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Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism, and Historical MontageCharles R. Warner a

a Cultural and Critical Studies, University of Pittsburgh,

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To cite this Article Warner, Charles R.(2008)'Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism, and Historical Montage',Quarterly Review ofFilm and Video,25:1,1 — 15To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10509200500538773URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509200500538773

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Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 25: 1–15, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10509200500538773

Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism,and Historical Montage

CHARLES R. WARNER

In the closing seconds of Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–1998), Jean Luc-Godard’s eight-part,four-and-a-half-hour videographic collage, we encounter the most celebrated image inSurrealist cinema: the close-up of a razor slashing a woman’s eyeball in Luis Bunuel andSalvador Dalı’s Un Chien andalou (1929). Originally, the image introduced a scandalousand seemingly incoherent work which the Surrealist group embraced as an “indomitablecall to revolution” (188), and which Bunuel himself called “a passionate appeal to murder”(Aranda 63). But Godard severely modifies the image, relocating it within a montagesequence that stresses his own points regarding “the death of cinema” and its possible“resurrection.” He freeze-frames, crops, and enlarges the original shot to make an eventighter close-up of the eye, then situates it between dissolving images from Orson Welles’Mr. Arkadin (1955), his own JLG/JLG: autoportrait de decembre (1995), and a reproductionof Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II (1957). On the sound track, in placeof the tango selected by Bunuel, a somber piano solo coincides with Ezra Pound readingHomer’s The Odyssey and with Godard quoting Borges’ “La flor de Coleridge.” In a sense,Godard even replaces Bunuel and Dalı’s ironic intertitles with his own writing and wordplayinside the frame. Given these changes, how might we respond to Godard’s use of Un Chienandalou? Aside from a gruesome image, what does the film bring to his project? Whataspects of Surrealism survive his alterations?

Of course, trying to pinpoint the meaning of a single citation in Histoire(s)—a workthat recombines hundreds of sounds and images collected from sources as diverse asHollywood and European art cinema, newsreels, modern and classical music, cartoons,pornography, paintings, and computer graphics—is neither a simple task, nor one whichGodard encourages. “The best way to look at these programs,” he suggests, “is to enter intothe image without a single name or reference in your head. The less you know, the better”(Ciment and Goudet 57). Thus, for Godard, temporarily forgetting the original contexts ofreferences in Histoire(s) becomes paradoxically necessary for the restoration of memory(and of the cinema itself) through montage. But whether or not we fall back on our ownideas about Bunuel and Dali’s film to unpack Godard’s quotation, we can be sure it occupiesa privileged position, appearing in the climactic final moments of a work which took overa decade to piece together, and which gestated for much longer in text- and lecture-basedversions (Temple and Williams 12–21).

What follows is an attempt to unravel and investigate the rather complex relationbetween Godard and Surrealism to which this quotation of Un Chien andalou alludes. I

Charles R. Warner is a Ph.D. student in Cultural and Critical Studies at the University ofPittsburgh. He has presented research on new media authorship at the Society for Cinema and MediaStudies Conference, and on transcultural remakes at the “Cinema in Europe” conference hosted bythe Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

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2 Charles R. Warner

want to argue that Godard’s recourse to Surrealism in this particularly charged sequenceof Histoire(s) involves something more substantial than a surface borrowing of affectiveimagery, that aspects of Surrealism—chiefly a poetics of shock—make their way into hisvideographic practice. In particular, his use of montage as a tool for retrieving forgottenhistories, and for redeeming the cinema of its failure to sufficiently confront the atrocitiesof the twentieth century, reveals an investment in Surrealist tactics of salvaging neglectedobjects, dismantling illusions of progress, and juxtaposing antagonistic images with littleor no mediating comment. While these strategies are characteristic of other trends in thehistorical avant-garde, they have particular resonances with the Surrealist artists, writers,and literati who emerged in Paris under the leadership of Andre Breton between thetwo world wars. And yet Breton often said that Surrealism was less a unified doctrinethan an “activity” to be practiced even in the absence of an ultimate, realizable goal.My concern in this essay is not to lay down a strict definition of Surrealism but toshow how Godard’s use of montage reactivates Surrealism in his most important work todate.

When voicing his thoughts on montage, Godard at times quotes Robert Bresson’sNotes on the Cinematographer to communicate how the editing process “brings togetherthings . . . that did not seem predisposed to be so” (Bresson 41). But more frequently, in hiswork and interviews since the 1980s, Godard has turned to the similar ideas expressed inthe proto-Surrealist Pierre Reverdy’s poem “L’Image”:

The image is a pure creation of the spirit.It cannot be born of a comparison, but of the rapprochement of two more orless separate realities.The more distant and just the relationships between these realities that arebrought together, the stronger the image will be—and the more emotional andpoetic reality it will have. (73–75)

Godard quotes these lines midway through the final chapter of Histoire(s), titled “SignsAmong Us,” while the hands of an editor (Woody Allen in Godard’s King Lear [1987])stitch together strips of celluloid in an overt demonstration of montage, or what Godardcalls “thinking with one’s hands.” As with the quotation of Un Chien andalou, I want tosuggest that Godard’s borrowing of Reverdy’s poem—which Breton adduces in the first“Manifesto of Surrealism” (20)—retains important links with Surrealism. Although hemay seem to adopt the lines as simply a schematic way of conceptualizing his “electronicmixing” of scavenged material (Manovich 151), Godard’s practice of montage can still beseen as bearing out a Surrealist aesthetic of shock and rapprochement.

