In the late 1960s and early 1970s, political cinema – both Western and non-Western – was largely defined by its connection to ongoing political struggles. It is an imperative found in European efforts, following May ’68, to combine political commitment within films with a model of collective, collaborative production. It is also found in the declaration of a ‘Third Cinema’ by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, in which all aspects of cinema – production, distribution, reception – were bound up with revolutionary activity.
1 This is the idea of political cinema most commonly held up as exemplary. Something began to change, however, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, perhaps due to the rise of right-wing figures, ranging from Reagan and Thatcher to Pinochet and Videla, and the apparent failure of revolutionary energy across international borders. In the midst of this reaction from the right, the self-evidence of what counted as political cinema was lost, and it began to splinter into a wide variety of forms.
I am going to focus on one of these new forms, defined largely by a marked turn to the history of cinema. This shift has seemed to critics as a kind of withdrawal from politics, a refusal to engage with the world, even a retreat to an ‘auteurist’ or apolitical view of cinema. By contrast, I think that it amounts instead to a different way of engaging with politics, one that attempt to come to terms with a legacy of revolutionary violence, historical upheavals and radical transformations. Put simply, investigations into the history of cinema became a central way of understanding history, a tool by which history could be analysed. Chris Marker’s
Le fond de l’air est rouge (
A Grin without a Cat, 1977) may be the first major instance of this form. Marker looks back on the previous decade to see how and why the left had failed in its political ambitions, but his focus is equally on cinema. Not only does he incorporate documentary footage, he draws on the history of cinema – political, art house and Hollywood – to think about the events that had happened (or failed to happen).
Le fond de l’air est rouge is not just the history of cinema, or even history represented or alluded to by cinema, but history done
through (the history of) cinema. It’s this form of political cinema that allows us to grasp the porous boundaries and complex relations that have existed (or been thought to exist) between film and history.
In this vein, I am going to discuss one of the key filmmakers who straddles the divide in political cinema: Jean-Luc Godard. Along with Marker, and perhaps even more so, Godard is exemplary of the shift that took place in debates over political cinema. In the late 1960s, the ‘Groupe DzigaVertov’, founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin, had been central to the dominant strand of political cinema (indeed, it’s precisely because of the importance of these films that Godard’s work since then has incurred charges ranging from nostalgia to naïveté to indifference, frequently characterised as amounting to a wholesale withdrawal from political concerns).
2 Part of the shift that takes place involves Godard’s rediscovery of the history of cinema, albeit on different terms than interested him in the 1950s and early 1960s. A familiar version goes as follows. In 1978, he stepped in for Henri Langlois – who had recently died – to give a series of lectures (or ‘voyages’, as Godard called them) on the history of cinema, and his own place within that history, at the University of Montreal.
3 This visit gave him the idea to develop a more substantial work on this topic, which became
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), his eight-part video series on the history of cinema, the history of the twentieth century, and the way those histories have shaped one another. Across its episodes, Godard tells a vast and idiosyncratic story about the interaction of cinema and history, on which cinema had an obligation to record historical world and show it to an audience, but at key moments – most notably, World War II and the Holocaust – betrayed this mission, thereby undermining its historical and political relevance.
Along with this, Godard also developed an account of cinema and history that explicitly drew on the question of politics and violence that preoccupied him in the late 1960s. We see this in the way his films across the 1970s continually revisit and revise his own work:
Letter to Jane (1972),
Ici et ailleurs (1974),
Comment ça va? (1975),
Numéro deux (1975) and even
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979). More systematically, in
Soigne ta droite (1987), Godard provides a detailed reworking of the famous discussion on the train from
La chinoise (1967), where a student militant (Anne Wiazemsky) and an older activist (Francis Jeanson) debated the value of revolutionary terrorism. In
Soigne ta droite, made twenty years later, the discussion takes place between two older militants, and the tone is now emphatically retrospective, about the problems of justifying violence by appeals to historical laws.
