The Cinematic Essay as Adaptive Process

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press.All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

The Cinematic Essay as Adaptive Process

RICK WARNER*

Abstract Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be

approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article

develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they

concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially

shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne

in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works.

Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema’s most prolific essayists, I focus

on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of

self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series

Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists work-

ing with sounds and images is a “pedagogical” mission to pass on to the spectator not simply

ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively

replayed and re-tested.

Keywords Essay Form, Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Luc Godard, Inventive Citation, Literary,

Cinematic Self-Portraiture

As one of the most important strands of the modern cinema that emerged in Europe after the Second World War, the audio-visual essay has, through its many guises and variations, long devoted itself to the task of exploring complex ideas in a markedly open-ended and self-inquisitive fashion. No easier to define than its literary counter-part, it troubles the usual distinctions between fiction and documentary, between deal-ing with actual events and drifting into imaginative, poetic reverie. It often proceeds and digresses more by intuition than by rational logic, seeking as it does to free thought and feeling from prescribed patterns and to prolong the questioning it initiates, through a certain kind of relation with its spectator. And whatever its topic, the investigation tends to confront the resources of the medium itself. As the exemplary efforts of Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alexander Kluge, and Harun Farocki make evident, the practice goes beyond a show of self-consciousness and tries to convert the cinema into an all-out laboratory for critical reflection.

Let me clarify at the outset that the term ‘essay’, as it functions in the pages that follow, is not just a synonym for ‘article’ or ‘thesis’. Were it mainly a disquisition, then available notions of documentary would be sufficient to handle its cinematic expression. Rather, ‘essay’, derived from the Latin exagium (‘a weighing’), refers to a testing out of ideas, an

*Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. E-mail: [email protected]

Adaptation Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1–24doi:10.1093/adaptation/aps021Advance Access publication 24 September 2012

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‘attempt’, which the French essai denotes more emphatically than the word in English. In German, the term for essay is Versuch, which also translates to ‘experiment’. The liter-ary and cinematic forms that partake of this definition can differ appreciably in style, ambition, and intellectual alignment, but what remains constant (and this is where the essay departs from classical rhetoric) is the working principle that nothing is known for certain before the reflective venture. Literary essayists are thus frequently at pains to distinguish their properly experimental writing from the ‘article’ (Klaus 160–65), just as film essayists are often quick to dismiss traditional documentary as a bland arena of facts, ‘a trail of sanctimonious boredom’, as Marker once put it (quoted in Lupton 49).

In recent decades, the term ‘essay film’ has gained increasing currency in both journalistic and academic discourse on cinema. Although it encompasses a rather broad and heterogeneous range of films and figures, its use generally entails one or more of the following traits: a strategic combination of fiction and documentary that challenges their conventional separation and questions the latter’s claims to truth and objectivity; the use of a pensive voice-over commentary track that refrains from imposing interpretations and exercises a more contrapuntal (and in some cases contra-dictory) relation to the images it accompanies; the reliance on found footage, already existing material that is sometimes offered as unaltered evidence and sometimes play-fully reworked through montage so as to generate new associations; the presence of the filmmaker within the work as he or she engages in self-portrayal or autobiography; and a fragmented style of presentation that favors digression and leaves substantial gaps in the ‘finished’ work that are meant to encourage the spectator to supply missing connectives.

While these structural characteristics indeed resonate across a disparate group of films that warrant the ‘essay’ distinction, it’s important to regard them mainly as points of orientation, as loose family resemblances rather than as hard-and-fast rules of a genre. After all, the essay, in both its literary and its cinematic manifestations, is consti-tutively resistant to schemes of classification. It is not a genre so much as an ‘impure’ form that promiscuously draws on other genres, occupying a kind of border posi-tion between them. The evasiveness of the essay is routinely acknowledged in critical accounts, but it is both curious and disappointing how often those same commentators then proceed to study the essay as though it were a distinct and fairly uniform genre by submitting it to a top-down taxonomic analysis.1 The trouble with this approach is that we tend to come away with a picture of the work under inspection that is much more programmatic and orderly than is actually the case, and the essay designation serves as a mere label that supports a game of inclusion and exclusion on the part of the critic.

