone relatively unnoticed, but it is a strong undercurrent within the history of film criticism.5 5 The most prominent moment for this tradition is the 1920s: see Herman Scheffauer, ‘The Vivifying of Space’, in Introduction to the Art of Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 76–85; Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (North Stratford: Ayer Company Publishers, 1997), 89–117; Louis Aragon, ‘On Décor’, in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1,` 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 165–8. A later example is Manny Farber's account of space: see Introduction in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, expanded edn. (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 3–11. Godard has long drawn on one of its most powerful exponents – Sergei Eisenstein – as a cinematic and aesthetic inspiration. Eisenstein's influence on subsequent filmmakers, including Godard, is usually discussed in terms of his advocacy of montage, whether in the form of the ‘montage of attractions’, the articulation of ‘intellectual montage’, the idea of sensuous thinking and ‘inner speech’, or the later theory of a montage ‘image’. Histoire(s) du cinéma, for example, can be seen as an attempt to revisit Eisenstein's theories of montage in light of half a century of historical and technological change. But Godard's indebtedness runs deeper, as he picks up on and commits to Eisenstein's interest in the aesthetic possibilities latent in the backgrounds of film. The principle of an active background finds perhaps its clearest expression in Eisenstein's discussions of Walt Disney. Eisenstein repeatedly expresses his admiration for the way Disney makes his characters' bodies expand, stretch, and drastically change shape. These transformations involve what Eisenstein terms ‘plasmaticness’, the way characters break free of their established and given forms. He locates the social significance of Disney's cartoons precisely in this idea of plasmaticness, arguing that they serve as a counterpart to, even an antidote to the regimentation of modern American life: Disney is a marvelous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived. For those who are shackled by hours of work and regulated moments of rest, by a mathematical precision of time, whose lives are graphed by the cent and dollar. […] Disney's films are a revolt against partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and greyness.6 6 Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Seagull, 1986), 3–4. Still, there are problems. If Disney offers an experience of liberation and freedom that is unavailable in everyday life, he fails to elevate plasmaticness into a universal principle. All of Eisenstein's criticisms of Disney hit on the same point: ‘The figures are very good, but the landscape is poor – always poor.’7 7 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘From Lectures on Music and Color in Ivan the Terrible’, in Selected Works, vol. 3, Writings 1934–47, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 317–38 (p. 336). Of Bambi (1942), a film he generally admires, Eisenstein remarks that it is ‘so bad in the unmusicality of its landscape and color’ and concludes, ‘Disney is amazingly blind when it comes to landscape.’8 8 Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 389. The figures in the Silly Symphonies may be in perpetual transformation, but the same is not true of the world that surrounds them: they are shape-shifters in a fixed universe. Disney, Eisenstein writes, misses the ‘unlimited possibilities for landscape elements […] to live and pulsate’; his animation fails to achieve ‘the real flow and true formation of landscape’.9 9 Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, 390. Because the backgrounds in the cartoons do not actively contribute to the production of effects, but are inert and indifferent, the social significance of the cartoons is limited: ‘This … is fictitious freedom. For an instant. A momentary, imaginary, comical liberation from the timelock mechanism of American life.’10 10 Eisenstein on Disney, 22–3; ellipsis in original. The possibility of transformation is directed towards the individuals, while the background – hence, the underlying conditions – remains unchanged. These may be the grumblings of a slightly disappointed and disenchanted admirer, but there's more than personal predilection at issue here. Eisenstein's unhappiness with the use of backgrounds in Disney's cartoons represents an aesthetic misgiving about something generally taken to be a given: that the foreground should be intrinsically of more importance than, and thus should stand out against, the background. To be sure, the hierarchy of foreground over background is hard-wired into the way we inhabit and perceive the world around us. Things we care about stand out against a background noise of information, thereby making themselves available to our attention and concern (as in the model of figure and ground). Many artists have drawn an intuitive conclusion from this fact, locating their figures against a stable background in order to draw attention to them. It's this artistic practice that seems to trouble Eisenstein.11 11 Eisenstein holds – following, perhaps, a move familiar among Russian formalist critics – that one of the powers of art is its ability to complicate seemingly natural ways of regarding the world. He spends a fair amount of time in the latter part of his career trying make aspects of the background into productive and active elements of his films. One of the privileged sites for Eisenstein's rethinking the role of the background is nature, not least because of its historic neglect. He variously describes the landscapes in his films as ‘frozen’ or ‘plastic’ music, as unconstrained forms of expression, or simply as ecstasy. In his famous – and much criticised – analysis of the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky (1939), Eisenstein argues that the contours of the landscape are matched to the tonal scales of Prokofiev's