This particular way of engaging history provides a different genealogy to Godard’s late career, revising the picture of a filmmaker engaged in a kind of cinematic solipsism. He uses cinema as a medium with a privileged, even unique, ability to understand and analyse the world, and the historical and political situation of his time. It may be less driven by an attempt to directly change the world, but his conception of cinema is still oriented by questions of politics. Not surprisingly, much of this turns on matters of historical violence: violence of the left and the right, but also in the mundane aspects of everyday life (this is, for example, the guiding logic of Numéro deux). In his films and videos since the late 1980s, Godard’s project is to develop aesthetic resources through which he can confront and grapple with the legacy of a century marked by violence.
My particular interest here is Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991), where Godard makes a case for cinema as capable of providing an understanding of history in a way that other media and modes of analysis cannot. It’s a large claim, and he stakes it out with some care.
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro is, significantly, made and set at a historically complex time, when major upheavals and transformations were taking place across Europe: the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the (re)unification of Germany, and the build-up of troops in the Persian Gulf.
4 It is a moment when it looked as though an era was coming to an end, when the dominant disputes and contestations that had occupied the bulk of the century were losing their sense of importance. This uncertainty is found in a play on words within the title of the film itself, since ‘Neuf’ means both ‘nine’ and ‘new’. So is it ‘Germany 90
Nine Zero’ or ‘Germany 90
New Zero’? A year suffused with a century of history, or one of clean beginnings? Or both simultaneously? The film works through the history and aesthetics of cinema to model a new form of historical knowledge appropriate to this uncertain world, one that takes shape in response to a set of discourses available in the public sphere.
The film is ostensibly about the journey of a secret agent – Lemmy Caution from
Alphaville (1964), again played by Eddie Constantine – across Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Godard uses the figure of the abandoned agent, forgotten by history, to pose the difficulty of coming to terms with the changing conditions in the present. Caution’s sense of shock and dislocation requires him both to understand the events that have taken place around him
and to create a historical narrative into which they fit, including two World Wars, the Soviet Revolution, the Holocaust, a divided Germany, the corruption of the East and the materialism of the West. This task is repeatedly interrupted by the appearance of a variety of literary figures, from Freud’s Dora to Goethe’s Lotte Kestner to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Caution even takes a side-trip to Weimar.
Another thread runs through the film, in the form of a series of scenes in which a man named Count Zelten (Hanns Zischler) and an unnamed woman (Nathalie Kadem) read Hegel together (in both French and German) and discuss German history and politics. To an extent,
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro is structured by these recitations of and reflections on Hegel’s writings on the philosophy of history, which Godard seems to employ as a way to think about the viability of large-scale historical explanations. Early on in the film, for example, he quotes from the famous preface to the
Philosophy of Right. The lines are spoken simultaneously in German and French, the different languages overlapping: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a form of life grown old? By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.’
5A natural thing to think here is that Godard is taking Hegel as a model, and so the implication would be that film (and art more generally) needs to rise to the level of philosophy if it is to successfully provide an understanding of the world to an audience. On Hegel’s account, this is part of a gradual process away from art’s sensuous aesthetic qualities and towards a degree of abstraction and self-reflection (a thesis that’s been labeled ‘the end of art’).
6 Many discussions of Godard’s late work assume this line of thought. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues that
Passion (1982) attempts to give art a ‘trans-aesthetic vocation – in which the work of art wants to be much more than a mere work of art, but rather to replace philosophy itself (an august Hegelian and anti-Hegelian vocation)’.
7 To a certain extent, Jameson is right: Godard is part of an intellectual and artistic tradition in which the medium of the artwork is at least part of the content of that work. But he makes a mistake in assuming, albeit implicitly, that when Godard takes cinema itself as the subject of films it is tantamount to asking cinema to
become philosophy, and thereby to renounce its aesthetic ambitions. Where Jameson goes wrong, in other words, is in assuming that Godard’s cinema, insofar as it operates primarily in a reflexive mode, has to take a non-aesthetic form.