How, then, might we begin to engage with the cinematic essay without reducing it to a static category, without squelching its unruly energies by subjecting it to the kind of schematic framework it finds antithetical to its own pursuits? In other words, how can we be sure the work we examine is encountered primarily as an essayistic process, rather than a tidier, more forthright version of that process that owes its character largely to the analytic protocol we bring to it? How might we productively leave intact what Theodor Adorno called the essay form’s ‘methodically unmethodical’ tempera-ment (13), its inbuilt rejection of systematic organization?2 In what follows, with a view to accepting and responding to this challenge, I propose to consider the essayistic less

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as a stable taxonomic category than as a dynamic, ongoing process of adaptation—a process that never congeals into a definitive state but remains, at all points, caught up in a movement of critical revision and transformation.

The meaning of ‘adaptation’ I have in mind is not the one that customarily refers to the transposition of a single work from one medium into another. While there are a few examples of films that, in the more conventional sense, adapt literary-philosophical essays (such as Peter Forgács’s Wittgenstein Tractatus [1992], which illustrates and enlarges on propositions taken from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) [2011], an eccentric version of and companion to W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn), my concern is with the essay form itself as an adaptive process that brings into play a multiplicity of texts and idioms both pictorial and linguistic. Moreover, in the specific European tradition of the essayistic I wish to take up, fidelity to the source often gives way to the inventive act of appropriation.

Since the late Renaissance, when the essay, in name, originated in the reflective writ-ings of Michel de Montaigne, France and Germany have arguably been the two most fertile grounds of its development, from its literary roots to its contemporary presence in film and other audio-visual media.3 The films, videos, and gallery installations of Marker, Godard, and Varda in France invite extensive consideration within a varied lineage of the form that traces back to Montaigne and also includes, at least potentially, such twentieth-century writers as Roland Barthes, E. M. Cioran, Michel Serres, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras (who doubles as a gifted filmmaker), and the Georges Perec of Thoughts of Sorts and An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.4 As for the German film and multimedia essayists, the projects of Farocki and Kluge contribute to an equally multifarious and deep-rooted tradition that extends through the Frankfurt School (in particular, Walter Benjamin and Adorno) back to some of the figures aligned with the Jena Romantics (most notably Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis), whose combined invest-ment in fragmentation, paradox, infinite becoming, and the poetic nature of criticism sketches an early notion of essayistic thought. Indeed the ways in which Schlegel serves as one of the first and most fascinating theorists of the essay—or, in his peculiar coin-age, of ‘essayification’ (quoted in McCarthy 329)—have not yet been explored for their application to cinematic forms of the practice.

A comprehensive discussion of the essay falls outside my purview here. Instead, in the interest of bearing down on its adaptive operations, I want to press further on the essay’s significance in the French intellectual context as it passes from literature into cinema. Rather than provide a sweeping overview, I want to look in particu-lar at a single French-Swiss figure, Godard, as he revives a Montaignian sense of the essayistic in his exercises of self-portraiture. By attending closely to what the ‘essay’ term embodies in Montaigne’s inaugural undertaking, and then showing how Godard takes on and adjusts such a notion for his own projects, I hope to give the ‘essay’ term the critical utility and descriptive purchase it lacks in arguments that use it mainly as an appellation conferred before or after the work of analysis. In taking this approach I also want to begin to sketch in the contours of a positive view of the essayistic—that is, a view that, instead of turning everywhere on what the essay is not with reference to the genres it infiltrates, underscores its specific, albeit ‘impure’ efficacy.

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MONTAIGNE AND THE ACT OF ESSAYINGFleeting and obligatory references to Montaigne as the progenitor of the essay are quite common in critical discussions of the cinematic essay, but few commentators have taken time to explore what the term actually means in Montaigne’s highly original sense.5 Simply put, for Montaigne, ‘essay’ does not mean a self-contained piece of nonfiction writing on a particular topic. When he chose the title Essais for his volume of writings, which were first published in 1580, then, in revised and expanded editions in 1582 and 1588, this was not to indicate a ‘collection of essays’ in the now-familiar sense. For the numbered and titled sections, which comprise three books altogether in the final ver-sion, he uses the term ‘chapters’. His main title refers not to a distinct prose genre but, more precisely, to the fundamental impetus of his project: the act of essaying.6 And this act is at once more intensified, more convoluted, and more expansive than the parameter of the chapter indicates. Montaigne’s volume is less a collection of discrete articles than it is an overlapping series of trials, tangents, exercises, meditations, and inquiries—a network of essaying that develops within and across the separate chapters that gener-ally regard their stated titles as jumping off points and that are bound more strongly by manner and mood than by theme or content. (The overlap is quite literal when multi-ple strata of original and revised writing are present in a chapter that he has reworked between editions, in the light of his later, often substantially changed thinking.)

