Discourse, 24.1, Winter 2002, pp. 113–119 Copyright © 2002 Wayne State University Press,Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

The Saint and the Heiress: A propos of Godard’s

Histoire(s) du cinéma

Jacques RancièreTranslated by T. S. Murphy

“And if George Stevens hadn’t used the first sixteen-millimeter color film atAuschwitz and Ravensbrück, undoubtedly Elizabeth Taylor’s happinesswould not have found a place in the sun.” The viewer of Histoires ducinéma recognizes in this declaration Godard’s manner of makingincisive juxtapositions (rapprochements à l’emporte-pièce). And in this,undoubtedly habit has already had a share in things. She says to her-self that it’s indeed interesting that before tackling the cinematicversion of An American Tragedy, George Stevens had accompaniedthe advance of the American army and filmed the death camps incinema. But she adds here the feeling that, if Stevens had spent thewar as an announcer in New York or a parachutist in Burma, thiswould have ever so slightly altered the way Elizabeth Taylor, in APlace in the Sun, portrayed the beautiful heiress overjoyed by heridyll with the young Rastignac played by Montgomery Clift. Havingthus sorted things out, she awaits the provocateur’s next telescop-ing and prepares herself to handle it in the same way.

But the director doesn’t mean it that way, and a new imagecomes to bring literariness (littéraliser) to Elizabeth Taylor’s place inthe sun. She now appears to us shadowed, iconized in a circle oflight that seems to outline the imperious gesture of a painted fig-ure apparently descended from the heavens. Her suspended posi-tion would logically make her an angel. But the halo, the watchfulexpression and the red cape fringed with gold apparently belong to

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a saint. The fact remains that saints rarely descend from the heav-ens, and one hardly sees why this figure, in which we recognize thehand of Giotto, defies the law of gravity for material and spiritualbodies.

Thus the pasting (collage) of the sacred painted image onto theprofane film redoubles in its bizarreness—both visual and seman-tic—the excess of the conceptual pasting that connected the light-ness of the star to the horror of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. It’s nota matter here, therefore, of one juxtaposition among others.Between the “excessive” conceptual pasting and the impossible visualpasting, the whole enterprise of Histoires du cinéma is emblematized.In the triangle that connects the cadaver of Auschwitz, the cinematicbody of the star and the painted celestial apparition, the three majorstrands of Godardian construction actually come together in a knot:a thesis on what the century has done to cinema; a thesis on what cin-ema has done to the century; and a thesis on what makes up theimage in general.

First the thesis on cinema in the century. If the Hollywood ver-sion of Dreiser’s American Tragedy must depend on what Stevens sawand filmed in the death camps, the fact is that—contrary to what thetitle leads us to believe—Godard constructs one history of cinemaand one only. Every history of cinema in this century—his century—is imperiously organized around the 1939–1945 war, organizedaround the Nazification of Fritz Lang’s Germany and the collapse,in spring 1940, of Renoir’s France, around Germany in ruins and thediscovery of the death camps in 1945. The history of the two dreammachines—Soviet and Hollywood—must find its truth in the Euro-pean catastrophe. This truth seems to be, at first glance, a combina-tion of two great theses: the Adornian thesis on the impossibility ofart after Auschwitz and the Deleuzian thesis, which connects the cri-sis of the movement-image to the compromise between grand cine-matic montage and totalitarian directing (mise en scène), and theRosellinian advent of the time-image in the traumatism of defeat.Whatever the qualities of their guarantors might be, both the onethesis and the other have a weakness common to retrospective dec-larations of impossibility. But above all their conjunction has animportant consequence, fully assumed by Godard, as to the very con-stitution of the corpus of the history of cinema.

Whatever can be shown to be in play in the backstabbed Frenchspring of 1940, the devastated Germany of 1945, and the horrorencountered in the camps belongs to Godard’s history of cinema.A Franco-German history, at the limit. It includes Soviet Russia,daughter of German speculations of the preceding century, NorthAmerica, daughter of old Europe and devourer of her mother, and

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Rossellini’s Italy, emblem of resistance to “the occupation of cinemaby America.” On the other hand it leaves the Japan of Ozu andMizoguchi on the sidelines. And it does this neither by means of aes-thetic depreciation nor by forgetting what Japan did and under-went between 1941 and 1945, but because the war and defeat ofJapan do not allow themselves to be thought within the Franco-Ger-man historical quarrel, nor do its images fit the Judeo-Christianquarrel over images. Significantly, the art of the great Japanese mas-ters is represented by a single shot, of which we can reasonably thinkthat it is included less for the virtues of the film itself than for thoseof its title: The Crucified Lovers. Deleuze’s “history of cinema” wasdivided between two fathers of the time-image: the non-temporalOzu and Rossellini, child of defeat. Godard’s is coherent: he knowsonly Rossellini’s year zero, the year zero of Berlin in ruins.

