To begin with, a generalization: Godardians really don’t like Quentin Tarantino. But, fear not, this post isn’t going to be about the latter, only the reasons expressed by the Godardians for their contempt. Wasn’t it Jean-Luc Godard himself who argued against a clear distinction between the fictional film and the documentary? For him, being even more opposed to naïve realism than Andre Bazin, the camera always had a perspective, a position, or as Colin MacCabe puts it: “there is not reality and then the camera – there is reality seized at this moment and this way by the camera.” [p. 79] It was this foundational belief that led to Godard’s dismissal of the anti-aesthetic implicit within cinema vérité, that reality comes from letting the film roll. Yet, Jonathan Rosenbaum (and I might as well mention Daniel Mendelsohn and HU’s very own Caroline Small) condemns Inglourious Basterds for “mak[ing] the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality,” because “anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong.” Evidently, fascism is just there waiting to have a camera pointed at it. No truth could possibly come out of a fantasy involving Nazism. In One Plus One, Godard films a neo-Nazi pornographic bookseller reading from Mein Kampf as his customers buy lurid novels and magazines — each person who makes a purchase gives a Nazi salute and slaps two captured hippies in the face. Is Godard making fascism easier to understand as a historical reality? More likely, the viewer is confused at this unrealistic scenario, but hopefully intrigued (or entertained) enough to contemplate what all these component images are doing there together in the middle of a rockumentary, e.g..: What does pornography have to do with fascism? What does any of this have to do with The Rolling Stones (the ostensible subject)? Just what the hell is Godard saying?
Rosenbaum refuses to regard Tarantino with any sort of reflection (I suspect too much identification, aka “entertainment,” and not enough distanciation aka “intellectual thought”). Inglourious Basterds is a film about other films, about movie conventions, and for that reason alone, “it loses its historical reality.” However, aren’t all of Godard’s quotations from films, news media, advertising and literature committed to the exact opposite point, that these images do have a historical reality in the way they construct/mediate who we are? If one is going to be derided for his narcissistic cinephilia (filtering everything through film), then the other should be, too. Rosenbaum mockingly quotes from an interview with Tarantino where he relates the 9/11 event to the spectacle of action films – not one of the director’s prouder moments, to be sure. Now consider Godard’s statement from La Chinoise’s press book:
Fifty years after the October Revolution, American cinema dominates world cinema. There’s not much to add to this state of affairs. Only that at our modest level, we must also create two or three Vietnams at the heart of the immense empire, Hollywood-Cinecittà-Mosfilms-Pinewood, etc. as much economic as aesthetic, that’s to say struggling on two fronts, to create national cinemas, free, brotherly, comrades and friends. [p. 182, MacCabe]
Although MacCabe gives this a sympathetic spin, noting how Godard has always been aware that his “oppression” isn’t as “grievous” as what was done to the Vietnamese, there’s not much he can do with the foolhardiness of the director’s feeling “solidarity” with them because “his own experience” is “the very same predicament.” I’m going to assume that the imperialism of having too many theaters showing American movies is quite obviously not the oppression of a napalm bath, as a spectacle or otherwise, and move on.
On the other hand, Godard’s kinocentrism (sounds better than ‘cinecentrism’) also served to make him film’s most indefatigable and important moral critic of the Sixties – at least, regarding his chosen medium (as we’ll see, I’m more skeptical of his role as a social critic). If his films of that period are about any one topic, it’s the relation of cinematic form to reality, how one shapes the other, and the filmmaker’s charge in relating his or her film to an audience. As our reality was becoming increasingly mediated by images, where the representation of life was replacing life and human relations were displaced through commodities (compare Pierrot le fou’s famous dinner party scene in which the guests communicate through ad-speak to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle), Godard radicalized his films in Brechtian fashion by subverting cinema’s conventions, calling attention to their mediating effects (albeit Debord and the Situationists weren’t fans): music pops up arbitrarily, dialogue doesn’t sync with the images, quotes (both visual and textual) are used in abundance but frequently have no logical connection to what little plot is involved, etc. As the title sequence for 1965’s Pierrot le fou fades to just the O’s, Godard, relating to the world through cinema, but ever more distrustful of the reality of images, announced his intent, to return filmmaking to degree zero. His films would become more radical (and more impenetrable to the average filmgoer).