Viewed in this light, essaying for Montaigne has both synchronic and diachronic dimensions: it entails not only an ambulatory testing of ideas regarding a given prob-lem but also an intricate, repeated process of revision that extends across a large oeuvre over time. It thus makes only partial sense to compare, in terms of tradition or genre, a single ‘essay film’ to an individual chapter in the Essais, because for Montaigne, each chapter is a field within which multiple essays intersect. ‘Of Physiognomy’ contains, or rather it hosts, many essays that outstrip the holistic divisions of chapter and book. This is to say that a genuine Montaignian notion of an audio-visual essay would apply less fit-tingly to directors who from time to time make ‘essay films’ in the taxonomic sense (e.g., Wim Wenders) than to the much rarer breed of prolific essayists who revisit and rethink their earlier output while undertaking new experiments (e.g., Godard, Varda, Kluge, Farocki, Edgardo Cozarinsky, and Peter Greenaway). Indeed a genuine Montaignian view of the essay form would attune itself not only to individual, autonomous works but to recursive and accretive forms that refigure still-evolving pursuits across an essayist’s body of work.

There are three connected aspects of Montaigne’s authorial procedure that I wish to emphasize with regard to their pertinence to cinematic uses of the essay: namely, self-portrayal, a critical poetics of citation, and an inclination toward dialogue as the essayist attempts to draw the reader—a certain kind of reader—into the critical and creative fold. These features are in no way comprehensive of Montaigne’s enterprise, but considering them will bring into sharper view a definition of the essay form as a principle of work, an adaptive process that animates his critical thinking.

SELF-PortrAIturEThe Essais are not ‘autobiographical’ in the familiar generic sense of imposing a chron-ological narrative with Montaigne as its central protagonist. Though he does often

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relate the events of his private and public life, in his prefatory address, ‘To the Reader’, he invokes the metaphor of painting to distinguish his project: ‘Here I want to be seen in my simple, natural, everyday fashion, without striving or artifice: for it is my own self that I am painting’ (Montaigne 1; this edition hereafter cited by book and chapter as well as by page number). But this is not a portrait7 for which he sits still. He tries to capture the mobility and the transience of the self he is testing, the short-term vacil-lations that reveal anything but a consistent character. ‘I am not portraying being but becoming [je peins le passage]: not the passage from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour’ (III.2.907–08).

Montaigne professes that once he manages to capture, ‘in the flimsy medium of words’, the chaotic and spontaneous shape of his thinking, what results is not so much a record of his deeds (which, he professes, would tell more about ‘Fortune’ than himself) as an inscribed corpus: ‘I am all on display, like a mummy on which at a glance you can see the veins, the muscles and tendons, each piece in its place … It is not what I do that I write of, but of me, of what I am’ (II.6.426). His persistent emphasis on the corporality of his text extends to its content: everywhere set on portraying himself sincerely, he does not shy away from writing vividly about his bodily functions, his sexual proclivities, his illnesses, his injuries, and his own approaching death. As Erich Auerbach observes, these details are ‘essential ingredient[s]’ of Montaigne’s self-portrait—they are ‘so inti-mately fused in their concrete sensory effects with the moral-intellectual content of his book that any attempt to separate them would be absurd’ (and for Auerbach, these details undercut the ‘formal systems of moral philosophy’, which dally in abstraction while ignoring the contingencies of life as experienced) (303–11). Montaigne goes as far as to contend that the Essais and their writer are composed of one continuous, vital sub-stance: ‘I have not made my book anymore than it has made me—a book of one sub-stance [consubstantiel] with its author, proper to me and a limb of my life’ (II.18.755).

Three conditions qualify this fusion of writer and writing, of ouvrier and ouvrage. First, Montaigne inhabits his text in all his self-professed ‘ignorance’, having mastered no field of knowledge or discipline of inquiry. In late sixteenth-century France, the term ‘essay’ had connotations associated with apprentice work, the trial-and-error stumbling forth of the artisan-in-training, and Montaigne mobilizes this disposition to cast doubt on any system of knowing, scientific or otherwise, that does not stem primarily from one’s own mental and, no less important for Montaigne, physical impressions, from one’s own observations made in the erratic flow of daily experience.