I have no intention here of pigeonholing Godard as a Surrealist. Instead, I will arguethat his relationship to the radical interwar movement can be established only by exploringcertain quotations and by scrutinizing his connections with specific historical figures—namely, Louis Aragon, Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Walter Benjamin—who haveclose attachments to Surrealism. Just as Godard’s method of quotation opens his workto whatever possibilities the “original” might carry, his habit of invoking these figuressets up exchanges between his work and theirs which suggest a reframing of his careerstages. The former Surrealist Aragon, whose poetry Godard quotes extensively in his NewWave films of the 1960s, offers an early way into examining the French-Swiss directoralongside Surrealist montage. Both Langlois and Franju serve as key figures in Frenchfilm history around which Godard revises the significance of the Nouvelle Vague, and


Shocking Histoire(s): Godard, Surrealism, and Historical Montage 3

Benjamin provides a philosophical reading of Surrealist shock which goes some waytoward elucidating Godard’s montage-based conception of history.

On the one hand, approaching Surrealism in this light entails a rethinking of thefrequently romanticized movement from which it emerged. Instead of focusing on thewell-known Surrealist notions of surrendering to the logic of dreams through automaticwriting and free association, I want to call attention to the implications of Surrealism forhistoriography, to the ways in which its shocks facilitate a spectatorial confrontation withwhat Benjamin theorizes as the “true image of the past” which “flits by” and “flashes up” atan opportune moment “when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (“Theses” 255).On the other hand, analyzing Godard in this manner calls for a reappraisal of the distinctionsseparating his early, middle, and contemporary oeuvres—distinctions that critics have madetoo sharply within circular debates about modernist and postmodernist sensibilities. As weshall see, whether Histoire(s) du cinema indicates the survival of a modernist aesthetic inpostmodern culture, or the advent of what Jean-Francois Lyotard postulates as a modernistart born after and through the postmodern (Ricciardi 171), any such attempt to situatethe videographic series must reckon with the Surrealist aesthetics informing Godard’s“historical montage” (Smith 190).

The circuit of associations surrounding Godard and Surrealism can be traced back tohis earliest career stages. As James Naremore has argued, Godard’s Cahiers du cinemacriticism of the 1950s exhibits a Surrealist-like mixture of high and low discourses whichundermines cultural hierarchies and “blurs the boundaries between romantic aestheticism,modernism, and the historical avant-garde” (17). Dissecting Godard’s review of DouglasSirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), Naremore shows how within the stretchof a paragraph, Godard delivers a Joycean pun, lampoons “serious” film criticism, heapspraise on lowbrow material, and alludes to the “delirium” of the Surrealist writer Aragon(15–17). Although Naremore restricts this tendency to Godard’s criticism, we can easilytrack its persistence in his early films, which also juxtapose dissimilar elements and chipaway at bourgeois taste distinctions. For instance, in Breathless (1960), within a minuteof screen time, Godard apes a plot device common to countless B-movies (eluding policeby climbing out a window), blends a nondiegetic jazz score with gunshots and orchestralstrains from the sound track to Budd Boetticher’s Westbound (1959), and replaces thedialogue of that “cowboy film” with a collage of lyrical poetry by Aragon and GuillaumeApollinaire (Martin 255–262), the latter of whom coined the term “surrealiste” in 1917 todescribe his own play (Bohn 121–140). In these moments, which fuse high and low cultureand bring together “more or less separate realities,” Godard’s allusive filmmaking achievessomething more sophisticated than a cinephilic in-joke or an innocuous homage.

Naremore, in part to take issue with the charge of apoliticism often leveled at theCahiers critics and eventual New Wave directors, goes on to outline similarities betweenthe Cahiers auteurists and the interwar Surrealists headed by Breton. “Both were fond ofAmerican films, particularly of the B movie,” he notes, “and both were dreamers of massculture looking for what Andre Breton had called ‘moments of priceless giddiness.” But“[w]hat the auteurists shared most of all with the surrealists,” Naremore contends, “was apredilection for l’amour fou”—that is, an attraction to films depicting “compulsive loverswho flouted bourgeois morality and consumed themselves with passion” (17). Where theSurrealists invested “mad love” with a transcendent quality in their literature, the Cahiersgroup critically relished the theme and later explored it in some of their New Wave films,such as Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).

But Naremore, not wanting to “overstate the connection between the auteurists andthe surrealists,” immediately drops the comparison and tells us his “point is simply that


4 Charles R. Warner

Godard’s writing is made up of a mixture of familiar discourses, and that it can’t beidentified completely with any of them” (17). To be sure, a closer inspection would haveto account for the significant differences between and within the two all-male collectives.Auteurism, or more precisely la politique des auteurs, remained a contested view amongthe fairly eclectic contributors to Cahiers, and Andre Bazin, the mentor of Godard and hisfellow auteurists, took them to task more than once for allotting “such importance to ‘B’films” and subscribing to an “aesthetic personality cult” (248–259). No less eclectic, theSurrealist group struggled to reach a consensus among its members, and arguments overhow to reconcile their poetics with revolutionary action often led to “excommunications”carried out by the authority of Breton (Nadeau 175–211). Even more important, a fullercomparison would need to examine the crucial variances between post-World War I andpost-World War II French culture. A thorough analysis of these periods falls outside theambit of my discussion, but suffice it to say that the Surrealists (disgusted by attempts torationalize the horrors of the Great War, suspicious of modernity’s progress, and caughtpolitically between Communist and Marxist crosscurrents) and the Cahiers critics (on thewhole receptive to the influx of American popular culture which went hand in hand withFrench modernization, unmindful of the aftereffects of atomic warfare and the Holocaust,and reluctant to engage pressing political issues, in particular the colonial war in Algeriaand the unresolved conflicts of the German Occupation) took notably different positionswithin notably different cultural milieus (Lowenstein 27–32).