Ever since I first saw it, One Plus One has alternately bored, frustrated and fascinated me in roughly equal measure. Godard called it his last bourgeois film, since it was the last of the period (following Week End) to be financed through conventional means and wasn’t as collaboratively directed as his subsequent efforts with the Maoist Dziga Vertov Group (where the group received auteur credit and they would try to make films via committee). Indeed, other than featuring The Rolling Stones, the film is probably best known by the incident where the director punched his producer, Iain Quarrier (who plays the bookseller), in the nose for having altered the ending to include the completed version of “Sympathy for the Devil” and renaming the film with the song title – that is, Godard hadn’t abandoned all vestiges of his own auteurship. Nevertheless, it was the first of his films to follow the transformative events of the Langlois Affair and May 1968, a transition into what’s typically known as his radical period, where he and his collaborators (particularly Jean-Pierre Gorin) attempted to realize the revolutionary potential of film.
Through long tracking shots between the band members in a recording studio, each often surrounded by soundboards, the film conveys the amount of individual effort and labor time involved, 1 + 1, even in manufacturing something as seemingly disposable as a pop song. By refusing to give the audience the finished version (in the director’s cut), the focus is on the collaboration, rather than the commodity. Likewise, the mise-en-scène is an attempt to not single out any particular member as a star (although, unsurprisingly, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards speak more than the rest while the drug-addled Brian Jones nearly vanishes on camera). Against the visual images, a narrator reads from a smutty political novel (involving, among others, Pope Paul and LBJ in lascivious encounters), which intrudes upon the traditionally diegetic sound, dialectically challenging the notion of a unified film diegesis. And against The Stones in the studio, Godard counterposes other, tenuously related sequences: the media interrogation and eventual demise of Eve Democracy (Anne Wiazemsky, JLG’s second wife); in a junkyard, black militants read Black Power disquisitions, pass guns to each other (within long lateral tracking shots) as they molest and slaughter white women; and there’s the aforementioned bookstore where men and women, old and young, bourgeois and working classes can purchase smut and racist, violent pulp. To quote Mao Zedong (lifted from Slavoj Žižek): “In any given thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative, whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute.” Godard is quite brilliant in formally instantiating Mao’s “the one divides into the two,” forcing the viewer to engage the filmic elements dialectically, but does the film effect any change outside of cinema, or even demand such a change?
I’m inclined towards Roger Greenspun’s early summation: “Whatever its intentions, One Plus One contemplates rather than advocates revolution.” It’s about the use of revolutionary ideas to make a film, rather than a film serving the revolution. Exploiting The Rolling Stones’ popularity could’ve been advantageous to spreading radical ideas to the masses, but not when it takes something like an intellectual interpretation of Mao to understand those ideas. The film could only fail in its didactic purpose, since it was ultimately aimed at other cinephiles already sympathizing with the ideology – i.e., white bourgeois radicals, the type of person who really gets the joke of juxtaposing a successful blues-based rock band against a black militant reading LeRoi Jones on the white appropriation of black music. But is Godard doing anything differently here? He uses the image of black militancy to lend authenticity to his kinocentric radicalism much like he analogized his own oppression to that of the Vietnamese, as if he’s there with them in the junkyard – the void of Western culture. At least The Stones have a genuine love for the American Blues. I’m not so sure that Godard expresses anything more than a narcissistic interest in the struggle of American blacks (namely, what it might mean to his ideas of a revolutionary cinema). Since I find this representative of a certain navel-gazing self-importance endemic to Godard’s films (what most of his detractors would call ‘boring’), I’m going to focus the rest of the essay on what’s problematic about his use of black representation.
First, consider this more favorable interpretation from Gary Elshaw (providing the most insightful and comprehensive critique of the film that I’ve found):
Godard’s desire to “destroy culture” is illustrated by [Eldridge] Cleaver’s own desire to destroy the dominant culture, a culture that is led in the form of the ‘Omnipotent Administrator’. The ‘Omnipotent Administrator’ represents white male patriarchal power, a power which often manifested itself as governmental and repressive.