My sense is that the significance of Godard’s late work in general, and Allemagne 90 neuf zéro in particular, has to do with the way its broader intellectual ambitions, vast and varied as they may be, emerge not by an evacuation of an aesthetic capacity – thereby modeling itself on philosophical discourse – but by staying with and working out the aesthetic potential of cinema. Historical understanding emerges only through aesthetic form.
Godard pushes beyond a Hegelian framework in another way: he will propose that film, precisely because its mode of presentation differs from philosophy, is the medium best equipped to serve a project of social and historical understanding. In making this case, Godard revises the very terms of the Hegelian project. When Hegel says that philosophy can understand a world only when the life of that world has ‘grown old’ and ‘cannot be rejuvenated’, this implies that philosophy gains its diagnostic value only at the end of an historical epoch, when there is no longer meaningful development or change. It can then provide a coherent explanation of the logic behind that history, taking a perspective from which the lived intricacies of history can be made sense of. Film, by contrast, is engaged in a history of the complex and changing present. If the twentieth century is coming to an end – and Godard’s films and videos of these years are suffused with an awareness of this – it is only cinema, the central art form of the century that is positioned to enable an understanding of the nature of this historical transformation.
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro sets out to provide an account of how this works.
The film’s argument is at once a criticism and a positive declaration of intent. To get this out, I’m going to focus on an early scene, where Godard suggests that there is something philosophy wants to do but which it fails to accomplish, and that film, precisely because of its affinity with a sensuous aesthetic dimension, is able to do.
The scene begins when Lemmy Caution is discovered living above a hair salon in East Berlin and unaware of the changes taking place in the world around him; he has been abandoned in and by history. Zelten tells Caution that the Cold War has ended, and that history has moved on. The sudden intrusion of the reality of post-Wall Germany places him in an uncertain position: he is asked to make sense of a new historical fact, to change the way he makes sense of the world. Caution tries to assimilate the fall of the Wall to an older worldview: ‘All the same, you have to admit that it’s the triumph of Marx. … When an idea penetrates into the masses, it becomes a material force.’ Earlier, Zelten dropped a bouquet of flowers on a sign labeled ‘Karl Marx Strasse’, said, ‘Happy non-birthday’, and then kicked it. Here, he expresses mild skepticism towards Caution’s pronouncement. The collapse of the Soviet Union’s control over Eastern Europe, he suggests, constitutes a conclusion to the narrative of the twentieth century. With the end of an era, conditions have changed, and so a different way of understanding the narrative arc of history is required; the explanatory power of Marxism ended along with ‘actually-existing socialism’.
We then get a stunning, brief sequence. Gradually accepting the fact that the Cold War is over, Caution wonders about the years that have passed him by. ‘What am I to do?’ he asks, and we are given an intertitle: ‘O pain, have I dreamed my life? [
Ô douleur, ai-je rêvé ma vie?].’ Zelten leaves, telling him to fend for himself, while Caution, after chasing Zelten to the door, asks a woman in the salon to bring his lunch. Then, in a peculiar if characteristic move, Godard strays from the narrative line. Instead of following Caution as he tries to decide on a course of action, the film cuts to a shot of an elderly woman having her hair done. Over this shot, Godard plays a German pop song, almost a show tune, whose lyrics run: ‘When a person falls in love / His heart soars like a dove. / It doesn’t really matter why, / But the sun sparkles in the sky.’ The song fades into the background as we hear Zelten begin to recite Hegel in German:
For philosophy to make its stamp on a culture, there must have first occurred a break in the real world [so muss ein Bruch geschehensein in der wirklichen Welt]. Philosophy then reconciles the corruption created by thought. This reconciliation takes place in an ideal world, the world of the spirit into which everyone flees when the earthly world no longer satisfies him.
In the first sentence, right on ‘
Bruch’, Godard cuts to a clip of people waltzing, dressed in formal and military attire of the Nazi era;the camera is just above head-height, moving with and cutting between the dancing couples. But the clip is not simply inserted in its original form.