Still, we should probably think twice before we subsume Godard’s early criticism andfilmmaking under a generalized Cahiers/New Wave aesthetic. While Godard would notevince a rigorous political commitment until the late-1960s, with La Chinoise (1967) andWeek-end (1967) (Hayward 143–144), we might bear in mind that his second feature, LaPetit soldat (filmed in 1960 but banned until 1963), drew French censorship due to itsreferences to Algeria and its candid depiction of torture on both sides of the war (not thatcensorship always curbs progressive politics). Even Breathless, which Godard has all butdisowned on account of its naıve experimentalism and its “fascist overtones” (Kline 185),registered anti-Gaullist sentiments which censors forced him to delete, namely a sequencein which he cross-cut footage of de Gaulle trailing Eisenhower down the Champs-Elyseeswith a shot of the French criminal Michel following his American love interest down thesidewalk—a linkage that sexualizes national politics in a manner proleptic of the montagestrategies of Histoire(s) du cinema (Rosenbaum 54).

My point here is not to deny that Godard’s early output demonstrates an apoliticalimpulse in keeping with the larger New Wave; nor do I want to argue against what AlainBergala describes (in a conversation with Godard) as the New Wave’s fundamental trendtoward historical “amnesia” in the wake of World War II (Godard, Tome 2 24). Rather, Iwish to suggest that Godard’s early-1960s, pre-Maoist films contain occasional flashes ofpolitical and historical commentary which distinguish his working methods from those ofhis Cahiers associates, and which prefigure the historical montage that defines his currentvideographic practice and sustains his links to Surrealism.

Aragon establishes a context for these links in his 1965 article “What is Art, Jean-LucGodard?” Ostensibly a commentary on Pierrot le fou, the piece digresses to positionGodard not only as an heir to Surrealist-approved auteurs (“Charlie Chaplin, then Renoir,Bunuel, and now Godard”) but as a successor to Lautremont, the nineteenth-century poetwhose famous description of beauty gave the Surrealists an aesthetic shorthand. “What iscertain,” writes Aragon, “is that there was no predecessor for [Delacroix’s] Nature morteaux homards, that meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine, just as there is no otherpredecessor than Lautremont to Godard” (141). With additional reference to painting, he



stakes this claim on Godard’s cubist-like “collage” which brings the fragments of discreteelements into close contact and shows “the order of disorder” (140). As an artist whois “proud to have been quoted (or ‘collaged’) by the creator of Pierrot,” Aragon insiststhat he and Godard agree aesthetically “on certain essential things,” that they share a“secret understanding” about the possibilities of “collage” (145). This is not to say that“collage” and “montage”—two strategies that are vital to the Surrealist enterprise (Clifford145–148)—are transposable or necessarily complementary. But where Aragon uses theterm “collage” to imply a loosely unified whole, we might still regard “montage” as thebasic device of construction that produces a loose patchwork by juxtaposing dissimilarsources.

Aragon, I should note, was not the only former member of the Surrealist group tochampion Godard in the 1960s. Georges Sadoul—who along with Aragon, in the 1930s,attempted to merge the ideals of Surrealism with the revolutionary politics of the FrenchCommunist Party (Nadeau 175–182)—notoriously supported the Nouvelle Vague despiteits apparent detachment from political concerns. Quick to point out that Godard studiedethnography at the Musee de l’homme before he began to make films, Sadoul comparesthe documentary-like style of Breathless to the anthropological aesthetic of Jean Rouch,only instead of observing West African populations, Godard “studies the lives of Parisianmen and women today” (165). More to the point, Sadoul makes montage the focus of hisassessment by aligning Godard’s editing structures with Eisenstein’s “shock attractions”:Godard, he argues, induces “no small number of shocks, striking images that shatter theunities of space, time, and action into tiny fragments” (163).

Of course, Aragon and Sadoul make their observations in the social and politicalcontext of Gaullist France during the 1960s, not the heyday of the Surrealists between theworld wars. And we should note that Aragon and Sadoul interpret Godard’s early-1960sfilms through the lens of his later, more outwardly political work, Pierrot le fou and Twoor Three Things I Know About Her (1967) respectively. But their attention to Godard’s“collage” and aesthetics of shock sets forth an early, prescient account of the relationshipbetween Godard and Surrealism along the axis of montage; where Aragon notes Godard’suncanny ability to convey “the order of what by definition cannot have any order” (140),Sadoul credits the director with a knack for instilling disorienting, defamiliarizing shocks.

Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Godard, doubtless hoping to shake offhis romantic image as a jump-cutting auteur of the 1960s, remained silent on the NewWave and his own critical place within it. But as his work in film and video turned moreand more to questions of history, the French-Swiss director set his sights increasingly onrethinking the New Wave apart from its mythological status, altering its roster of auteurs,and atoning for its “erreur tragique”—that is, its predication on “l’amnesie de la guerre,”on historical amnesia in the wake of the Second Word War. Godard’s revision provides thebasis for an entire chapter of Histoire(s) du cinema (3B: Une vague nouvelle), and in part itserves to underline the links between his work and Surrealism. He does this not by directlyendorsing Breton and the Surrealist group, but rather by emphasizing the central role inthe history of cinema—and thus, for Godard, the history of the twentieth century—of twofigures with intimate ties to Surrealism: Henri Langlois and Georges Franju, the cofoundersof the Cinematheque Francaise, where the young Godard and other imminent New Wavistsfamously received an education in film history at weekly screenings.