Contrariwise, I find a bit of minstrelsy in Godard’s use of black men in that it’s a savage image, regardless of their literary references. Now, I understand that their violence stems from what he surely agrees is white oppression, but their abstracted appearance here is more a metaphor for his own struggle to destroy the Hollywood Empire’s hegemony than to capture the reality of blackness. Black Power is to Godard’s target audience what Leadbelly was to the “open-minded,” left-leaning white audiences of his time. As Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor put it (in their book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music): “[B]y the twentieth century, with the influence of Darwin and Freud, it was primarily the Negro who had become idealized, and this time as the primitive – pure id, and therefore profound.” [p. 10] Despite the soft-spoken musician’s preference for suits, his promoter and producer, John Lomax, insisted on the commodified image of the prison-garbed, convicted murderer, selling an idea of authentic repression by reflecting (however well-meaning) white bias. Isn’t this what Godard’s doing with the black militants, by presenting the violent return of the repressed black to white radicals calling – at least, intellectually – for a violent revolution? Solidarity, go primitive, back to zero. Eve Democracy dies while fighting beside blacks on a beach at the end. As the most likely stand-in for the director (espousing many of his views during the interview earlier), that it’s her corpse raised on the Hollywood-sized camera crane (Godard’s “omnipotent administrator”) in the last shot is, I believe, telling.
My triangulation is similar to the scene in Week End where two previously warring parties, an anti-Semitic woman and a communist farmer, are united in their disdain at the self-centeredness of the lead bourgeois couple, Corinne and Roland. As Frank B. Wilderson III argues (in Red, White & Black):
[T]he imaginative labor of White radicalism and White political cinema is animated by the same ensemble of questions and the same structure of feeling that animates White supremacy. Which is to say that while the men and women in blue, with guns and jailers’ keys, appear to be White supremacy’s front line of violence against Blacks, they are merely its reserves, called on only when needed to augment White radicalism’s always already ongoing patrol of a zone more sacred than the streets: the zone of White ethical dilemmas, of civil society at every scale, from the White body, to the White household, through the public sphere on up to the nation. [p. 131; capitalized White and Black refer to structural positions]
By being a reflection of his kinocentrism – cinephilia his “zone of White ethical dilemmas” – Godard’s attempted solidarity with the American Black Power movement becomes aligned with early twentieth century white condescension. On the one hand, there’s the offense at Henri Langlois being unjustly removed from the Cinémathèque Française and, on the other, there’s former Slausons member Kumasi’s memory of the Watts Riots (from the film Crips & Bloods: Made in America):
You cannot woop us. We’re already dead. We’re already beaten down — we’ve been beaten down for 400 years. We already got the wounds inside and outside our bodies; how you gonna hurt us? […] Here’s a dilapidated building; ain’t nobody livin’ there. You didn’t fix it; you didn’t remove it, okay? It ain’t nothing but a pile of bricks, anyhow. That’s comin’ at you. That whole building, brick by brick, is comin’ at yo’ ass. That’s what we’re throwin’ at you: the building, the bullshit, the rubble, the rubbish that we live in. That’s what’s comin’ at yo’ ass. Those are our weapons: the filth, the funk, the shit that you can’t stand — that you defend, that you put a barrier between us and yo’self. That’s comin’ at you.
Wilderson would argue that these two forms of oppression aren’t just different in degree, but in ontological kind. Godard’s attempt to draw a structural parallel (say, between the censoring of films under the de Gaulle regime and the way the black population was cordoned off in Southern Los Angeles) is based on a false analogy. This “ruse,” as Wilderson calls it, hides the ontological violence perpetrated on blacks through slavery, whereby Blackness became defined as fungibility and accumulation – Inhuman, Dead. As for the communist struggle, quoting Wilderson again: “workers labor on the commodity, they are not the commodity itself, their labor power is.” [p. 50] Not that it would be much more plausible, but Godard should’ve kept his analogies of oppression to those of the striking workers in May 1968, since they were struggling with alienation and exploitation, not necessarily their position as Human. It was his solipsism that ensured One Plus One would be best remembered for its formal inventiveness or, most often (for example), as a collection of snazzy clips of The Stones at the beginning of their most inventive period.