Secondly, Montaigne understands that his striving for a self-presentation without artifice necessarily calls for the construction—the fiction—of a textual persona that at all events appears genuine and spontaneous. ‘Since I was modeling this portrait on myself ’, he writes, ‘it was so often necessary to prepare myself and to pose so as to draw out the detail that the original has acquired more definition and has to some extent shaped itself ’ (II.18.755). All contrivance notwithstanding, Montaigne’s notion of essaying refuses to dissociate the essayist from the work, to treat the author as a sub-ject detached from and outside the writing. ‘Elsewhere you can commend or condemn a work independently of the author; but not here’, he argues. ‘[T]ouch one and you touch the other’ (III.2.909).


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Thirdly, the Essais disperse, challenge, and complicate, more than neatly affirm, the inscribed self. It may be the case that the work is personal, but it does not sketch its author as a coherent and unitary agent (or cogito) toward which the writing everywhere reverts. Rather, they chart a fluctuating, fragmentary self as it verges from the individ-ual into relations (implied more than actual given Montaigne’s solitude) that might be better described as ‘dividual’, relations in which the essayist shares the labor of reflec-tion with others—whether they are other authors brought into play through citation, or readers with whom the essayist endeavors to strike a tacit dialogue.

A CrItICAL PoEtICS oF CItAtIonMontaigne’s self-portrait relies heavily on a curious poetics of citation, one that departs from the way in which other, authoritative sources are invoked in literature prior to the Renaissance. When reflecting on the citations that proliferate in his writings, which he does quite frequently, Montaigne refers to them as emprunts or allegations, as though to underscore and respect their status as material on loan from authorities. But in practice, he aggressively transforms what he quarries—sometimes concealing or misquoting the original source, sometimes tweaking it for his own needs. And he defends each of these operations as fair game for his Essais, since they follow naturally from his ‘treacherous memory’ (II.10.469) and from his inclination not to study books but to ‘dip into’ them: ‘as for anything I do retain from them, I am no longer aware that it belongs to some-body else: it is quite simply the material from which my judgment has profited and the ideas and arguments in which it has been steeped. I straightway forget the author, the source, the wording and the other particulars’ (II.17.740). Through a cultivation image, he writes of how he ‘transplants’ preexisting statements into his ‘own soil’, where the ideas take root in one field. He admits that his appropriations result in ‘some of the richer flowers’ in his garden, thoughts and ‘reasonings’ he could not have mustered himself. Even still, he instructs us: ‘Do not linger over the [borrowed] matter but over my fashioning of it’ (II.10.458). Ultimately, the citations, whether taken verbatim or creatively transfigured, belong to Montaigne and to the Essais as much, he implies in another metaphor, as honey belongs to the bees that have ‘ransacked flowers’ to pro-duce it (I.26.171).

Montaigne’s memory, of course, is not as defective as he claims. His ‘forgetting’ enacts a playful, albeit ambivalent recasting of citational procedure in the con-text of the humanist education he received and exhibits on each page. He at once mimes the gesture, endemic to the Renaissance, of recoursing to the ancients when-ever they have a nugget of insight to offer, and undoes this procedure by enlisting citation as a profoundly inventive activity, one that transforms more than reiterates, and refuses a subordinate relation to the anterior texts brought into the weave of reflection.8

An IMPuLSE towArD DIALoGuEIf Montaigne initiates the essay as a literary practice, he borrows and refigures aspects from a host of preexisting forms—to name a few, the aphorism, the apothegm, the moral lesson, and the letter. The most important precursor is the dialogue: like the missive, an ordo neglectus, an ‘open’ form of exposition. At many points in the Essais,

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Montaigne looks to the Socratic dialogue as a way to describe, by comparison, the form he pursues for his reflective writing, namely, a marriage of conversation and poetry (the prose of Plato, he writes, ‘sparkles throughout with poetic power and daring, and presents the characteristics of its frenzy’ [III.9.1125]).