score in order to guide the viewer's eyes across the image, as well as to emphasise the connection between the Russian soldiers and their native land. Nature is never just the frame or backdrop on which the action is placed; it is, or should be, ‘nonindifferent’. It's in the context of Eisenstein's interest in using backgrounds that we can approach the presence of nature in Godard's late works.12 12 The principle of an active background is also of value for thinking about the function of superimpositions in Histoire(s) du cinéma. One place this inheritance is found is in the opening moments of Prénom Carmen, where Godard uses an active and dynamic background to generate a comparison between urban and natural worlds. He does so in order to define the film as operating around the modality of the sublime, understood as an overwhelming experience that threatens the integrity of the individual. Prénom Carmen begins with a voiceover monologue set off against a shifting background of different locations, starting with a shot of cars going down a highway at night while a train crosses on tracks above. It feels like an establishing shot, something that orients us within a setting and guides our comprehension of the action.13 13 The shot recalls an early image from Alphaville (1964) of cars moving through galactic space (in fact a highway outside Paris). This is, presumably, the world the film will inhabit, and so we expect that the sequence will continue with an exploration of that world. Instead, Godard cuts to the credits – the shot of cars will never be placed within the film's narrative – over which we hear the sound of gulls and waves, as a voice (Carmen's) says, ‘It's in me, it's in you; it makes terrible waves.’ The next shot is from a beach, looking out over a lake as waves break onto the shore. If the setting of the film initially appears to be the urban world of modernity, it quickly moves into nature; it's a radical shift in location, and one without narrative motivation. One way to think about the role of nature here is as generally destabilising the presumption of a stable background world. We might describe this as the Krazy Kat principle of the construction of a scene, where the background is a mobile and flexible variable within the overall aesthetic, standing out as an autonomous agent behind the character-driven events. But Godard is doing something different: the shots of cars and waves are not random images but two sides of a comparison, linked through their shared trope of endless progression. Each shot begins, as it were, in media res, and they end similarly: the series have been going on before we saw them, and they will continue after we've left. In effect, Godard uses the shot of waves to inflect, or change, the way we read the shot of the cars. The terms of this operation revolve around the sublime. Traditionally, the sublime is taken to be triggered by objects of great size: pyramids, mountains, and such. The idea is that our ability to grasp a phenomenon, to represent it to ourselves in a single sensible intuition, is refused by the sheer immensity or magnitude of what we have to grasp; we are unable to apprehend the totality of what's before us. As Kant puts it, ‘If a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself.’14 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), Ak 258. Size may be the primary object, but the sublime can also be occasioned by the way a series of objects extends in a potentially infinite progression – as in the cars and waves in the opening of Prénom Carmen. The sublime tends to generate a problem for representational artworks.15 15 I use the phrase ‘representational artworks’ in order to separate music from this problem. Because they are limited in size and scale, artworks have generally been thought to be unable to overwhelm the imagination – and thus incapable of generating the experience of the sublime. Kant simply thought it was conceptually impossible, and argued that the sublime could only be occasioned by natural objects like ‘shapeless mountain masses piled on one another in wild disarray, with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy raging sea’.16 16 Kant, Critique of Judgment, Ak 256. Kant is explicit that it is only ‘an object (of nature) which can provoke an experience of the sublime’ (Ak 268, 270–71). Note that this isn't a problem for someone like Burke because the terms of empiricist aesthetics allow artworks to generate such experiences – his discussion of Milton is an excellent example of this. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), 61–2, 174–5. Kant's ban, however, has often been treated as a challenge for aesthetics, as in Jean-François Lyotard's reinterpretation: ‘Is it possible, and how would it be possible, to testify to the absolute by means of artistic and literary presentations, which are always dependent on forms?’17 17 Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 153. Indeed, almost as soon as Kant's argument was made, art movements became interested in exploring the question of how artworks could be made to generate an experience of the sublime, how the unrepresentable could be used for pictorial purposes. The paintings of Friedrich and Böcklin can be read as sustained attempts to evoke the sublime through artistic media; a more contemporary example would be Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus (1950–51). Placing Godard in line with these attempts to generate the sublime would be one way forward,18 18 See Marc Cerisuelo, Jean-Luc Godard (Bourges: Lherminier, 1989), 208. but doing so would obscure what Prénom Carmen does with the images of nature. In an important respect, Godard does not follow this artistic tradition: he is not trying to create a genuine experience of the sublime for the viewer. This point may seem obvious; I don't think it is. Where Eisenstein, for example, is explicitly interested in the way elements of his films create specific and specifiable effects on the viewer, Godard is fairly indifferent to such a project (perhaps because he lacks Eisenstein's powerful, if peculiar, psycho-physiological account of the mind).19 19 Cf. Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 42ff. The shots of the waves are not meant to literally overwhelm the viewer. The work they do is at the level of iconography, as a way to bring into the film a set of intellectual associations having to do with the sublime. They generate a context of meaning that provides the means for a retrospective understanding of the shot of the cars that began the sequence. Rather than simply standing in for modernity – a common enough gesture in Godard's early work – the cars now have a specific meaning attached to them: the technological object par excellence, and by extension modernity itself, is to be understood in terms of the natural sublime. To be sure, as an argument about the experience of modern life, this is not exactly original; that modernity can be overwhelming, destabilising to our sense of self, is a commonplace of early twentieth-century cultural criticism.20 20 Virginia Woolf, for example, uses a similar image of the surging sea to evoke the experience of the modern city. See The Waves (London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1931), 72. Godard's innovation is twofold. First, the idea of the sublime is associated with a kind of destructiveness that extends from artistic forms to individuals.21 21 A common position in 1980s French thought held that the sublime was simply a form of the destabilisation of the self. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 61–5. Kant himself thought the loss of the self was only the first moment in the sublime, to be followed by a more powerful affirmation of the self as having supersensible capacities. Everything in Prénom Carmen is out of control, everyone is overwhelmed: musicians play only fragments of quartets; a filmmaker (played by Godard) is unable to generate ideas and consigns himself to a mental institution; bank robberies and casual violence are taken for granted; and so on. At the end of the opening scene, over a stunning shot of clouds in the sky, Carmen utters a peculiar line in voiceover: ‘She's the girl who should not be called Carmen.’ Speaking of herself in the third person, Carmen declares that her name does not fit her, that she has the wrong identity. She seems to imply that naming brings with it destiny, that being called ‘Carmen’ dooms her to the fate of the literary figure of Carmen – she is being swept away by an identity that has been thrust upon her. The second innovation has to do with the method Godard employs. The central terms at work here – about the destabilisation of the self, for example – are not so much laid out by characters or actions as they emerge from the full texture of the scene, from an interaction between voice and landscape. It's not that the cars occupy the foreground, framed by the waves in the background. Both cars and waves constitute the setting of the scene, and the analytic action that occurs takes place exclusively in the background. This pattern persists throughout the film. In the final scene, elements that had hitherto been separated – the story of Carmen and Joseph, the efforts of a burnt-out filmmaker to make a film, the rehearsal of a string quartet, and the images of waves breaking onto a beach – are finally brought together. In the way Godard combines these disparate elements within the same world, there is no hierarchy of foreground (words, actions) over background (nature, music). They are each made active, and interactive, as Godard creates a kind of fragmented cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk which contains equal participation from all parts. The opening of Prénom Carmen thus shows the intimate connection of Godard's interest in nature with the idea of an active background. It's tempting to elevate this particular instance into a more general principle. But that would mistake Godard's aesthetic ambitions. There is no single thing that the principle of an active background does for Godard in his use of images of nature; if he is committed to the principle, he nonetheless explores its possibilities – aesthetic as well as thematic – differently in each film and video. My sense is that this variance is tied to Godard's own changing conception of nature. A major shift in Godard's use of nature takes place towards the end of the 1980s, when he moves, roughly speaking, from an interest in nature in terms associated with the sublime to one based on the beautiful. It's a shift that, among other things, allows him to show how nature is marked by and enmeshed within the history and politics of the twentieth century. The culmination of Godard's interest in nature in this period comes in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, where the introduction of a specific historical context – Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall – allows him to give nature a more central and concrete role in the overall work of the film. In some sense, it's fitting that Godard's most fully elaborated account of nature comes in a film set in Germany. French artistic circles were never particularly enthusiastic about nature: Alain Robbe-Grillet disdained the use of nature in literature, seeing it as equivalent to the use of hackneyed metaphor, while works by Francis Ponge and Georges Perec were less about the natural world than the realm of objects and things attached to human activity. By contrast, German modernist and avant-garde movements in the twentieth century – starting with Rilke's Worpswede and continuing through Celan's poetry and Handke's Walk about the Villages– depended heavily on an engagement with the natural world and a history of artistic representations of nature. Allemagne 90 neuf zéro begins with a search for a secret agent – Lemmy Caution from Alphaville, again played by Eddie Constantine – who has been abandoned in East Berlin. After he is found living above a hair salon, the remainder of the film is organised around his journey through Berlin as he tries to take stock