R Bellour I Am an Image Godard

7/27/2019 R Bellour I Am an Image Godard

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I A m a n ImageRaymond BellourThe essential novelty of Sauve qui peut (la vie) (already suggestedin FvanLe/touv/d~touv/deux/enfants)resides in the displacement towhich the cinema is subjected. Here, for the first time, the curse ofanalogy, of the regular reproduction of movement, is brought to anend. Beyond the pure, all too pure division of experimental fiction,the very notion of truth twenty-four times per second contestsitself, destroys itself, recomposes its body born of decomposition,composes a fiction a t once different and the same, uncertain not be-cause it hesitates over what road to follow, but because its road con-stantly teeters over the abyss of a spontaneous perversion of themechanized illusion of movement.

To create this new kind of fiction, a mere fifteen orchestratedskids [variations on stop-action nioments] are sufficient: from thefirst series of shots of Denise on her bicycle (but shot is not theright word: the slide toward painting is effected by means of a redis-tribution it may henceforth be impossible to analyze between shotand photogram) to the image of Pauls body as he collapses againstthe fender of the car, while watching Cecile walk away with hermother.

Here, in order, are the fifteen stop-action moments-but I may bemistaken, taken in by the excessive naturalness of these breaks whichare so much a part o f the new nature of the image that soon they willno doubt be impossible to enumerate: Denise riding her bicycle onthe mountain road-the hornuss players on the field during thedialogue between Denise and Piaget-Piagets hands as theymanipulate the lines of type-Denise on her bicycle once more-thewoman slapped by the two motorcyclists as Denise waits for the

S a w e q i r i peirt (la vie) (Save your life, if you can) is owned by Zoetropc Studiosarid distr ibuted in the U.S. by New Yorker Filnis (16 W . 61st S t reet , New York ,N.Y. 10023) unde r the t i t le Every Marifur Hirriself; running t ime 87 viinutes.


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I train-Cecile and her ball on the playing field-Paul and Denise em-bracing in front of the television building-cars moving on the roada t night (after Pauls dinner with Cecile and her mother)-the carsonce again (during the fictive time of that same night, when Paulsleeps wi th Isabelle)-Isabelle cornered by the two pimps who attackher-a man and a woman meeting on the street (while Isabelle doesher thing with Monsieur Personne, Mr. Nobody)-Isabelle andthe landscape, when she shows her ass to Monsieur Personne-Isabelle in a car, at night-the embradattack between Paul and

Denise in the apartment-Paul sees Cecile and her mother, runstoward them, backs away and falls against a moving car.The shock-waves produced by the image of that collapsing bodyare carried by words, by Pauls voice fading away or dying or be-coming immemorial, doubly fictive, attributing a meaning to the fic-tion: A bit foolishly I began to think . . . Im not dying now . . .m y life has not just passed before my eyes . . . Im not dying now. . . sincc Ive . . . nothing. . . . SEEN NOTHING, at the veryinstant when we, on the other hand, have seen too much, when theedges of the screen seem to collapse inward under the vibration ofspace-times internal to the law of cinematic movement [d$lement]dispossessed of its mastery. I t is when I is (am) dying that theimages unfold, differently, like the condensed film of an impossible


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life, like the possibility demanded of cinema that it reinvent life.(Paul) Godard must die to (in) the image so that (Jean-Luc) Godardmay be reborn into cinema. A privilege granted, begged from artwhen all else fails; art conceived once again in relation to death, thetransmutation of death warded off by a new form-but at the sametime, a thwarting of the illusion that is the hallmark of the religionsof art. Cinema dies to itself and transforms itself, doing away withthe last refuge that identified it with the realism of representation: nomore cinema is life, guaranteed by the naturalness of movement;at the same time, a refusal of the henceforth all too simple thatsonly cinema (cinema is not life), which reconciles the brotherenemies, Cain and Abel, cinema and video, cinema always begunanew.