Godard’s debt to Langlois, whether figured in aesthetic, curatorial, or pedagogicalterms, cannot be overstressed. His desire to produce an audiovisual history of the cinematraces back clearly to Langlois’ death in the late 1970s, when Godard took over Langlois’lecturing duties at the Conservatoire d’art cinematographique in Montreal. As Michael


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Witt has noted, Langlois’ “eclectic collage-based programming style at the CinemathequeFrancaise looms large over the montage-based conception and structure of Histoire(s) ducinema” (34). Indeed, in Godard’s eyes, Langlois was less an archivist or curator than anfilmmaker, “cineaste” who “shot films” through “projectors instead of cameras” (Tome 1405). Throughout Histoire(s), Godard combines stills of Langlois with images from TheMan with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) and with titles which state, “L’homme ala camera,” thus highlighting Langlois’ status as a filmmaker and montage artist. And inthe chapter devoted expressly to the New Wave, images of Langlois appear with startlingfrequency, as though to establish his position alongside Hitchcock, Hawks, and the otherauteurs whom the Cahiers group most revered.

Given that commentators on Langlois’ method of programming tend to evoke thenotions of montage and rapprochement (Roud 134, 180), it is not surprising that Langloistook interest in Surrealism and screened Surrealist films regularly for cine-clubs. Whileconversant with the movement’s literature and politics, Langlois felt that Surrealism hadits strongest affinities with the cinema. “I am persuaded that Surrealism first existed inthe cinema,” he once stated in an interview. “You’ve only got to look at Les Vampires[Louis Feuillade, 1915] to understand that the cinema, because it was the expression ofthe twentieth century, carried Surrealism within it” (qtd. in MacCabe 48). In the sameinterview, Langlois asserts that “a return to Surrealism, to its sources and its endings, isthe only hope of a cinematographic renewal. And that’s why one must . . . go back to theSurrealist manifesto, because it remains explosive provided you read it with eyes whichare in excellent condition” (388n7). It would be a reach to argue that Godard performs arereading of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism,” but when he appoints himself the heir toLanglois in making Histoire(s), he inherits Langlois’ interest in Surrealism and he indeedreturns to the movement’s “explosive” aesthetics within a project of cinematic renewal.

As for Franju, who perhaps more than any of Godard’s postwar contemporaries retainedSurrealism’s affective impact in his fiction films and documentaries (though like Godard,he elided the distinctions between the two), his role in Godard’s revision of the New Waveis equally important. Not unlike several members of the Surrealist group who fought in theGreat War “by obligation and under constraint” (Nadeau 45), Franju served in Algeria anddrew on that experience in his films—mainly by shocking spectators into acknowledgingtraumatic history in the lull of familiar situations. In addition, Franju’s own brush withcollaboration (when he and Langlois partnered with a German official to establish theFederation Internationale des Archives du Film) shaped his filmmaking, as his work tendsto implicate the viewer in its violent outbursts. To cite just one example, Blood of the Beasts(1949) juxtaposes graphic footage inside Parisian slaughterhouses with tranquil images ofthe city’s outskirts and industrial activities. The documentary’s effect is to allegoricallyforce a “shocking recognition” of Nazi death camps and French collaboration “within thefabric of the everyday” (Lowenstein 22).

Godard well understood Franju’s tactics. In his Cahiers review of Franju’s first featureHead Against the Wall (1959), Godard writes that “the secret of Franju’s art” hinges on a“flash of madness” which “suddenly rips apart the screen and forces the spectator to lookat reality in another light.” Elaborating this formal logic (and nearly echoing Langlois’assessment of Surrealism noted above), Godard concludes that Franju “demonstrates thenecessity of Surrealism if one considers it as a pilgrimage to the sources” (Godard onGodard 129–130). Later, in his third commentary on the same film, Godard maintainsthat Franju “confirms the auteur theory, growing better as he grows older,” and Godardagain stresses Franju’s knack for violently transforming perceptions of reality. But thistime, he illuminates Franju’s “secret” by way of a syllogism: “One, reality. Two, madness.



Three, reality again.” On the basis of this three-part method of “decomposition,” Godardaligns the style of Franju with “cinema of the past,” noting its eerie resonances with “silentcinema at least from the mid-thirties” (148–149). As will become evident when we examineHistoire(s) more closely, these formal aspects which Godard ascribes to Franju in someways prefigure his own conception of montage and his own to attempts to conjure up the“cinema of the past.”

However, Godard withdrew his support for Franju upon the release of the latter’s nextfeature, Eyes Without a Face (1960). The exact reasons for this are difficult to trace. ThoughEyes Without a Face—which follows the murderous deeds of a French surgeon desperateto replace the mutilated facial tissue of his daughter with faces removed from victims hisaccomplice has kidnapped—shows up on several other Cahiers critics’ “ten best” lists for1960, it is notably excluded from Godard’s. In fact, Godard makes no explicit mention ofthe film in his Cahiers articles of the period. So what might he have found so objectionableor disappointing? What suddenly demoted Franju from a director who confirmed auteurismto one unworthy of comment? It is tempting to refer to the film’s generic ambiguity, its“double niche” of art cinema and body horror (Hawkins 53–113). Indeed, the one Cahiersreview of the film, written by Michel Delahaye, struggles to reconcile the major talentof Franju with the “minor” horror genre, which Delahaye sneakily reframes as “gothic”and “noir” (qtd. in Hawkins 73). But Godard, we should recognize, does include anotherlurid (albeit much less graphic) horror film on his top ten list for 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’sPsycho (Godard on Godard 165).

