Godard's counter-memory - film and video works of Jean-Luc Godard; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

My father was a doctor, for a like reason I tend to compare cinema with a medical act. Reality is the patient, and I am the doctor--and I am also ill.

--Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard didn't display up last fall for his scheduled appearance at the Museum of late Art's exhibition of his film and video work of roughly the past sum of two units decades, "Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991" His absence at this extensive observe of more than 30 works, many of them previously unperceived in the States, wasn't just a classic bad-boy move--although he was quot in the novel York Times as saying "MOMA unmutilateds like mummy in French."(1) Instead, the famously recalcitrant director was not upon working with actor Gerard Depardieu, putting a certain number of finishing touches on his nearest feature film, Helas pour Moi.

The decision to stick with a in every one's mouth project rather than be f|t for past efforts isn't all that suprising. Godard is, after all, the man who's claimed of retrospectives, "It's better to die and make a comeback." What is startling is that the 63-year-old Godard still jostle violentlys out films at all, since it's widely assumed he's stopped making movies, or at least movies that clan might want to see.

Godard is many times reduced to a merely retrospective force, a 1960s-era avatar of cerebral disjunctiveness and ebullient rule-breaking. After he abandoned feature making in the late '60 to do polemical, collaborative throws with the Dziga Vertov collection (culminating in the 1974 documentary, Ici et Ailleurs), Godard made a comeback of sorts with Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie) in 1979 and then went upon to direct features as diverse as Hail Mary (1985) a contemplative direct the eye at the immaculate conception; King Lear (1987) a loopy sonically inventive take upon Shakespeare featuring such luminaries as Burges Meredith, Molly Ringwald and ligneous Allen; and Nouvelle Vague (1990) a lush lyric poem to male impotence. Still, Godard remains best known for of recent origin Wave classics like Breathless (1959) A Woman is a Woman (1961) and Pierrot le Fou (1965)--giddy, pop-infused films that beth mimic and celebrate the cliches of Hollywood narrative in a playful, punning manner that came to be known as Godardian.(2)

on the contrary equally Godardian, though in a far les popular and accessible faculty of perception is the filmmaker's determination to push moving images into the arena of critique, to question the politics and make of representation by interrogating by what means systems of imagemaking arise, function and are maintained. Nowhere is this preoccupation more apparent than in the large material substance of video work Godard has created in his residence studio in Rolle, Switzerland, since 1974 when he first began combining film and video for the groundbreaking Numero Deux (1975)

These video pieces, which not alone inform but occasionally surpass his films of that period [see A. i. A., Nov. '9I] include sketches for features, where Godard works without ideas while fashioning a smallscreen investigation of the creative process; sum of two units pioneering series made for French television with co-director Anne-Marie Mieville (one exposing the reductiveness of TV of recent origins the other a brilliant close attention of two French schoolchildren and their relationship to language, image and self); and like oddities as the feature-length Grandeur et Decadence du Petit system of exchanges de Cinema (1986), which lampoons the operations of a failing film company and stars French of recent origin Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud as a desperate, mustachioed producer

All these shoot forwards reflect a critical tension between video and film--both in bourns of their relative stature and by what means each medium operates economically and esthetically. This examination reaches a febrile disease pitch in Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (1989-) an expansive, densely layered, elegiac treatise upon the fate of cinema. The sum of two units 60-minute episodes of this ongoing cast shown at MOMA proved the high point of Godard's video retrospective. At one time an idiosyncratic version of film history and a brooding autopsy of it, Histoire(s) is an imaginative collage of of advanced age movie clips, soundtracks, newsreels, film stills, snips of dialogue, reproductions from paintings and words that gradually accumulate to form replete suggestive phrases. Using video to the couple anoint and indict the intrinsic showiness of cinema, Godard rearranges his collection of filmic simple bodys into a fast-paced work that is each bit as eye-grabbing.

Passages from grainy black-and-white silent films and lurid Technicolor spectacles are extracted and manipulated from one side rapid cross-cutting and creeping moderate motion. It is not enough barely to include shots of celluloid sliding back and forth in a Steenbeck editing a whole the sound squeaking and stuttering across the audio heads in a state of near-hysteria; Godard must also interpose the face of a man in a black-and-white film clip, his grimaces freeze-framed and staggered until his features distort into a rictus of horror. Shards of music and dialogue snitched from movies (some profoundly moving, more [i]or[/i] less fantastically trite) overlap to the point of near-chaos, swell, then halt abruptly, creating a dislocating unhurt track that both nudges and grates against the images. There is a desire here to force the constitutings of moviemaking to speak again--or exclaim out for salvation--by beth distorting and dismantling them.