8 Godard films the image off a video screen in way that allows us to see the texture of the video image: the flicker of the monitor, the pixels of the screen. Through the same means, he also varies the playback speed, a technique that generates a kind of ‘stuttering’ effect; Godard slows down, stops and speeds up the clip, drawing us into the movement of the camera as well as of the couples. After the quotation from Hegel comes to an end, Godard cuts to a shot of a study, framed from outside the door; Zelten enters and repeats a line from his previous quotation from Hegel, this time in French: ‘Philosophy then reconciles the corruption begun by thought’ [
la philosophie alors concilie la corruption commencée par la pensée].
This is a dense passage, one of the key moments in all of Godard’s late work. The fulcrum of the sequence is the sudden shift from the smooth flow of the film to the stuttered playback of the video footage. It raises, in particular, two large topics that bear on Godard’s account of the role film can play in historical understanding. The first concerns the evidentiary status of the clip that’s inserted into the film. We might think that its position inside another film turns it into something like an object, a document of sorts, that rather than showing a fictional world it functions instead as testimony to a historical moment (it becomes available as history when it ceases to be fiction). But this would radically underestimate the complexity of Godard’s understanding of cinema and history. One of his deep beliefs is that how we understand the historical world is shaped by the images we see on screens, and these images are fictional more than – or at least as much as – they are documentary. In this way, the opening montage of
Notre musique (2004) shows our image of war to be formed by the legacy of both fiction and documentary, from Vietnam-era newsreels to westerns. Fictions may be documents, but not just of actions and settings: they show us our fantasies and desires, tell us new things about ourselves – we are involved in complex relations to them as images, worlds, even dreams. The clip Godard incorporates is thus already involved in a complex relation to history; the use to which he puts it simply brings this out.
The second topic concerns the manipulation of the video image. Godard is often taken to subscribe to a rather strict divide between film and video, largely because of his fondness in the late 1970s and early 1980s for using the metaphor of Cain and Abel to describe the relation between them (most famously in
Sauve qui peut (la vie)). An enigmatic remark at best, it’s generally been taken to mean that film and video are opposed by virtue of a difference in their material base, with cinema figured as the good brother (even though, in the structure of the analogy, ‘cinema’ actually matches up with ‘Cain’). In reality, however, Godard has a more open relation to new technologies: ‘I’d say there was no very big difference between video and cinema and you could use one like the other. There are things you can do better with one so with the other you do something else … above all you can alter the image easily with video.’
9 Godard implies here that cinema and video are not different media but different tools for the production of images, allowing for different formal possibilities and effects. Although the videographic manipulation of footage in fact emerged as a technique in
France/ tour/detour/deux/enfants (1977), continuing in his video projects of the 1980s,
10 the video clip in
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro marks the first appearance of this technique in a film. The technological shift from film to video serves as the occasion for a corresponding formal and aesthetic rupture, while also being connected to – this is the alignment the sequence works with – a historical transformation and upheaval.
11The shift in media, and the attendant features it brings with it, coalesces around the Hegelian term that Godard inserts at this moment. The idea of a ‘break’ functions as the sequence’s central analytic term, both literal (the breaking of the world of the film) and figurative, and three different ways to understand it quickly suggest themselves. One involves Hegel’s own account of history, indicated by the voice-over; the other two involve aesthetic considerations. The first of the aesthetic readings has to do with the way the rhythm of the video clip produces a ‘break’ in temporal continuity. The film’s opening voice-over had wondered if it was possible to tell the story of time ‘in itself’, and later on Godard returns to the topic:
There is a difference between narration [
la narration] and music. A piece entitled ‘Five Minute Waltz’ will last five minutes. That’s it, and nothing else matters in its relation to time. But a telling [
un récit] of an action that lasts five minutes could be stretched into a period a thousand times longer if those five minutes were filled with an exceptional awareness. And it can seem short although to its imaginary duration it may be long.