If Godard could accept the horror film under certain conditions, perhaps the endsto which Franju employed the genre touched a nerve. Instructive on this score is AdamLowenstein’s account of Franju as a marginalized filmmaker whose “allegorical, horror-inflected aesthetic” viciously opposed the New Wave’s tendency to neglect political andhistorical concerns. In his detailed discussion of Eyes Without a Face—over and againstFrancois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959)—Lowenstein illustrates how the film mingles“the iconography of World War II with the iconography of torture so central to French publicperception of the Algerian War.” While obliging the viewer to confront and come to termswith these two linked histories, Franju’s film “stages a reckoning” with French involvementin “Nazi medical experiments conducted in concentration camps” (40–44). Granted, thereare traces of this strategy in Head Against the Wall’s concentration camp-like depiction ofa mental asylum, but is it possible that Eyes Without a Face interrogates traumatic historyin such a nationally specific fashion that Godard could not account for Franju’s “flashesof madness” in strict formal terms, as he had done with the earlier film? While Godard’ssudden unwillingness to see Franju as a New Wave figure remains open to speculation,Franju’s attitude towards the emergent artistic school was most definitely one of cynicism.As he said to Truffaut in a 1959 interview, “‘The New Wave’? There’s a film to make aboutthat. I’ve already got the title: ‘Low Tide’“ (qtd. in Lowenstein 33).

In Godard’s reconfiguration of the New Wave in Histoire(s), he not only rejectsthe auteurist criteria by which he apparently demoted Franju years ago (he now stressesthe “politique” over the “auteurs,” the “works” over their “authors”), he also reconsidersthe significance of “Une Vague Nouvelle” in a manner which now includes Franju on ashort list of members, few of whom wrote for Cahiers. An early sign of this recuperationoccurs in Godard’s King Lear, which anticipates the essential arguments of Histoire(s) bystaging the reconstruction of cinema in the wake of an historical disaster (“Chernobyl”),and which opened in New York not long after Franju’s death. During a scene in which acharacter labors to recall the names of forgotten directors (while Godard, or his alter-ego“Professor Pluggy,” cites Bresson’s theory of montage on the sound track: “If an image


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looked at separately expresses something clearly, and if it presents an interpretation, it willnot transform itself on contact with other images”), a still of Franju holding a dove onthe set of Eyes Without a Face flashes onto the screen. Here Godard makes explicit theconstellation of Franju, montage, and “cinematographic renewal.” To be sure, Eyes Withouta Face resorts to montage sparsely. In the face-removal sequence, for instance, Franju dragsout the ghastly operation to an uncomfortable length, cutting to several shots of the doctorand his tools while sustaining the impression of duration (though in a sense he maps the cutsof montage onto the human body). Even so, Godard aligns Franju with montage in figurativemore so than technical terms. The still of Franju holding the dove—which could just as wellhave been taken during the filming of Le Grand Melies (1952) or Judex (1963), two Franjufilms which celebrate early cinema and use doves as part of conjuring tricks—positions thedirector as a kind of magician. Just as the title character in Judex resurrects a dove (whiledisguised as a hawk), Godard approaches montage as a practice of magically resurrectingthe dead: “Above all, the object during editing is alive, whereas during shooting it is dead.It is necessary to resuscitate it. It is witchcraft” (qtd. in Ricciardi 178–179).

Godard riffs on this complicated linkage of Franju, montage, and regenerationthroughout Histoire(s), most often when dealing with the New Wave. For example, inchapter 3B: Une vague nouvelle, just seconds after presenting the beach sequence thatconcludes The 400 Blows, the same Franju photo flickers rapidly, this time overprintedwith a spinning Zoetrope which crudely animates a bird in flight. On the one hand, thequotation reinstates Godard’s earlier argument that Franju represents the “cinema of thepast”—not an outdated school or genre, but cinema’s very origins. On the other hand, itsituates Franju in relation to perhaps the most emblematic New Wave film while alluding tothe final moments of Eyes Without a Face, in which the heroine/victim releases doves fromtheir cage. Ultimately, in the last minutes of the chapter, Godard’s recuperation of Franjucomes to the fore when a female interlocutor suggests a revised list of New Wave directors:“Becker, Rossellini, Melville, Franju, Jacques Demy, Truffaut . . . . You knew them all?” Towhich Godard responds approvingly, “Yes, they were my friends.”

Despite the implications of this sequence—from its conflation of the New Waveand Neorealism to its omission of such figures as Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Varda, andResnais—few commentators have examined it beyond Godard’s posthumous patching upwith Truffaut. But as I hope to have made clear, the inclusion of Franju, itself a gestureof reconciliation, is absolutely central to Godard’s mission. By re-embracing the “bastardchild of surrealism” as a major figure in film history, Godard effectively adapts Franju’s“aesthetic of awakening,” as Lowenstein terms it, within his own project of reversing theNew Wave’s inclination to forget historical reality. In what follows, then, I will tease outthe aesthetic consequences of Godard’s espousal of Franju in particular and Surrealism ingeneral. Insofar as Godard refuses in his videographic work to distinguish criticism frompractice, or theory from application, we can safely assume that his embrace of Surrealismmanifests itself in formal terms, through means more material than intertextual reference.But in order to identify this materialization and situate its effects, we must turn to WalterBenjamin’s rethinking of Surrealism in relation to historiography.