REFERENCES (not all of them cited in the text):
Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music
Gary Elshaw, “The Depiction of Late 1960s’ Counter Culture in Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil”
Stephen Glynn, “Sympathy for the Devil”
Roger Greenspan, “Sympathy for the Devil (1+1)”
Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy
David Sterritt, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
Donato Totaro, “May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond”
Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule”
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The Godard Roundtable index is here.
I really like this article a lot.
I haven’t seen One Plus One, unfortunately, but I’m curious if folks who have would be interested in comparing Godard’s use of black revolutionary tropes with Tarantino’s? Tarantino filters all of that stuff through blaxploitation, of course…and I wonder if that’s better, in some ways? Genre’s a communal project, and so is innately less solipsistic, it seems to me. If you’re talking about blaxploitation, you’re at least talking about a phenomena in which lots of black people (like Pam Grier) have participated; there’s collaboration as well as appropriation. Or, as Charles says, at least the Rolling Stones really love black music; they want to participate in the genre of the blues, rather than just using that genre as an analogy for their own marketing struggles (or what have you.)
Great article! Strangely, you made me want to see this movie.
Charles, excellent job on a very strange film, even by JLG’s standards.
I think you’re the first person to invoke the “B” word in your post–labeling Godard’s films “Brechtian”–and I’d agree that SYMPATHY’s separation of elements, etc. follow the techniques of Epic Theater. Personally, though, I’ve always had trouble with Brechtianism, because (a.) it presumes that the author (or auteur) can create a text that can effectively govern reader/audience reactions, and (b.) it assumes that escapism is a bad thing. What about the counter-argument, made by the great Hollywood director John Sullivan, that escapism is “all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan…”?
Great job Charles! After your (and Craig’s, by the way) contribution to this roudtable mine will be breezy, I’m afraid…
Escapism to a Marxist is the same thing as alienation (not cool at all). To me it’s an aesthetic sin and let’s leave it at that…
I think Charles is actually raising a question here about whether genre is escapism, though. Obviously it can be…but it seems like it can also be a form of engagement. That is, the Stones are trying to connect through genre with both the history of the blues and a broad (largely white) public. That’s arguably a political act, albeit obviously compromised in various ways. But is it more compromised than turning black experience into an analogy for one’s own marketing problems?
Compromised is putting it mildly. I would add: compromised to the point of derision. It seems to me that we can’t escape (he he) our own origins. Craig explained it well when he so aptly analyzed _La Chinoise_. A friend of mine once told me that communism is a bourgeois ideology. I had to agree.
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As Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor put it…“[B]y the twentieth century, with the influence of Darwin and Freud, it was primarily the Negro who had become idealized, and this time as the primitive – pure id, and therefore profound.”
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Humph. Aside from the “and therefore profound” bit, has there ever been a time where blacks were not “idealized…as the primitive – pure id”? Viewed as childlike simpletons satisfied with simple animal pleasures, whom book l’arnin’ would only confuse and spoil?
(And there certainly is no shortage of rap performers eager to depict themselves in such a fashion these days…)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I think Charles is actually raising a question here about whether genre is escapism, though. Obviously it can be…but it seems like it can also be a form of engagement.
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“Yes” to both; the sticking-point is whether the work reinforces or questions cultural assumptions.
Since genre tends to formula, is defined (in the most part) via the following of conventions, it would powerfully tend toward the former. As Stephen King put it, “horror is conservative.”
