Haunted by Godard

Abstract

Jean-Luc Godard was haunted by cinema. In his early films, he grappled with genres that had long possessed his thinking, as in the romantic melodrama Contempt (Le M epris, France/Italy, 1963), where ancient literature and a venerable filmmaker represent the tenacious shades of traditional narrative whose confines he was eager to escape. The haunting takes a theological form in Hail Mary (Je vous salut, Marie, France/Switzerland/UK, 1985), where engagements with the soul and the divine manifest his quasi-spiritual faith in painterly and cinematic images. And in Histoire(s) du cinema (France/Switzerland, 1989–99) he conjures up cinema’s ghostly lineage by means of images translated from the crisp materiality of film to the ectoplasmic pliancy of video. These three masterpieces support my proposition that hauntology is an admirable tool for illuminating Godard’s body of work. As posited by Jacques Derrida, hauntology displaces ontology, figuring the specter as an unfathomable intruder that is, in the words of philosopher Colin Davis, “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive,” a state resembling cinema’s dual nature, both immanently present and physically unreachable (Davis 2005, 373). Another sense of the term, developed in psychoanalytic theory, emphasizes the phantom, the metaphorical presence of what Davis describes as “a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light,” which is pertinent to Godard’s fear of an “end of cinema” wrought by capitalist exploitation and political cowardice (Davis 2005, 373). Speculating along similar lines, Fredric Jameson has posited “spectrality” as an awareness “that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be [and] that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity,” another concept applicable to Godard’s anxieties about cinema’s convoluted past, living present, and threatened future (Jameson 1993, 39). In its revolutionary reworking of film history, Godard’s project exemplifies Derrida’s idea of “an interpretation that transforms what it interprets” (Derrida 2006, 87). A major reference point for Derrida’s hauntology is Hamlet’s complaint that “time is out of joint” (Shakespeare 2012, I:5). It is through temporal displacement, philosopher Liam Sprod contends, that “the past invades, or haunts, the present with its return and in this disjuncture makes possible a new aesthetic that is hauntology,” marked by “a return of the ideas, images and ideals of a past age, which now grate and creak against the joints of the present” (Sprod 2012). This suggests an interesting entryway to Godard’s filmography, beginning with its earliest titles; these are very different from the pictures he made in later years, but although they are narrative movies