In the late 1920s, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin developed anattraction to Surrealism that shaded much of his work thereafter, not least his unfinishedArcades Project. Far from adopting the artistic movement wholesale, Benjamin sought toliberate the “Surrealist experience” from its “charmed space of intoxication,” to “open upthis romantic dummy” and determine “something usable inside” (“Surrealism” 208–214).For Benjamin, this meant unleashing the concept of “profane illumination, a materialistic,anthropological inspiration”—a shocking experience which initiates the modern subject



to an “image space” (217), recovers the “revolutionary energies” in “outmoded” materialsand objects consigned to habitual uses (210), and inscribes Surrealism’s political value asa “cult of evil” aimed at eradicating “all moralizing dilettantism” (214). If the Surrealistsfailed to realize this potential in their writings, this was due to their willingness to trade in“surprises” instead of transformative “shocks,” and to their overemphasis on the “dreamexperience” and its cognates, e.g. “religious ecstasies and the ecstasies of drugs” (208).

Benjamin, on the other hand, stresses the dialectical interchange of dreaming andwaking. As Susan Buck-Morss points out, Benjamin’s purpose “was not to represent thedream, but to dispel it: Dialectical images were to draw dream images into an awakenedstate, and awakening was synonymous with historical knowledge” (261). Benjamin thusbegins to refigure Surrealism along the lines of historiography, suggesting its capacity toreveal the hidden exchanges of past and present (Cohen 198–205). Revisiting this idea inThe Arcades Project, he articulates his concern with the “constellation of awakening” inopposition to Aragon’s “persist[ence] within the realm of the dream.” Whereas Aragonrestricts his work to its impressionistic, mythological elements, the task of Benjamin is todissolve those kinds of elements “into the space of history” (458). A few passages later, hereturns to this cluster of issues and highlights his debt to Surrealism:

Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) andwaking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening wouldbe identical with the “now of recognizability,” in which things put on theirtrue—surrealist—face. (463–464)

Thus, while Benjamin appropriates aspects of Surrealism selectively and suspiciously, hestill locates “what is usable” at the crux of one of The Arcades Project’s most significantepistemological formulations. When past and present, “then” and “now,” fuse togetherto form an image in “a constellation like a flash of lightning” (463), the image becomesrecognizable—if not profanely illumined—as it exposes its “true Surrealist face.”

Benjamin develops this concept even further in his “Theses on the Philosophy ofHistory,” an enigmatic set of notes which configures “historical materialism” as an effortto “blast open the continuum of history,” to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at amoment of danger,” and to capture “the true image of the past” at the opportune “instantwhen it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255, 262). Though the essay, whichhe wrote in the months between the Nazi invasion of Poland and his suicide while tryingto evade the Gestapo in 1940, makes no conspicuous reference to Surrealism, we can seehow his rhetoric continues to associate the movement with historiographical rescue—thatis, with making history intelligible during the “now of recognizability.” And Benjamin’sassimilation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) as the “angel of history” surely retainsthe Surrealist focus on retrieving neglected objects and shattering ideologies of progress.With “his face turned toward the past,” the angel sees not a causal “chain of events” but“one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” at his feet. Although he wishes to“stay, awaken the dead,” and sort through “the pile of debris before him,” his wings arecaught in a fierce “storm of progress” that “propels him into the future” (257–258). Justas the Breton-led Surrealists strove to violently undermine modernity’s progress, the taskof Benjamin’s historical materialist is to inhabit the space and perspective of the “angelof history,” and then carry out the angel’s impossible task of rummaging through andre-combining the material sediments of the past. Explaining this historicizing “principleof montage,” Benjamin stresses the need to “assemble large-scale constructions out of the


10 Charles R. Warner

smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the smallindividual moment the crystal of the total event” (Arcades 460–461).

In the initial version of chapter 1B: Une Histoire seule (“A Solitary History”) ofHistoire(s) du cinema, which aired on French television in 1989, a reproduction of Klee’spainting appears superimposed on a photo of Godard, in effect situating the filmmaker asBenjamin’s backward-glancing angel—attendant to the catastrophic nature of history, andeager to reclaim fragments of neglected material. While excised from the 1998 release ofHistoire(s), the image attests to the influence which Benjamin exerted on the formation ofGodard’s project. A relatively small number of critics have begun to investigate the linksbetween Godard and Benjamin, and almost no one has paid attention to the way in whichSurrealism mediates their relationship. Youssef Ishaghpour, in two 1999 dialogues withGodard, suggests the conceptual affinities of Histoire(s) and The Arcades Project, notingthat both works consist almost “entirely of archive material and quotes through montage”(20–21), and Benjamin, to be sure, proclaims that his work must exploit “the art of citingwithout quotation marks,” a form “intimately related to that of montage” (Arcades 458).This point of departure has led to a handful of interesting comparisons around questionsof montage, most notably essays by Alessia Ricciardi and Kaja Silverman. But in failingto engage how Surrealism underwrites Benjamin’s “constellation of awakening” and thusGodard’s historical montage, these critics have missed a crucial element of the shocklikeeffects which both figures strive to provoke. I want to suggest that Godard’s deploymentof Benjaminian shock not only pulls together the multiple filiations between his work andSurrealism, but also carries out his fundamental project in Histoire(s) of remembrance, ofreacquainting the cinema and its spectators with forgotten historical realities.