Nevertheless, if Godard borrows from Deleuze his cutting up oftime and from Adorno the sepulchral tone of time after, it is inorder to found a completely different idea of the task of cinema inhis century. It’s not a matter of saying that art—or in any case thegreat constructivist cinema—is no longer possible after Auschwitz.It’s not a matter of calling into question (incriminer) what cinemawould still like to do after the horror of the camps. Godard’s thesisis the opposite: if cinema has become “impossible” after Auschwitz,this is not because the horror is unfilmable, it’s because it hasn’tbeen filmed. More precisely, according to Godard cinema’s, erroris double. It has failed at the task that its powers imposed on it: thatof filming the horror of the camps. But it has also failed at the veryknowledge of its powers: it was unable to recognize that it hadalready shown, in its fictions, this horror that came crashing downon reality. It was unable to recognize in reality what it had never-theless shown already in its fictions: for example, in the rabbit huntor the dance of death in Rules of the Game, or in the anti-Semitic raidsand the concentration camp in The Great Dictator.

Here again the argumentation, regarded coldly, is none tooconvincing. Renoir’s rabbit hunt can always be called prophetic inretrospect, like thousands of other shots of suffering inflicted oninnocent victims. But that childish camp from which the barber andhis protector easily escape shows in any case that the most resoluteand talented cinematic denouncers of Nazism had not the least ideanor the least premonition of the coming reality of the extermina-tion camps. Cinema’s merit (having shown everything in advance)is as imaginary as its error: not having seen, not having been able torecognize in reality what it had foreseen.

If Godard does not care anymore about supporting his histori-cal demonstration, this is due to something more fundamental: a

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thesis on the image that is first of all a faith in the image. Cinema isguilty of not having filmed the camps at the time; it is great for hav-ing filmed them ahead of time; it is guilty of not having recognizedthem. This triple affirmation does not admit a confrontation withthe documentary reality of what was in the films or with the empir-ical reality of what was visible of the Nazi camps and imaginable oftheir principle. It’s useless to suggest that there would have beensome difficulty for filmmakers of good will to set up their workingmaterials in the death camps. Cinema should have been therebecause its very essence is to be there. If there were no images ofthe camps, no images that were available or constructible by the cin-ema, and therefore missed by it, the very virtue of the image wouldbe in question: its virtue of being everywhere and showing every-thing to everyone.

This virtue has nothing to do with the docility of the reproduc-ing machine. The image here in question is something other thanreproduction. It is the mark of the true, the face on Veronica’s veil,the face of the Word, of our savior the Son of God, the very imprintof the prototype. The virtue of cinema according to Godard is notthat of the camera that decides, but that of the screen, the veilstretched out so that the world imprints itself there. This is why thecinema must film Auschwitz. And if it has not done so, it’s becausecinema had already betrayed its essence. It had already betrayed thereal of the image. It had sold its soul to the devil, to the Hollywoodfiction industry. The rabbit hunt and the dance of death in Rules ofthe Game, after the martyrdom of Broken Blossoms and the massacresof Intolerance, were in short fictions in which cinema already repre-sented its own death by the Hollywood “plague.” But because cin-ema had consented to this assassination, it could not see in theseimages of its own destiny the “figures” of mass assassinations tocome. This is why the atonement for its error could only come fromthe poor images in the news. Not that the news had been atAuschwitz any more than cinema had, but because the news neverclaimed anything other than “being there.” It is this humility alonethat has preserved the power of salvation; the power of the imagethat “will come at the time of the Resurrection” because it was alwaysalready there, because it has always preceded itself.

And this resurrection is announced by this profile thatdescends from the heavens to trace the halo of light in which LizTaylor appears, not rising from the bath but literally raised from thedead, those dead that the filmmaker filmed a few years before. Theprofile is that of Mary Magdalene. The saint is not known for hav-ing practiced levitation. If she hovers in the air, arms raised towardthe sun, this is simply because Godard has rotated her image 90

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degrees. In Giotto’s fresco the saint’s feet are firmly planted on theground. Her arms are raised toward the Savior that she recognizes,near the empty tomb, and whose hand turns her away. Noli me tan-gere: don’t touch me.

In the Western pictorial tradition, Giotto is the painter whodrew the sacred figures, inherited from the Byzantine icon, out oftheir solitude, the one who brought them together to make theminto characters in a drama who occupy a common space. Godard’smaster in iconographic matters, Elie Faure, even ventured to jux-tapose a photograph of a team of surgeons in the midst of an oper-ation with the Deposition of Christ in order to improve the latter’splastic composition. The cutting and pasting in which Godardindulges here take on, by contrast, their entire signification. By cut-ting in Mary Magdalene’s profile, Godard has not simply intended,following others, to deliver the pictorial image from the original sinof perspective and history. He has released the figure of the saintfrom a plastic dramaturgy whose sense here was precisely absence,the incurability of separation, of this empty tomb that was the heartof romantic art for Hegel. In place of the Noli me tangere stands theabsolute image, the promise that descends from the heavens, rais-ing the rich heiress—and with her the cinema—from the tomb, likethe speech of the visionary Johannes brought the young mother ofOrdet back to life.