From the Dec. 11th entry in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s online journal ( http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/ ):
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…last night, trying to get sleepy…I read Lisa Tuttle’s recent short story, “The Man in the Ditch,” because Tuttle has written some good stuff, and I liked the title. Sadly, the story is bland, only competent, and infected with an especial sort of bland, formulaic mundanity I’m seeing in a lot of “horror” these days, both written and in film. Couple moves into house, apartment, condo, old farm only to discover that the domicile is haunted by malevolent spirit of X (insert generic EVIL entity of your choice). Family X (which can be nuclear or otherwise, pure or tainted, possessed of children or not, but they are pretty much always heterosexual) soon meets terrible fate at the hands of X, or, more rarely, escapes after the fashion of The Amityville Horror (1977) or Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982); Ryan Murphy is turning this tired trope on its ear with his American Horror Story, by the way, by mocking the various incarnations of X and by making the ghosts sympathetic and the X Family the true monsters/invaders…
Which leads me to wonder exactly what all these straight couples are afraid of. The intrusion of the Outside, the Unknown, via a supernatural agency? No, I think that’s only a metaphor – the ghosts and demons and whatnot. They are merely tiresome phantoms trotted out for more mundane (there’s that word again) threats: infidelity, an inability to conceive, sudden infant death syndrome, bankruptcy and foreclosure, children who indulge in drugs or engage in sex or who turn out to be queer or who run away from home, termites in the walls, AIDS and other STDs, bedbugs, and so forth. But instead of writing about those things, it’s all dressed up in the metaphor of “horror.” And it’s dull as small-curd cottage cheese, and it makes me weary…
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Clive Barker, in his brilliant Books of Blood, having likewise flipped the “normalcy threatened by the not-us weird” attitude around…
Craig–
I apologize in advance if it will seem like all I do today is disagree with you (here and on FB)–but, I guess, today I happen to!
You write: “[Brechtianism] assumes that escapism is a bad thing. What about the counter-argument, made by the great Hollywood director John Sullivan, that escapism is “all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan…”?”
You’re making Brecht’s point for him. Of course, escapism is never “all some people have.” A choice to educate oneself (for example in critical theory, which is only as far as the nearest public library), or to be a creator rather than just a passive consumer, is always possible. But the entertainment industry would like people to believe that is all they have, so as to keep them coming back as obedient consumers. There is a clear connection between corporate interests, the promotion of escapism, and the definition of film as exclusively narrative, fictional and diegetic (therefore providing a story and a place to escape to). From this point of view, “Brechtianism” is exactly the corrective that is needed. Furthermore, if I’m not mistaken, Godard is influenced by Brecht from the very beginning; the jump-cuts in “A Bout de souffle” are already such a verfremdungseffekt, though later they get absorbed fully into narrative filmmaking, forcing Godard to push alienation further and further (especially in “Weekend” and “La Chinoise”–I haven’t gone back to read your review of the latter since reading this comment, but I’m not sure how one can enjoy it without being aware of exactly that intent–I mean, it’s pervasive!)
(I’d also like to point something out here–about how your comment seems to posit “escapism” and “Brechtianism” as the only two choices… But discussing that would take forever. Let’s just say I see it at least as a sliding scale, with many hybrid possibilities in the center, and also other approaches–Brakhage, say–that do not fit on the scale at all, though a Brechtian approach certainly could prime viewers for them.)
Your other “trouble with Brechtianism” is that “it presumes that the author (or auteur) can create a text that can effectively govern reader/audience reactions.” But isn’t that exactly what Hollywood does–indeed, isn’t that Godard’s main problem with the Hollywood institutional style? It’s just that Hollywood does this through emotional manipulation, counting on an (ideal) ideologically-blinded viewer, while Brecht (and again, I haven’t read him in decades, so I’m working from memory now) undertakes to educate the audience as to its own risk of being manipulated, and then refuses to manipulate it emotionally (for example, through catharsis, which, IIRC, was one of Brecht’s bugaboos), rather trying to educate it and therefore (hopefully) to help it judge rationally the presented ideas and narrative?
Well, that’s the theory, at least. In practice, as shown by Godard, verfremdungseffekts can clearly be used without a single-minded didactical purpose, can be used more “modernistically,” I guess you could put it, but, nevertheless, the Godard/Brecht notion involves a more aware cultural consumer, one who is conscious of the possibility of his or her own ideological manipulation–a much more positive scenario, I’d say, than the ideal consumer of Hollywood spectacle that Sullivan’s comment implies.
Just subscribing to the comments, which I forgot to do before… How exactly do you do it without commenting, by the way? I mean, I check the box, but I don’t think that’s enough.