(I exist more as images than as a real human being, since my onlylife consists in making them. And when I say that cinema is moreimportant than life, that in a way is what those close to me haveblamed me for: You dont care about food, about sports. . . . But Isay that 1 care about filming food and thats important to me. Andsince theres something in life that takes place there, I say Im a rep-resentative of life. Its a life that doesnt exist. When Rimbaud said,Real life is elsewhere, he wasnt just playing with words-thatelsewhere is also the beauty of life. Cinema is in the means of com-munication, it is in this also. 1 )

But that death is also, emphatically, the death of a man: of thehero (or what remains of him). The power of Godards film, its en-ormous and violent effect, comes from the way it crosses (amongother things, but these two in particular) the battle between imageswith the battle between the sexes. During that final whirling of in-stants frozen like an eternity in movement, the voice of his ex-wifetakes over as Pauls voice fades away: What are you looking a t? Itsnone o f ou r business now. Come on, Cecile, lets go.2And Cecilegoes, fatherless, toward life, where images as if spontaneously com-pose themselves in their decomposition: on the road, for example,where Denise moves forward, without a man, without any Paul, asif propelled by the force of her own words at last reconquered (herprojected book), accompanied by landscape-images, fractured linesand colors.

These frames which are frozen in more or less developed series arenot really determined by any causality. Their power, rhythmic andpassionate, comes from their being linked to the quasi-neutrality of

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120 the gaze itself-its virtuality. Every image can, could, always stop,fragment itself (Piagets hands, the ball-players, the cars). But thesemoments are for the most part united and divided around two pos-sibilities that are indissolubly linked: exaltation of woman and ag-gression against woman, according to the script-line which opposesPaul to the series of feminine figures-Isabelle, Denise, his ex-wife,Cecile-who are interchangeable and joined in the circuit of depen-dence-independence, physical and psychic mobility, and historicalpositivity. (Putting it more precisely, we can say: Isabelle beaten em-phasizes, of course, the aggression, while Denise on her bicycle em-phasizes the exaltation; but there is also, in the frame, in the way theactresses play the scene, in the stop-action that works through thesemoments, an indissociable mixture of aggression and exaltation .) Hebeing a man and they women, they run away, watched and violatedby the image, in the image; and he dies of it. As if one were therevenge of the other, the consequence of a socio-historical obsessionand guilt: the price to be paid by the one who speaks, the man whodirects, desires, and thrashes.

Given all this, one may find surprising at first that the great prosti-tution scene escapes this questioning of linear movement, this fictionof the stopped image focusing on woman. But one soon realizes thatthe scene mimes the decomposition of movement by its exaggeratedreintroduction of the cinematic apparatus. As Bonitzer has pointedout, all the movements of the film seem to converge in this sexualmontage, which becomes the analogue and the emblem of cinemai t ~ e l f . ~he four linked bodies participate in the production of animage organized by the director-executive (You, you will put somelipstick on me, but only when he licks your ass . . . and you,Thierry, you lick her asshole only when the other one sucks you,and you, you suck each time I touch your tits with my foot. . . .).They produce an image and the sound that goes with it (Okay,weve got the image, now well take care of the sound). And whenthey start up again, when the chain functions with image and soundtogether , the director-executive tells Isabelle: And afterwards youllput some lipstick on me, just once, and if I smile at you, you kissme. But he doesnt smile. He cannot smile. Death does not smile.What is in question here is the production of an impossible image,one from which cinema has derived its imaginary power ever sinceEdisons famous close-up ofJones C. Rice and May Erwin4: a kiss,o r the image of two bodies reconciled. The decomposition of the


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image renders the kiss impossible (Save the image, if you canlSauvequi peu t /image): the fragmented stop-action makes it impossible forbodies to come together, as in the fable about Achilles and thetortoise. Paradoxically the stop-action doesnt stop, making impos-sible the imaginary pause that the image needs in order to satisfy itsfalse plenitude.

