Godard's Inferno

Michelangelo and Ulysses came home from the war with knapsacks bulging, bearing the reward for hardships suffered and inflicted. "We promised you the world," the soldiers boasted to their wives. "Here it is"--and onto the kitchen table they spilled a heap of picture postcards.

This scene, from the 1963 Les Carabiniers, seems in hindsight the true starting point for Jean-Luc Godard's art. Breathless is immortal, A Woman Is a Woman continues to delight, Le Petit Soldat forever marks Godard as combative and political; but Les Carabiniers, among the early films, most clearly announces "the image" as a primary subject of his work.

Not "images," as you might expect from a maker of moving pictures, but "the image." The wildly assorted photographs that Michelangelo and Ulysses slapped down before their wives resembled a primitive travel montage, run so slowly that the frames were visible one by one. This retarding of the flow has become a recurrent device in Godard's late work, starting about fifteen years ago with the series Histoire(s) du cinéma. He sometimes makes a point of holding apart the binary elements of filmmaking, shot and reverse shot, rather than letting them merge in the viewer's mind. In place of persistence of vision, he gives you resistance of vision.

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