So how does this shocking historical montage work in action? Since Godard, inHistoire(s) and countless interviews, hinges the death of cinema squarely on its failureto confront and document the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps in World War II,we might begin by examining a sequence in Histoire(s) which explicitly tries to redeemthis criminal negligence, this “erreur tragique.” Towards the end of chapter 1A: Toutes leshistoires (“All the Histories”), Godard juxtaposes images of a bathing-suit clad ElizabethTaylor holding Montgomery Clift on a shore in A Place in the Sun (1951) with footage ofemaciated corpses stacked in ovens at Ravensbruck; and Godard’s voiceover is quick toinform us that these images were captured by the same filmmaker, George Stevens, whoused the first 16 mm Kodachrome film to record the camps before making his Hollywoodfeatures. On one level, then, this montage of quotations crystallizes Godard’s argumentthat the cinema regressed from “something” to “nothing” when it surrendered entirelyto fiction, stardom, and spectacle. But the sequence enacts something more powerfulthan a reconciliation of fiction and documentary or a brutal rapprochement of beauty andhorror. As with most quotations in Histoire(s), Godard radically adjusts Stevens’ originalscene. He replaces the score and dialogue with a viola sonata by Paul Hindemith, hestop-starts the action with uneven slow motion, and he converts Taylor’s outstretchedhand from a gesture of romantic love to one of Messianic redemption by overprintingit with Giotto’s fresco Noli me tangere, which he rotates 90! so that Mary Magdaleneswoops down into the frame like an angel, her extended arms parallel to Taylor’s, andthe hands of Giotto’s resurrected Christ barely noticeable at the bottom right corner(Williams 135). Godard’s voiceover, underlining the potential of montage, says, “O howmarvelous to look at what one cannot see/O sweet miracle of our blind eyes!” But thenthe fresco vanishes, Taylor stands from her lover at a normal pace, the sonata comes toa halt, and we cut to a black screen, where Benjamin’s “image of the past” is no longerrecognizable.



While Godard doubtless inherits his mixing of aesthetic and theological discoursefrom Bazin, Bresson, and (to a lesser extent) Pier Paolo Pasolini, here we can see that hishistorical montage also draws on Benjamin’s much-debated integration of mystical andMessianic strands within his concept of historical materialism, and we should note thatBenjamin prioritizes the Surrealist “profane illumination” because of its ability to redeemin a quasi-religious sense without languishing in the realm of intoxication (Buck-Morss229–252). Just as Benjamin writes in “Theses” that an image of the past will materializein a moment “shot through with chips of Messianic time” (263), the montage of ElizabethTaylor and the Holocaust bears out Godard’s contention—which he states periodically inHistoire(s), misquoting St. Paul—that “the image will come at the time of resurrection.”

Given that the sequence reacquaints the cinema with the possibilities of montage andwith a neglected subject, while at the same time staging a spectatorial encounter withtraumatic history, we might argue, as James Williams does, that it provides a “metapoeticcomment” on Godard’s “videographic process itself” (135). But how does Godard’s practiceimpact on the spectator? His debt to Benjamin notwithstanding, what lodges his montagein the domain of shock instead of surprise, and how does it recuperate memory? Heinvestigates these questions himself in 2A: Seul le cinema (“The Cinema Alone”), whenhe quotes Leonce Perret’s Le Mystere des roches de Kador (1912). In the original film, awoman witnesses a criminal act, but loses her memory upon believing (wrongly) that shehas shot her fiance. A professor claiming to have discovered a new treatment for amnesiashoots and edits a film which restages what little the woman’s fiance can recall. She viewsthe projected images, abruptly recovers her memory, and the crime is solved. Godard singlesout the exact moment of her recuperation before the now blank screen, when her memoryreturns in a violent shock that causes her to faint into the arms of the professor—an effectwhich Godard’s titles ascribe to “the cinema alone.” In this striking and richly instructivecitation, which explores in miniature Godard’s hopes that Histoire(s) will offer spectatorsa belated reckoning with the traumatic real, it is crucial to note the necessity of forgetting(Lundemo 380–395); or as a character puts it in Nouvelle Vague (Godard, 1990), blendingquotes from Nietzsche and Proust, “It is not enough to have remembrances. It is necessaryto forget them when they are numerous [. . .] and to have the patience to await their return.”Kador’s amnesiac recovers her memory through re-encountering the traumatic events insuggestive fragments in an unfamiliar context, not through trying to remember them as theyactually happened.

Thus, for Godard, the testimonial power of cinema resides in the image alone, inthe reality of its representation instead of its representation of reality, hence his aphorism“just an image” (Landy 9–11). Sharing Benjamin’s disinterest in articulating the past “theway it really was,” Godard undertakes a project of assembling historical relations throughmontage, through combining fragments of scavenged objects. Like Kador’s filmmaking,crime-solving professor—and rather like Benjamin’s historical materialism, which seeksnot to accumulate a mere inventory of “rags and refuse,” but to reactivate those materials“in the only way possible: by making use of them” (Arcades 460)—Godard conducts hisinvestigation by collecting evidence and using the resources of montage to both regain lostmemories and remedy the weaknesses of human perception. The theme of optical detectionabounds in Histoire(s) du cinema—from repeated glimpses of James Stewart handlinghis telephoto lens in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and Mischa Auer peeringthrough his magnifying glass in Mr. Arkadin, to non-fiction images of soldiers lookingthrough riflescopes and scientists hunching over microscopes—and we might rememberthat Benjamin linked photography, modern criminology, and detective fiction within asingle constellation (Godard and Ishaghpour 65).