A dialogical inclination impresses on both his use of citation and his address to the reader of the Essais. Dialogue isn’t merely suggested but inscribed in the flow of the text, with Montaigne either using citations (the sources generally unidentified) as if they are interjections that demand a response from him (e.g., the Virgil line that prefaces his explanation of poetic prose in Book III: ‘Where are you heading, so far off course?’), or raising questions himself and using quotation marks as if temporarily donning the voice of an interlocutor (e.g., ‘Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight, manco male if I manage to do so by my muddle. “Yes, but afterwards he will be sorry he spent time over it”. I suppose so: but still he would have done it!’) (III.9.1126). By conjuring up a general atmosphere of conversation, Montaigne invests his text with the skeptical thrust of the dialogue form, its ability, as a drama of contrast, to test assumed truths and to stave off consensus while remaining in the register of a provi-sional exchange of ideas.

Even as Montaigne describes the Essais as a solitary project he carries out while iso-lated in the library tower of his family estate, a stress on interaction fuels his thoughts on several topics (not least friendship) and inflects the manner by which he insinuates a conversation with the reader. The Essais, in their very conception, were inspired by the premature death of Montaigne’s close friend and correspondent, Etienne de La Boëtie, and Montaigne frames his essaying as an effort to continue their intellectual exchanges. ‘If I had somebody to write to, I would readily have chosen [the letter] as the means of publishing my witty chatter’, he writes. ‘But I would need some definite correspondent, as I used to have, who would draw me out, sustain me, and lift me up. For to correspond with thin air, as others do, is something I could only manage in my dreams’ (I.40.283).

Not just any reader, however, suffices to take part in the tacit interaction he sees the Essais as triggering. In the midst of expressing his fondness for the ‘poetic gait’ of Plato’s dialogues, Montaigne declares, ‘It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject not I’ (III.9.1125). This comment is less a repudiation of responsibility or an admission that he revels in misdirecting his readers (while keeping to himself the threads that hold together his arguments) than it is a playful acknowledgement of the challenges accorded the reader of his volume, a work that is intensely riven with incompletion, from skipped steps of reasoning, to ideas and feelings put aside before they are explored to satisfac-tion, to sentence structures lacking syntactic order or closure. A ‘diligent’ reader, along these lines, must not only keep pace with Montaigne’s itinerant and digressive thinking but also contribute where the discourse breaks down.

In the sixteenth-century context that radically informs Montaigne’s undertaking, there is more to his interest in dialogue than his appreciation for Plato’s Socrates, or his grief over the loss of his friend. In particular, the religious wars that raged in France for the better part of his adult life amplified his skeptical attitude and demanded a complex rethinking of self-other relations. His project of self-portraiture, which tries to establish an implicit dialogue with others, must be regarded, in part, as an exigent response to the antagonistic and dogmatic thinking at the source of the bloodshed. What he pursues by


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contrast is not the classical model of balance, order, and stability, which he consigns to the past as an unfit ideal. Rather, the Essais takes into its own procedure the unruliness and inconstancy of the modern world as he sees it. Dialogue and understanding are only possible, his work suggests, to the extent that we make ourselves ‘at home in exist-ence without fixed points of support’ (Auerbach 311), and his style, his style-as-thinking, tries to orient us to this task while asking for a diligent response.

ESSAYING THE CINEMA: GODARD AMONG OTHERSThis account of the Essais has merely scratched the surface of what Montaigne is out to accomplish in his pioneering experiment, but it nevertheless shows that a properly Montaignian notion of the essay form must go beyond notions of personal expression or first-person subjectivity and attend just as emphatically to the dialogical dimensions that are central to the essayist’s working manner and principles. If Montaigne is, in fact, the progenitor of a form of reflection that extends from literary into cinematic pro-duction (as is commonly observed in studies of the essay film), then we need to attune ourselves not simply to general taxonomic traits that effectively render documentary more ‘subjective’ and ‘first person’ but to a dialogical spirit that registers, sonically and visually, through complex gestures of self-inscription, the inventive reworking of avail-able materials in a conversation of sorts with other authors, and a mode of address that invites the spectator to take critical and imaginative part in the thinking at stake.