It is necessary, therefore, to take literally the phrase that says thecinema is neither an art nor a technique but rather a mystery. At thetime of the debates that took place at the Locarno Festival, I appliedmyself to interpreting this mystery in a Mallarméan sense. Mallarméin fact opposed a purely human celebration of artifice to the neo-mysticism of the Symbolist era. He thought out a fiction discon-nected from resemblance and incarnation, brought back to thepure gesture of a performance, to the pure projection of a “mag-nificent ordinary” (quelconque) on a “vacant and superior surface.”Could one not, then, place the cinematic privileging of “projection”celebrated by Histoires du cinéma under the patronage of Mallarmé?Could one not just as well identify the Mallarméan scorn for the oldfiction of “Ladies and Gentlemen” with the Godardian denuncia-tion of these equivocal games of the real and the imaginary, inwhich the real demands its price in real blood and real tears?

Undoubtedly I had believed it possible to honor Godard in thisway while discreetly rescuing him from the surrounding neo-spiritualism. These two laudable intentions were equally misplaced.Godard’s art is resolutely anti-Mallarméan. What he opposes to fic-tion is not the claimed illusionism of performance; it is the imageas the imprint of presence. The cinema “projects” these icons of

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presence. Its childhood virtue is thus the opposite of any celebra-tion of artifice. The childhood of art is what is before art, before theartifices of fiction and perspective. What is before art is precisely theimage. Cinema’s original sin, according to Godard, is to take itselffor an adult, to devote itself, under industrial constraint, to thegames of fiction, when it was really there to show, to testify to pres-ence. There’s no point in rescuing Godard from this spiritualism ofthe icon that he fully claims. It’s a matter rather of recognizing thepaths by which the apparent iconoclast of the Sixties has slowlychanged into one of the most rigorous servants of the icon (icon-odules). And precisely the painting/literature/cinema collages havehighlighted this displacement, from the Dadaist impertinence ofthe New Wave, by way of pop-art derision and the Brechtian peda-gogy of the critique of the image, right up to these current super-impositions in which the icons cut into the works of Giotto,Rembrandt, Monet and whatever others are there to guarantee thepower of presence that consecrates the icons proper to cinema—that dropped lighter, that glass of milk, that bunch of keys, or thathairbrush whose brief flashes outlive the forgetting of their “histo-ries” because they were prior to those histories, like the divineimage is prior to human artifice.

Histoires du cinéma reverses, then, the great contemporary doxathat emphasizes the fatal screen, the reign of spectacle and the sim-ulacrum. They bring to light what the contemporary developmentsof video art already attest to: on the contrary, it is from the very heartof this videographic manipulation of images, where one readily seesthe reign of artifices and simulations of the machine, that a newspiritualism, a new sacralization of the image and presence arises.The prestige of videographic art here transforms the melancholicdiscourse on the king-spectacle into a new sparkle of the idols offlesh and blood. But the paradox, of course, can be read backwards:in order to bring the scenarios of cinema back to the pure icons ofan “unmanipulated” presence of things, it is necessary to createthese icons by the force of editing. The gesture of the manipulator,who takes apart and re-pastes (recolle) to his taste all the composi-tions of painting and all the linkages of film, is necessary. It is nec-essary, while enhancing the pure presence, to render all the imagespolyvalent; to take an image of wind blowing on a female body as ametaphor of originary “murmuring,” the struggle against death ofthe “youngest of the ladies of the Bois du Boulogne” as a symptomof cinema, and slaughtered rabbits as a prefiguration of the Holo-caust. It is necessary, while challenging the empire of language andsense, to submit the linkages of images to all of the prestige ofhomonyms and plays on words. In this way Godard’s cinema renews

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the interminable tension between the two antagonistic and inter-dependent (solidaire) poetics of the aesthetic age: the affirmation ofthe radical immanence of thought in the materiality of forms andthe redoubling to infinity of the games of the poem that takes itselfas its object.

And this is undoubtedly the most profound paradox of Histoiresdu cinema. It wants to show that, with its calling to presence, cinemahas betrayed its historical task. But the demonstration of the callingand the betrayal offers an opportunity to verify exactly the opposite:cinema’s calling to the infinite possibility and radical innocence ofits manipulations. The author of Thus Spake Zarathustra once madea fable of it: the “ascetic of the spirit” is always at the same time a“magician.” It’s understood that the “wrong man” haunts Godard’sfilms. A “wrong man” in the manner of Hitchcock is the one who iswrongly taken for the guilty one. In the manner of Dostoyevsky, it’ssomething else entirely: the one who vainly does his best to pass forthe guilty one. To demonstrate everywhere the innocence of this artthat must be guilty in order to prove a contrario its sacred mission isperhaps the most intimate melancholy of Godard’s enterprise.

First published in Cahiers du cinéma 536: 58–61

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