Andrei, if you figure out how the comment subscription works, let me know. It remains largely a mystery to me, unfortunately.
The word “subscribe” is a link — it doesn’t look like it but it is. If you click it, it subscribes you.
I assign agency to it. I don’t really understand what happens when one clicks the word. But it works!
Thanks for the provocative response, Andrei!
My mistrust of Brechtianism stems from Brecht’s assumption that much of the misery in life is a product of capitalist ideology. Brecht, like Marx, is at heart a utopian; if we offer the masses an alternative to mindless escapism, Brecht says, they can take steps towards liberation. The problem with this, however, is that sometimes life can be brutal in ways that have little to do with ideology. People die and shit happens regardless of the nature of the social order, and during those times escapism can be a balm. The examples that come to me are personal ones—how after my mother’s death I re-read old comics to escape into a nostalgic haze for a while—but I do think that SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS is a credible rebuttal to Brecht. Sometimes life sucks, and escapism helps.
In some ways, we’re on the same wavelength here: we both lament the overwhelming dominance of Hollywood escapism, and you’re right when you say that Brechtian aesthetics are a corrective. Given that Hollywood operates within a pathetically narrow narrative field, other types of films—Brakhage’s closed-eye abstractions, Bergman’s psychodramas, Antonioni’s languorous ennui, etc.—function as radical alternatives. I’d also agree that it’s a sliding scale between the extremes of Hollywood storytelling and Brechtianism, a point that Brecht himself acknowledges when he categorized his own plays into “culinary” Epic Theater (with enough old dramatic tropes to give pleasure to a mainstream audience) and Lehrstucke (much more experimental, and designed for already enlightened participants).
I’d disagree, though, that the Godard of BREATHLESS was Brechtian. The jump cuts and formal play in his earliest movies jolt the audience, but many of the pre-1965 Godard films don’t follow that jolt with any political content or point-of-view. There are plenty of exceptions—the Algerian War in LE PETIT SOLDAT, or the critique of consumer culture in A MARRIED WOMAN—but movies like BREATHLESS, A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and BANDE A PART give us Brechtian form but virtually no radical content. In his book A CERTAIN TENDENCY OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA, Robert Ray points out that plenty of late 1960s-early 1970s Hollywood films (BONNIE AND CLYDE, FIVE EASY PIECES) borrow flourishes of Godard’s style, but since the content (and the emphasis on narrative) doesn’t change very much, the result is a jazzier version of Hollywood business-as-usual. I’m reluctant to call a text “Brechtian” unless it has both radical form and content.
Also, I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer about my “trouble with Brechtianism.” I’m perfectly happy to extend my skepticism about texts controlling audience/spectator/reader response to ALL texts, Brechtian, Hollywood, and otherwise. I stick close to the Cultural Studies belief that a text generates a multiplicity of responses, only some of which were anticipated by the creator(s) of said text. That doesn’t mean that Brechtian movies can’t have a radical effect—just that I think our assumptions about their radicalism should be humble and skeptical until proven otherwise.
In her book INTERPRETING FILMS, Janet Staiger argues that films (and the historical moments in which films are watched and discussed) generate a plethora of reading strategies, though some of these are much more dominant than others. I relied on Staiger’s work in my dissertation, where I argued that US critics read Godard’s late 1960s and Dziga Vertov films in many different ways, though by far the dominant reading was to co-opt them into a conservative “Godard as auteur” paradigm. That’s happened here at HU too: the thread following John and Sandra’s post is a list of favorite directors formidable enough to make Andrew Sarris blush. But is there tension in claiming that Lynch, Bresson or Godard are “radical” while admitting them to the canon and labeling them “great artists”?
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the thread on John and Sandra’s post started because anybody was thinking about “Godard as auteur” — it started as a string of really emotional reactions to Godard’s criticism of Spielberg. I think Godard was largely erased in that thread, not elevated to auteur, critically or uncritically.
I think it’s fair to say that an auteurist mentality pervades the thread, though — just not about Godard in particular. It’s sometimes hard in this context to distinguish between the critical concept of an “auteur” and just plain old director-as-celebrity. I think the concept of auteur is itself compromised by celebrity post mass media in a way that it just wasn’t when it was originally formulated. It doesn’t wear well.