The same thing happens when, in counterpoint to the other greatprostitut ion scene between Isabelle and Monsieur Personne, we see aman and a woman meet on the street: their meeting moves in brieffragments to a near-kiss, to the point of almost achieving the naturaland unrealizable contact between bodies and between the sexes. Andthe same thing happens during Paul and Denises embrace, so incred-ibly exacerbated by the fiction of the decomposed shots which seemnever to cease being born and reborn one from the other, composinga partition of the space-time of love, panicked by its own undefined-ness, its wandering of images. And again, toward the end of the filmthere is a counterpart to this embrace that almost immediately turnsinto a confrontation: it is the embrace-attack in the apartment (Paul,sitting at the table, suddenly jumps on Denise), which projects thetwo bodies onto the ground in breathtaking fragments. W e feel liketouching, but we can only do it by hitting each other (Paul toIsabelle, when she comes into the apartment). In the same way theirnages seem to hit each other, musically, pictorially, striking eachother admirably and thus rnaking impossible any continuity ofmovement which would produce, the moment it is a question ofbodies and of the sexes, an imaginary ideality that has simply ceasedto exist.B y carrying i t to an extreme, Godard explodes the notion dear toHazin that it is irnpossible to represent an erotic relationship in~ i n e r n a . ~he kiss becomes unrcpresentable because a t the other ex-treme the sexual image speaks with a documentary crudeness thatBazin considcred contradictory to the imaginary vocation of cinemaas he conceived the latter. Th e impossible mythical kiss of the prosti-tution sequence is the counterpart of the clinical image that precedesit: the whore Marilyn-Nicole climbing under the table to suck theman with the face of ivory and offering to the image her ass likethe close-up of an idealized face. ( It is not a close-up, for that wouldcome too close to pornography and would kill the effect; but thewider frame, through what it shows, functions as a close-up: as asexual appeal, but idealized, concentrated, as in the Hollywood tradi-

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122 tion for example, o f close-ups on the womans face: the moment ofthe kiss, or of its sadistic counterpart, murder, offered, promised,permitted to the spectator.) An extreme violence inflicted on wom-an, again and always-a violence whose historical critique is pro-vided by the dialogue ( You know what they called women in theMiddle Ages? . . . -Witches. -And what else? -Horizon of thedevil, ember of hell.) But it is the violence of a full and continuousimage that a stop-action series couldnt interrupt, since in a sense thefreeze-frames throughout the film function as a response to it: theresponse o f representation pushed to its extreme by the cold fantasyof excessive power, an immcnse and irremediable despair.6

The rebirth of the image, this move from the fiction of cinematoward a writing-painting freed from the deceptive imaginary pleni-tude prescribed by the forward movement of the machine, thus takesplace in the historical gap opened up between two gazes: Cecilesgaze at her father dying to (in) the image and of the image (Whatare you looking at? Its none of our business now.); and the unbear-able gaze at that ass which comes back toward the spectator with allthe excessive violence of its vision and, quite literally, looks a t him,at me. Like Isabelles unblinking eye, isolated by the face of Godard-Dutronc, filling up the frame, when she picks him up by asking:Do you feel like going to the movies?

Translated by Susan SuleimanNOTES*Jean-Luc Godard, Propos rompus, Cahiers du Cinema, no . 316 (October 1980),p. 1 5I . Ibid.2 . Quest-ce quc tu regardes? Ca ne nous regarde plus. Allez, tu viens, CCcile?3 . Pascal Bonitzer, Peur et commerce, Cahiers du C i n i m a , no. 316, p. 6.4. L o Duca, Liro tism eau cirrima (Paris: Pauvert, 1957),p. 9.5 . AndrP Bazin, En marge de Lirotisme au cirzima, in Quest-ce que le cinema?,vol. 111

(Paris: 1961),pp. 68-82.6 . Isabelles voice, off-screen, at the end of the scene: I looked at that face of ivory,

and I saw there an expression of somber pride, of fierce power, of abject terror,and also ofan irnmcnse and irremediable despair.


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R Bellour I Am an Image Godard

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