Respectively, Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan, in their recent book-length studies of the essay film, have done much to tease out this dialogical element, whereas earlier accounts, most notably Phillip Lopate’s, had defined the form as though it were a soliloquy, a coherent meditation on which we listen in as an authorial voice works out a specific problem and ensures itself the final word. For Rascaroli, who draws heavily on enunciation theory, the implied dialogue announces and sustains itself through moments of interpellation whereby the viewer is summoned ‘to become active, intellectually and emotionally, and interact with the text’ (35). In one of her more convincing case studies, she shows how Farocki, in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), takes on the role of an embodied enunciator within his own project while doing so as a kind of spec-tator himself, this being a self-inscriptive gesture that at once fortifies and ‘debunks his own authority, and empowers the viewer’ as an active participant (57–58). For his part, Corrigan offers a more subtle and sensitive account of this relationship between essayist and viewer than is possible to arrive at through the ‘I-You’ mechanism of interpellation.9 While giving more extensive attention to the literary heritage of the essay form, he traces a history of its cinematic variants that follows expressly from an interactive dynamics of reception established—through both institutional and aesthetic developments—in Europe after World War II. The resulting notion of ‘essayism’, as he at times calls it, alluding to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, has its basis in a two-way, dialogical ‘testing of subjectivity’ in a decidedly public domain of experience (50–74).

Neither of these monographs, however, explores at length the essayistic role and value of inventive citation, which, as we have seen, is a key feature of the Montaignian tradition. Though it is common to note that essay films often ‘rely on juxtapositions of archival images and present-tense commentary’ (Arthur 59), the implications of such a tendency for self-study and the collaborative rapport sought

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with the spectator have not been thoroughly considered. To be sure, a detailed anal-ysis of the essayistic strategies of some of the more accomplished exponents would have to take into account a wide range of citational and appropriative gestures, from Kluge’s utopian retrieval of discarded texts and discourses, through Farocki’s politico-aesthetic Verbundsystem of recycled materials, to Varda’s more casual bor-rowings from those whom she counts as kindred artists in her recent autobiographi-cal jaunts The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011).10 Moreover, among these major essayists, citation within one’s own corpus often asserts itself as a means by which an ongoing body of work is maintained and modulated over time. To name just three cases, consider Farocki’s reworking of his earlier scenes of self-inscription, from Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and Images of the World, in his initial video installation, Interface (1995); Marker’s recourse to the returned gaze of the African woman in Sans soleil (1983) not only within that film (where it undergoes the electronic transformations of ‘The Zone’) but also in subsequent projects of Staring Back, his 2007 digital photography exhibit, and the museum created for his Second Life residence on the virtual archipelago of ‘Ouvroir’; and Peter Greenaway’s more meglomaniacal techniques of remixing his earlier work, as in the endless essayistic condensations and reroutings that comprise his loosely autobiographical Tulse Luper series.

If the Montaignian practice at once portrays a thought process consubstantial with the body and life of the essayist and radically opens that process to a dialogical out-side in large part through creative citation, then there is no more profound audio-visual exemplar than Jean-Luc Godard, who is famously an ‘essayist’ by his own description, a composer of ‘essays in novel form or novels in essay form’ (Godard 173). Citation, self-inscription, and dialogue (in a philosophical sense that far exceeds the speaking of lines)11 intertwine in complex ways quite early on in his oeuvre: an emblematic case would be his crafty vocal recital of Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1842) in Vivre sa vie (1962) where his own voice, in a kind of filmic ventriloquism, is mapped onto the body of another performer/character as he oscillates between reading the Poe story and observing Anna Karina/Nana (Lack 315). But here I want to focus specifically on his late work and its more intense reliance on the strategies of self-portrayal we have deemed essayistic through Montaigne, a figure whom Godard has indeed referenced as one of his distant forebears.12

When Godard inhabits his films and videos from the 1980s onward, the nature of his performance is sometimes mockingly critical of himself and of the very possibil-ity of communicating ideas. This motif recurs, with variations, from his role as Uncle Jeannot, a mental patient percussively typing a cryptic reference to Beckett, ‘mal vu mal dit’, in Prénom Carmen (1983) to his riveting lecture in Notre musique (2004) that nonethe-less fails to hold the attention of much of his audience in the film, as they laugh and whisper through the final, most moving parts of his presentation, and as Godard, dimly lit, again figures as a creature of obscurity. And yet, over the same span of his career, the French-Swiss director couches his aesthetic and historical experiments according to conditions that are fundamentally interpersonal. This registers in part across his video dialogues as he tries out a variety of positions within the frame relative to his interlocutors and to the camera, his bodily arrangement geared sometimes more to


