“A story? No. No stories, never again.”
—Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day (translated by Lydia Davis).
The history of cinema is a history of waves.
A wave is a motion, not an object.
Waving is also the gesture which most often accompanies bonjour or adieu.
The ocean wave, meanwhile, is a cascading series of movements that arise through the displacement of liquid volume caused by some force or disturbance applied externally from above or below—such as wind or earthquake—to the water, which is itself inert.
Sentences are like waves, too: curling through a page, the period hangs on the edge like a surfer.
An artist’s oeuvre is yet another sort of wave, the ongoing development of a creative process.
Roll out, crest, crash, recede: a familiar pattern.
Every wave ends at an interval and is eventually succeeded by the next.
The image of a wave, however, is static; and yet, it contains a trace of its movement in formation, the indication of an instant inscribed on time’s relentless unfolding.
Thus, the seascape painter’s task throughout history was generally to depict the wave’s sense of movement on a two-dimensional surface.
Photography did so mechanically, yet gave us an impression of the wave’s indivisible singularity; the film’s exposure to each wave would be inherently different depending on so many variables: point of view, under which skies, on what shoreline and horizon.
In the cinema, a limited sequence of waves in motion could finally be shown.
Baignade en mer, 1895.
Lumière Film was the first wave of the cinema, a 19th century industrial invention immediately declared futureless.
The Nouvelle Vague was essentially, unbeknownst to its cadre at the time, the last wave masquerading at renaissance; a culminating swell of the 20th century’s signature art form; only one major component in what was more broadly an expanding global network of cinematic pools and tributaries.
Cinema then sloshed over into the first quarter of a new millennium that would see to its absolute commodification, slow obsolescence and undying reanimations, already usurped by television long ago—nevertheless, countless films continue to proliferate.
We have not yet fully registered that the cinema has gone away.
Two years after his death, I still think of Jean-Luc Godard as an old man; he is still resisting.
One definition of the cinema could be: The image that resists death, and then dies.
Now, Godard projects himself into Scénarios beyond death, his contemporary absence entombed in his body of work, each film viewed anew like a visitation.
Artists who do not grow old gracefully, but rage and change through the whole of life, find themselves, at the end, alone with their innovations and not part of a refurbished movement. In that sense, the later works of Goya, Verdi, Monet, or Yeats constitute a solitary interior development whose deepest effects, like those of Turner’s final oils or Beethoven’s last quartets, are sometimes delayed for generations.
—William H. Gass, Finding a Form, “The Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde.”
The Godardian project maps most naturally onto a pedagogical framework; but, like in Jacotot’s universal teaching method, Godard attempts to teach us precisely what he himself does not know.1
Godard never effectively defines the cinema; instead, he searches for verification of its existence.
What he finds is ultimately not the image, but the gaze; that life had once moved through the image, gave voice to it, loved it, and lost.
Godard’s cinema is a painful meditation on the theme of restitution. Or better: of reparation. To repair is to return the images and the sounds to those from whom they were taken. An ineradicable fantasy. It also means committing these people to producing their own images and sounds. A commitment that couldn’t be more political.
—Serge Daney, Footlights, “The Therrorized: Godardian Pedagogy,” translated by Nicholas Eliot.
In Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Godard describes the arrival of technicolor as being like a funeral wreath thrown over the mourning shades of black and white; one might then come to think of Godard’s late painterly studies in abstraction using digital color grading, high levels of contrast and saturation—which began in earnest with In Praise of Love (2001) and crescendoed in The Image Book (2018)—rather as a showering of the world with celebratory flowers in preparation for leaving it, perhaps like the iterative cut-outs of Matisse or the red roses of Twombly.
Resolutely though, “the melancholy that colors everything in Godard” remains.2
Nearly the same melancholy can be found in all of Twombly’s paintings as well, throughout the films and writings of Marguerite Duras, and more recently in the silent-speed films of Nathaniel Dorsky—it is the very same sorrow of shipwrecked Odysseus and of Hamlet, the forlorn sense of time’s immortal ruin and the present’s constant departure.
‘The Image will come at the resurrection,’ says Godard: that is, the ‘original image’ of Christian theology, the Son who is not ‘similar’ to the Father but partakes of his nature. We no longer kill each other for the iota that separates this image from the other. But we continue to regard it as a promise of flesh, capable of dispelling the simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter.
—Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott.
In one of his final on-screen appearances, in the film See You Friday, Robinson (2022) directed by Mitra Farahani, which documents Godard’s correspondence with Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan (October 19, 1922–August 22, 2023), he addresses the camera and makes the claim that he still believes in the image, but he is careful not to speak for the cinema.
It’s impossible to imagine, were Godard alive today, that he would maintain such an uncharacteristically optimistic view.
Because there are no words for the images we have seen from Palestine over the past eleven months.
He saw enough.
We praise the dead—as Godard did in his cinema, chiefly in the form of quotation—as a point of resistance, for the will to go on with living.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, translated by Kristin Ross, Stanford University Press, 1991.
Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, translated by Peter Bush, The New Press, 2012.
I like this way of thinking about cinema in terms of waves, but stubbornly (foolishly?) hold out hope that there may be more waves to come.