What role, then, does Surrealism play in advancing Godard’s detective work? To tacklethis question, I want to return to the quotation of Un Chien andalou which opened thisessay, and which we are now in a better position to unpack, having explored both thehistorical and aesthetic points of contact between Godard and Surrealism. To be precise,the quotation near the end of Histoire(s) echoes an earlier moment in chapter 2B: Fatalebeaute (“Fatal Beauty”), when Bunuel and Dalı’s sliced eyeball follows images of deathand mourning, with Godard’s titles again stressing that the image will spring to legibilityin a time of resurrection. But even more central to Godard’s project, the quotation in 4Bovertly links Surrealism’s “disenchantment of the eye” with montage and its potential toshow “relationships between things” which are otherwise untraceable. After a collage oftitles illustrating the multiple ideas contained in “(Hi)story/ies of Cinema,” and anotherimage of Mischa Auer’s magnified eye in Arkadin, we cut to a freeze-framed and blown-upimage of the eye in Un Chien andalou, just before the razor starts its course. We thendissolve to a shot of the blind editor in JLG/JLG, trimming a roll of celluloid in Godard’sediting suite in Rolle, which looks more like an operating room, befitting his descriptionof montage as a “regard au scalpel” (Godard, Tome 2 427–430). As the editor’s scissorsrhyme with (or stand in for) Bunuel’s razor, an image of visceral horror merges with oneof formal manipulation and the re-structuring cuts of the editing process acquire a bodilysignificance, a slight charge of medico-horror which recalls Franju. Just as Franju stroveto “work on the mind’s eye like an operation for a cataract” (Durgnat 19), Godard definesmontage in this sequence as a corrective surgery which both discloses interstitial relationsand enables the viewer to detect them.

The metaphor of dissection is especially relevant since Benjamin, in his “Work ofArt” essay, compares the operations of the filmmaker to those of the surgeon, over andagainst the painter and the magician. Where the latter two keep a “natural distance”from their subjects (reality and patient respectively), the filmmaker and the surgeon bringtheirs into close proximity and “penetrate deeply,” the suggestion being in part that thefilmmaker, equipped with montage, “cuts into” observers in a non-auratic fashion insteadof confronting them “person to person.” Yet Benjamin also asserts that cinema surgicallypenetrates the body of everyday reality, revealing “another nature” which escapes humanconsciousness (117–118). In Histoire(s), the moment in question overtly associates therevelatory power of montage with a remedial optical surgery. Far from dully rehashingSurrealism’s “disenchantment with the eye,” or Vertov’s machinic “cine-eye,” Godard’slinkage of editing and eye-slashing draws on (and culminates) the relationship betweentouch and vision which Histoire(s) persistently foregrounds, whether through juxtaposinghand and eye imagery or through reiterating in titles Godard’s conception of montage as“thinking with one’s hands.” On this score, it seems worth pointing out that JLG/JLG’ssightless editor is meant to bear out Wittgenstein’s claim in On Certitude, quoted earlier inGodard’s 1995 film-essay, that one can confirm neither that one has hands by seeing them,nor that one has eyes by touching them. Hardly a simple gesture of seeing anew, Godardformulates a montage-based way of perceiving things in which the optic and the haptic, ormore broadly sight and touch, work reciprocally and inseparably.

Following this citation, Histoire(s) concludes in a manner that further resonates withSurrealist notions. Despite the palimpsestic layering of quotations on the sound andimage tracks, Godard’s final voiceover—which riffs on Borges, Coleridge, and Jean Paulsimultaneously—revisits the dialectical interchange of dreaming and waking: “If a mantraveled across paradise in a dream, and received a flower as proof of his passage, and onawakening he found that flower in his hands . . . What is to be said? I was that man.” Aswith Benjamin’s reworking of Surrealism, the stress falls on the moment of awakening, a



shocking and ephemeral encounter with history—in the “now of recognizability”—whichGodard simulates with a brief, flickering montage of photos of himself and a yellow rose.The retrieved object, while nominally another trope on Borges, in particular his tale “Unerose jaune” where a yellow rose moves a dying poet to imagine paradise (Lack 326–329),could refer just as meaningfully to Benjamin’s “Blue Flower in the land of technology,”his puzzling metaphor for the cinema’s capacity to synthetically produce (via montage) an“immediate reality” that appears “equipment-free” even as it replicates the assaultive shocksand the fragmentary impressions of modern experience (“Work of Art” 115–116). Andwhile this final burst of montage reconfirms Godard’s investments in a Surrealist-inflected,Benjaminian “constellation of awakening,” it also relates Godard’s “passage” through adreamlike space to the conceptual design of The Arcades Project (Sieburth 20).

Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship devoted to Histoire(s) du cinema, muchof which has served my own argument crucially, Godard’s ties to Surrealism have gonerelatively unnoticed, an oversight which is not surprising given the degree to which theevidence remains deeply embedded in quotations. However, my contention has been thatthe filmmaker’s mission of reacquainting the cinema and its spectators with forgottenaesthetic practices (montage) and neglected histories (the horrors of World War II) owesconsiderably to Surrealism’s repossession of outmoded and discarded objects, as well asto the movement’s assault on teleological narratives of progress. When Godard reclaimsGeorges Franju—a Surrealist heir who sought to awaken postwar audiences to traumatichistory—as a major figure of the Nouvelle Vague in Histoire(s), he effectively draws onSurrealism to revise the political detachment and “l’amnesie de la guerre” which typifiedthe New Wave, atoning for his own errors and those of his Cahiers cohorts. And when hepractices montage as shock-inducing rapprochement, he not only revitalizes the Surrealistchance encounter, he also takes on board Walter Benjamin’s retooling of Surrealism as anactivity in line with historiographical rescue. In short, Godardian montage strives to givethe viewers of Histoire(s) ephemeral access to the “true image of the past” when it eruptsonto the present, enters the “now” of its readability, and exposes “its true Surrealist face.”

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