I haven’t read a lot of Godard criticism, honestly, and what I have read is very theory-laden, so I’m actually a little surprised the auteur model stuck that hard. That’s kind of disappointing!
I’ve highlighted some of the comments about Brecht and Godard in their own post here.
Thanks, everyone.
At the time the Rolling Stones were listening and being shaped by the Blues, it wasn’t like it was an obvious idea for making lots of money. I’d say the racism comes in at the structural level of why they could succeed to a degree their inspirations couldn’t. Likewise with Elvis, who often gets tarred for appropriation. On the other hand, Sam Phillips wasn’t a fool, he knew what he had, a white guy with black talent. What I wonder is if guys like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters really liked the rock appropriation, so went that way because of it, or if they were just cynically cashing in (I hate their 60s blues rock albums, which tend to be their most popular). Anyway, this all gets really difficult to suss out, I think.
As to Noah’s question about genre and revolutionary tropes, I see merit in getting “communally” invested in genre, “identifying” with it, or, as Craig suggests, being “entertained” by it (without an abundance of guilt). For all his critique of images, Godard’s revolutionary-minded distancing techniques tend to, paradoxically, reduce Blackness to an image. If he were simply critiquing the black militant image, then it would be less problematic, but he sides with this image over others (e.g., representations of the bourgeoisie). To bring up one of Noah’s favorite topics, Haneke ultimately fails at doing horror with Funny Games, because he insists on lifting the audience out of the immersive bond that’s integral to the genre. He did so to criticize the specular violence we consume, but ends up making the violence merely specular, without any realworld emotional import (e.g., all the fictional deaths mean nothing, they can be reversed). If anything, he demonstrates that cinematic violence doesn’t mean much of anything to the real world. Isn’t Godard doing something similar with the black struggle? The black militants are his agitprop speak in the same way that Pierrot’s dinner guests speak through ads. It’s confined to the cinema, whereas watching Kumasi definitely isn’t. Likewise, in terms of fiction, it seems to me being invested in a Pam Grier character (e.g., Jackie Brown) is potentially a way out of a solipsistic cinephilia. Sometimes identification in art can change you for the good, allowing you the opportunity to escape into another.
Does that make sense? I’m not sure it’s the same thing as Noah’s point about the communal nature of genre, but I’d be interested in hearing more.
Yeah…all of that is in line with what I was thinking. I agree with the general line of your discussion of Funny Games too (some of the specifics I’d quibble with, but maybe another day.)
I think the Stones probably had a good sense that they were working in a popular idiom…they had the prototype of Elvis and Bill Haley and even the Beatles.
The difference between Elvis and the Stones I’d say is that Elvis was not looking to black sources for validation. That is, he wasn’t reflexively referencing the blues in order to portray himself as cool or authentic. He didn’t need to portray himself as cool or authentic; he was solidly working class and in a country tradition that had it’s own authenticity markers. To the extent that he was performing in a black style, it’s because it wasn’t a black style, but an integrated style in which black and white performers had been learning from each other for decades.
The Stones, on the other hand, were absolutely aping black tropes and performance as black tropes and performance to present themselves as cool and tough. Which on the one hand is unpleasant…but on the other hand, they were much more forthcoming than Elvis in some ways about the roots of their music, and much more likely to try to shout out to particular performers.
So at least for me I wouldn’t condemn either Elvis or the Stones…though neither deserves the clear accolades of someone like Wanda Jackson or Moon Mullican, or for that matter Benny Goodman, all of whom actually performed in integrated contexts at a time when that was a big fucking deal.
In terms of Muddy Waters’ and others later rock albums…I think it’s probably a misleading question to ask whether they did those because they liked rock or because they were just trying to cash in. I doubt any of those people exactly made that distinction. Early blues was commercial recording; I’m sure Waters, et al., always saw themselves as trying to cash in to a fairly large degree. Making rock albums wouldn’t have changed that.
I rather like Waters’ Electric rock album, though, I have to admit.