Based on the distinction articulated here, we might treat the inserted clip on the model of narration. If, ordinarily, a shot has a continuous temporality – the model of the ‘five-minute waltz’ – the stuttering of the speed of the clip means that the duration of the shot is no longer identical to the diegetic time it presents. Time itself becomes a variable that can be expanded or contracted within the film. And yet the terms of music are present as well, highlighting a set of associated formal attributes at the heart of cinema. There is rhythm, not only in the movement of the dancers but in the variation of the playback as well, and a suggestion of formal regularity that gives order and structure to the expressive effect of the clip.
These models are not mutually exclusive. Godard positions film between them, able to manipulate time but without the unfettered freedom of narration. By making the image dance to its own tune – in conjunction with but different from the movement of the dancers – Godard pulls our attention to the sheer fact of that movement. The effect is to make the world of the clip embody the principles of a dance, and the kind of experience such movements offer. It’s not just that we see dancers moving in a certain time, following set patterns and rhythms; time itself comes to take on the semblance of a dance, with hesitations and accelerations followed by a smooth glide at normal speed. The duet between dancers and ‘stuttered’ clip makes us physically follow and respond to the image.
The second aesthetic understanding of the idea of a ‘break’ has to do with the way the introduction of video creates a ‘break’ in the world of the film. Godard makes the shift explicit by filming the clip directly off a video monitor, so that we physically sense the difference in tone and texture between the clip and the surrounding images in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro. His emphasis on texture – the lines, the flattening of space produced by the monitor – draws our attention to the surface of the image. Rather than seeing ‘into’ that world, we are invited to focus on its appearance. We become concerned with how the image looks, with the different texture of the video format, and, most importantly, with the rhythm of the ‘stuttering’ effect. The shift between film and video thus emphasises an experiential dimension in our viewing of films. We are arrested at the moment where the shift occurs, struck by the sensuous dimensions of the image before us.
But the sequence doesn’t stay at this level. Godard ties the emphasis on aesthetics, and a kind of experience, to larger historical and political concerns. In part, this happens because of the content of the image: the dance we see is a Nazi-era ball, men with swastikas on their uniforms. History, and the violence it contains, is the unavoidable content of the sequence. But there’s something else going on as well, emerging from the way Godard insists on describing the shift from film to video in terms of the Hegelian account of a historical ‘break’. For Hegel, the idea of a break is intimately connected to our ability to understand the progress of history, since only after a radical shift in history – an often-violent undoing of the previous order – are we able to understand the significance of what came before.
I think there is a specific reason Hegel is important to Godard, although it is not explicitly present in the film. In the months during its production, Francis Fukuyama’s essay ‘The End of History?’ (1989) had provoked a set of discussions in Europe about the historical narrative into which the decline of the Soviet Union ought to be placed. Fukuyama drew explicitly on Hegel to make his case, proposing that history had in fact come to an end when Hegel said it did, when Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army in Jena in 1806 allowed for the institutionalisation of the principles of liberal democracy across Europe. Fukuyama claimed that history there reached its
telos, the next two centuries simply the process by which liberal democracy became universal.
12Thinking that Fukuyama is on Godard’s mind helps explain the terms on which
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro takes up these same topics, and allows us to see how the correlation of aesthetic and historical breaks forms an implicit critique that uses Hegel’s own terminology to undermine his explanatory power. The critical project takes shape in the opening juxtaposition of the passage from Hegel’s
Philosophy of History and the lyrics of the German pop song, a juxtaposition, which turns on the terms of the pop song. From the perspective of someone in love, the mawkish sentiment goes, the world itself is brought into accord with his or her desires: ‘It doesn’t really matter why / But the sun sparkles in the sky.’ At first blush, nothing could be further from Hegel, but the affinity is to be found in the way Hegel describes philosophy as offering a location from which apparently contradictory historical intricacies are reconciled through a grasp of the whole logic of history. Philosophy is taken to reside in a space above or outside the world in order to produce an order and harmony the world itself lacks. The problem, then, is not just that philosophy might arrive too late to help us understand the changes in our world. Godard suggests that philosophy, insofar as it tries to make sense of ‘breaks’ by fitting them into a larger explanatory historical narrative, betrays something of the phenomena it attempts to analyse.