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a confrontation (with Michel Piccoli in 2 × 50 Years of French Cinema [1995]), some-times more to a genial exchange of ideas and arguments (with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville in Soft and Hard [1985]), and sometimes to a mixture of both moods (with Woody Allen in Meetin’ WA [1986]).13 Even in his more solitary exercises, where he relishes portraying himself as an ill-fated and misunderstood artist removed from social life, he often initiates a movement toward some form of co-involvement and shared intellectual pursuit, a movement that curiously both negates and newly intensifies his legendary status as an author.14 There is no more compelling example than his ‘autho-rial suicide’ (Silverman 21) in the final seconds of JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December (1995). Somewhere between shots of winter and springtime landscapes—a passage marked by the turning of blank pages in the notebook where Godard’s handwritten phrases have periodically appeared—‘JLG’, last glimpsed walking into a snowy forest, vanishes. Only to resurface, however, in the last, long-held shot of the film, in the form of shadows (of clouds) moving over a green field toward the horizon (figures 1–3).15 His voice resurfaces as well; paired with David Darling’s sonorous cello, it speaks to the meaning of this parting gesture:

I said I love. That is the promise. Now, I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word love means something, so that love exists on earth … In recompense, at the end of this long undertaking, I will end up being he who loves. […] A man, nothing but a man, no better than any other, but no other better than he.

Figure 1 JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December (1994).

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The last sentence, spoken over black leader, finishes, or rounds off for the time being, Godard’s movement toward dialogue, here expressed as a gift of love requiring self-sacrifice. But, quite fittingly, that sentence is not his own but a citation of Sartre’s closing remarks in his 1964 literary self-portrait, The Words: ‘A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any’ (255). Yet, Sartre himself was already embroiled in a game of revision with regard to antecedents. His concluding words rewrite a statement that begins Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘Simply myself. I know my heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any-one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better but at least I am different’ (17). Rousseau gallantly asserts the singularity and originality of himself (and also of his book, which he maintains ‘has no precedent’ and ‘will have no imitator’), whereas Sartre proclaims a leveling of himself among others, and a hard-won sense of community into which his words have at last thrust him.

JLG, for his part, reworks Sartre reworking Rousseau—without overtly quoting either of these texts—so as to ascribe more than private stakes and consequences to his own form of self-portrayal. The words are both his and not his, or not only his, and their use affirms a condition by which his work is the work of others as well. In effect, what the end of JLG/JLG suggests is not simply a death but a diffraction of an authorial self in two directions at once: into the very texture of the film and its processes, and into citation as a medium and instrument of exchange.



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GODARD’S HISTOIRE(S) AND THE ESSAYISTIC SPECTATORThe interplay of citation and self-portraiture that characterizes much of Godard’s essaying in his late work has its most elaborate expression in his eight-part video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). There, the problem on which JLG/JLG reflects in its final seconds—that of the essayist entering into a cooperative circumstance by way of citation and a consubstantial merger with the sounds and sights he handles—is given a more pressingly critical charge. While some commentators have taken the series to task for only enchanting the audience with a fireworks display of technique, that is, for only concocting a view of history through the purely formal rhythms and relays of associa-tive montage (Rancière, Film Fables 171–88), I want to argue quite the contrary. If we look closely at how Godard portrays himself throughout Histoire(s), and if we allow in our interpretation for the essayistic stress on trial to which his performance, along with his use of montage, is everywhere pitched, it becomes evident that the most vital claims in the series turn on the prospect of Godard being able to extend a certain manner of seeing to the viewer, not simply the results, the findings, of his own, now complete investigation but the perceptual and intellectual adventure of the process itself.

Admittedly, Godard pursues this objective—and clues us in to the stakes of our involvement—in a roundabout and esoteric fashion, through a montage of cited matter that can prove daunting even for the most informed audience. To be precise, Histoire(s) is composed predominantly of clips taken and reworked from Hollywood and European cinema, including fiction films, documentaries, cartoon animations, and pornography.


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Far from being conventional excerpts, these clips are substantially altered (in texture, color, acoustics, velocity, and duration) and densely recombined with (reframed details from) photographs, paintings, sculptures, and frescoes. These new, fleeting ensembles, which are broken up at regular intervals by black screens, are further shaped and punc-tuated by videographic measures that have only loose filmic equivalents, from stop-started motion to rapid iris-ins and iris-outs between superimposed layers in the visual field. There are also samplings of classical and popular music, as well as a barrage of literary references that shift between high and low genres and surface either as titles or spoken commentary. Adding still another level of complexity is the breadth of lan-guages in play at any given moment (French, German, Italian, Latin . . ., only a portion of which is translated by the subtitling on DVD versions of the series).