of this moment in European culture and history, and his own place in it – or lack thereof. Godard seems preoccupied with contemporary anxieties occasioned by the prospect of German unification.22 22 I am grateful to Miriam Hansen for drawing my attention to the importance of the debates over unification for Godard. In particular, he takes up a concern that the proposed unification would entail a return to a form of nationalism that was last present in the Nazi era. Faced with arguments that the division of Germany was compensation for the Holocaust, that the guilt of the Nazi era had been washed away, critics of unification worried that any unified German would efface the recognition of the atrocities of the past century.23 23 As one commentator remarked, ‘By means of hard work, a feeling of responsibility and good will, the Germans have created the prerequisites for the restoration of what Hitler destroyed: national unity.’ Quoted in Stern, Frank, ‘ The “Jewish Question” in the “German Question”, 1945–1990: Reflections in Light of November 9th, 1989’, New German Critique, 52 (Winter 1991), 155– 72 (p. 159). To this end Allemagne 90 neuf zéro provides a continuing diagnosis of the rise of historical amnesia, along with reminders of the history being forgotten, while at the same time searching through the history of Germany and German culture for resources that can be used to counteract this historical (and historiographic) problem. One technique Godard uses for this purpose involves the interplay between film and video. In Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, for the first time in any of his feature films, Godard begins to insert clips from the history of cinema directly into the flow of the film. The clips, however, are not simply inserted in their original form. Godard films them off a video screen in a way that allows us to see or sense the texture of the video image: the flicker of the monitor, the pixels of the screen. Through the same means, he is also able to vary the playback speed, a technique that generates a kind of ‘stuttering’ effect: the image slows down, stops, speeds up. Godard's emphasis on texture keeps our attention to the surface of the image, so that, rather than seeing ‘into’ that world, we are invited to focus on its appearance, and on the experience we have of a radical break in the film. The work of this technique suggests that, through the creation of aesthetic breaks, the right kind of social, political, and historical knowledge can be achieved. More generally, Godard uses the qualities of an aesthetic break as a way to model an experience of tarrying or staying with historical breaks. The manipulation of the image – with its ambiguous temporality, stuttering playback speed, and shift in media – provides an example of what it is to stay or tarry with the experience of a break, and thereby to understand something essential about it as a historical phenomenon. It's a way of ensuring, within the context of the contemporary political situation, that changes occurring in the way of the fall of the Berlin Wall do not easily fit into a larger historical narrative.24 24 This topic deserves greater consideration, but it belongs to a different discussion. Alongside his virtuosic exploration of the intersection of aesthetics and analytic possibilities within the medium, Godard investigates these concerns in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro through their intersection with ideas and images of nature. Though it is a theme present throughout the film, its most sustained elaboration comes in a scene in which Caution comes across a number of giant strip-mining machines (fig. 1). It is an extraordinary scene, in some ways representative of Godard's late work as a whole. It combines striking visual power, an overwhelming sense of loneliness and solitude, and an apparently endlessly proliferation of references to European culture. The scene also gives a sustained account of why a turn to nature is important to this historical and political context. Godard provides all this by simultaneously telling two dense and complex stories. One takes place in the foreground: in the encounters Caution has with people and things, in the references to literary texts that appear in voiceover and intertitles, and in the images that break into the action of the scene. This is a familiar way Godard has of constructing a scene in his late films, but here it is shown to generate a failure internal to its ambitions. The second story – a story that is harder to see – occurs in the background of the shots, in Godard's engagement with the German landscape and the various historical transformations it has undergone. In this story, nature is not simply shown to be marked by a series of events and changes – the kind of image Adorno describes as a ‘cultural landscape’.25 25 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 64f. A more complicated account emerges, one that shows how an elucidation of history in and through nature not only addresses the problems that arise in the first, foreground narrative but eventually becomes a model for Godard's understanding of cinema's own relation to history. The first story emphasises the difficulties of the present situation. After an insert shot of a page from Kafka's The Castle, in which K. is described as trying in vain to fix the castle with his gaze, Godard cuts to a shot taken from the floor of a valley or canal: in the middle-ground is one of the giant machines, its conveyor of buckets depositing rubble onto a mound on the right side of the frame. Caution enters this shot (fig. 2), walking parallel to rail tracks and towards the machine, after which Godard cuts to an intertitle, ‘Les dragons’, to a close-up of one of the beasts from Grünewald's Temptation of St Anthony (1515) – a creature combining a bird's head and torso with human arms – and then to a final intertitle, ‘De notre vie’ (The dragons in our lives). Another cut goes to a shot of Caution walking along a plateau by the side of the valley, a machine tearin