13This point is emphasised through Godard’s use of the inserted video clip. It’s not just any ‘break’ that’s at issue – a moment when a contradiction in the social order emerges – but one that poses the strongest challenge to the explanatory narrative: the rise to power of the Nazi Party. A Hegelian mode of treating the Nazi rupture in world history would be to move towards a higher reconciliation, towards a wider perspective of history and its developments, treating the ‘break’ as a moment in the historical dialectic, eventually leading to a better social formation.
14 Indeed, Fukuyama himself made such a claim, arguing that the traumatic events of the twentieth century – the two World Wars, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and so forth – mattered within the historical narrative as the means by which alternative systems to liberal democracy were successively discredited.
Godard invokes the Nazi era not simply as a reflexive gesture against this position – well, what about the Nazis? – but to bring historical concerns of the present into the film. In a sense, the main historical anxiety present in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro does not have to do with the demise of East Germany or the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It has to do, instead, with the prospect that, for the first time since World War II, Germany was moving towards a unified federal state – and doing so, at times, without awareness of the historical legacy of national (and nationalist) ambition and its genocidal consequences. A number of commentators, activists and intellectuals at the time worried that Germans would think that, by virtue of having been divided into two states for over forty years, a moral debt incurred because of the Holocaust had somehow paid off. Frank Stern, for example, quotes a 1990 pamphlet on the subject of German moral and historical responsibility whose author writes, ‘By means of hard work, a feeling of responsibility and good will … the Germans have created the pre-requisites for the restoration of what Hitler destroyed: national unity.’ As Stern notes, at work here is a kind of moral calculation:
Nazi horrors and the Germans as victims after 1945 are weighed one against the other, suffering juxtaposed to suffering, an equation of victimization. In this view, the mass murder committed against the Jews of Europe has been repaid and ‘recompensated’ – what remains now as a task is the historical reassembling of a shattered Germany.
15
It is in the position Stern argues against that we can discern a Hegelian logic. The argument would go something like this: the rise of the nation-state produced genocide; this led to the division of Germany, the suffering of which balanced out the earlier crimes; as a result, unification was now possible, albeit on new grounds. A resolved dialectic.
At stake in the debate over historical narrative is the question of whether the history of German militarism and violence can be left to the past. Godard’s emphasis on this particular history places him firmly on the side of those who worried about the historical significance of the move towards unification – seeing it, rather, as a move towards reunification. The danger, on this view, is in arriving at a perspective from which it all fits into and is justified by a large-scale historical pattern. Godard correlates the violence he does to the image with violence done in history so as to refuse a presentation of that history in a way that effaces its violence. The sequence, in short, amounts to a refusal to let a claim to a logic of history do away with the violence and suffering it contains.
The movement from film to video within Allemagne 90 neuf zéro has another ambition as well, one that concerns a methodological project. This is the positive argument of the sequence. Through the emphasis on the idea of a ‘break’ as something aesthetic, technological and historical, Godard suggests an alternative to the Hegelian postulate of an ideal reconciliation, an alternative to the very historical framework that Hegel deploys. He does so through the texture of the image itself. What the manipulation of the image does – the ambiguous temporality, stuttering playback speed, and shift in media – is to give us 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. Godard, that is, uses the qualities of an aesthetic break as a way to model an experience of remaining with historical breaks without immediately abstracting to a larger pattern. If a Hegelian philosophy attempts to place events within a larger historical narrative, Godard suggests that film, precisely through an affinity with aesthetics, is able to give us a better account of how and why the break itself matters. To tarry with the break is not to forgo understanding, to ignore the task of looking for historical patterns and causes of violence. It is, however, to suggest that the move toward abstraction is incomplete without recognition of the phenomenology of violence, and that film – including its use of video – is able to provide us with the necessary form of experience.
The terms of the connection between the aesthetic break in form and the historical break in the world shown in the clip finds additional support in the figure of the dance itself. Not simply a category of ornament, dance can be seen as standing in for a vision of social order. There is a clear expression of this idea in a letter of Schiller’s:
I know of no better image for the ideal of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns … Everything fits so skillfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, without everyone getting in anyone’s way. Such a dance is the perfect symbol of one’s own individually asserted freedom as well as of one’s respect for the freedom of the other.
16
But this is clearly not what’s going on in Allemagne 90 neuf zéro. Godard’s manipulation of the dance undermines the political ideal through aesthetic means. Rather than harmony and play, a kind of formalised beauty, we have stuttered play-back; rather than a distanced perspective, overseeing the patterns formed by the dancers as a collective, we are immersed in the visual breakdown of their individual movements. What was, in the diegetic world of the clip, a rhythmic and graceful movement that evoked a well-ordered, successful society – even if one on the verge of collapse – is made into something distinctly messier: the patterns are broken down, disrupted by internal forces. And so, we might think, it should be. The dance takes place under the aegis of a violent and repressive state; we can take Godard to be arguing that the means for representing this social organisation should therefore be different than for those social orders which express Schiller’s aesthetic and political ideal. In a sense, Godard undermines an already undermined vision of politics.
The terms of this reading recur throughout Allemagne 90 neuf zéro. Indeed, we only need to look a little further to find the argument reiterated. As Zelten continues to read from Hegel, this time in both French and German, Godard cuts to a series of clips staged against the content of the quotation. The brief sequence runs as follows:
Philosophy begins by the destruction of the real world. [Cut to a clip of artillery firing at night: only the gun flashes are visible, though we hear sounds of distant guns. Then a clip of deportations.] Philosophy makes its appearance when [cut to a clip from Lang’s Metropolis, where Maria is surprised by a noise in the catacombs and whirls around] public life is no longer satisfying and ceases to interest people and when citizens [cut to a clip from Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene, where she and a Nazi official mount a large staircase to meet Hitler; a Nazi flag is prominent in the background] no longer take part in the running of the state.
The choice of images here is again non-trivial (though not entirely surprising). Each clip presents a moment that refers, explicitly or implicitly, to a historical moment where the historical present was treated as breaking sharply from its past: World War I, 1920s industrial poverty and quasi-socialist utopias, and World War II.
17 Godard again contrasts philosophy’s desire to resolve contradictions or ‘breaks’ – to place them into a coherent narrative, as Hegel does by employing the device of the ‘cunning of reason’ – with the way film can stay with and emphasise the experience of that rupture through aesthetic means. In
Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, cinema – both film and video – is presented as a way to think about these changes that are taking place, a medium that contains a unique and invaluable set of tools for the purpose of historical analysis.
In his films and videos since Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, Godard has continued his efforts to adapt cinema’s aesthetic resources as an analytic tool for new instances of historical violence. Much of this, at least in the 1990s, concerned the break-up of Yugoslavia and the wars that erupted there; in works like Hélas pour moi (1993), Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1994), For Ever Mozart (1996), and even Notre musique, Godard brings cinema to bear on the increasing complexity of nation-states, personal identity and problems of war and memory. Histoire(s) du cinéma, his main preoccupation in these years, takes this project further, proposing that film is implicated in the historical events it analyses and shows. In one of its strangest and most controversial claims, Godard argues that the cinema was obligated to intervene in World War II but failed to do so, and its inability to prevent the Holocaust from happening – quixotic as that hope may seem – marked its failure as a medium attuned to the world.
The reasons behind these claims are beyond the scope of this essay. But Godard is insistent in his work since the 1980s that it’s precisely because cinema has an obligation to show the world to an audience, to render that world intelligible for them, that its failures constitute an indictment of its very possibility for mattering in the first place. It’s the power of film’s aesthetic resources to model and produce historical knowledge that makes its failures so devastating, its reinvention so important.
NOTES