One of the threads that holds this chaotic weave together as Godard reflects back on the cinema of the twentieth century is his persistent claim that what made the medium unique was its mysterious ability, through montage, to bring into sight relations between things, events, and people—otherwise undetectable relations that could be seen together in the communal darkness of the theater. It is clear enough from the melancholic tone of the series that, for Godard, the medium failed to harness this potential when it was most needed, namely in the face of the century’s most horrific social injustices and abuses of state authority. As Godard succinctly puts it in voice-over in chapter 3A, the ‘flame’ of cinema’s true calling as a form of thought and vision ‘was extinguished at Auschwitz’.16 At the same time, there is much more going on in his own use of montage than the mere illustration or embellishment of a mainly verbal thesis. The videographic process itself doesn’t quite show us what cinema, according to Godard, once was; nor does it simply resurrect that cinema in the full span of its communal bearings (which would require a popular framework of reception from which Godard is far removed). Rather, it offers an intensified expression of what cinema might have been if its critical powers of montage had been better understood and applied. And it’s through this subjunctive approach to the cinematic past that Godard retains for his own project, all melancholy notwithstanding, a lingering sense of possibility, of open-ended futurity in and through the form of seeing he tries to share with an audience. Both his self-inscription in the series and his abundant use of existing sources are keyed to this pursuit.

In body and voice, Godard is seemingly omnipresent in the series. He recites from various other texts and provides his own commentary (the distinction between the two is blurred); we see him take part in a dialogue with Serge Daney. True to the Montaignian essay’s double backs and revisions across an evolving body of work, his previous films and videos figure prominently in the play of citations, this being still another dimension of self-portraiture. Using superimpositions, he stages encounters between ‘Godard’ and ‘Godard’ at different moments in his career, as when, in episode 1B, he revisits the last shot of Contempt (1963) of Fritz Lang filming Ulysses salute an invisible Ithaca, and we see, in a composite image, Godard lighting a cigar in his library, circa 1988, alongside the young Godard playing Lang’s assistant.

But for our purposes the most significant moments of bodily self-inscription are those, interspersed across the episodes, that take place in Godard’s library/study, where the French-Swiss director generally assumes one of two positions—either seated behind his typewriter or standing by his crowded bookshelves. These repeated scenes would, on


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the surface, seem to correspond to the filmmaker-at-work shots that occur often in essay films (consider the foregrounding of the editing room in cases as far apart in concep-tion as Orson Welles’s F for Fake [1975] and Farocki’s The Expression of Hands [1997]), as though to provide a cinematic complement to the various passages in Montaigne’s Essais where the self-sketching author feels the need to make his reader aware, in care-ful detail, of the physical setting, the circular library, in which the writing of his book transpires. In several of Godard’s late videos, most strikingly in Scénario du film ‘Passion’ (1982), we are shown the filmmaker using the basic tools of his craft, but surprisingly in Histoire(s), for all its stress on montage, there are no shots of Godard technically at work. The scenes in his library instead show him writing short, evocative phrases—mostly citations—on a mnemonic typewriter, a machine that, with its staccato clacking, some-how substitutes for the technical apparatus of cinema. And just as often, he removes a text from his bookcase at seeming random (a contrivance, of course) to say its title, to read aloud from its pages, or to use its cover for largely visual purposes. Each of these recurring deeds gives rise to a videographic stream of citational montage that issues forth abruptly, as though from his cinematic imagination (figures 4–6).

These scenes with Godard in his study cut to heart of Histoire(s) and its montage-based project concerning the relation between essayist and viewer. While his vocal and visual self-inscriptions effect a quasi-corporeal continuity with the work he undertakes, these recurring moments in his study portray him less as a filmmaker than as a writer, a reader, and, most crucially, a spectator. In these scenes, he often turns his eyes upward,

Figure 4 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), chapter 1A: ‘All the (Hi)stories’.

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just before the images appear, as if to cast his gaze onto a screen out of frame. At times he stabilizes his eyeglasses with one hand and stares ahead, looking inside-out from the superimpositions of which he is an integral part. These short-lived ‘visions’ materialize somewhere between Godard and ourselves and are—unlike the titles that often join them—not quite inscribed on the surface of the picture plane. More delicate, they take shape as though projected onto the smoke rising from his cigar.

This attempt to intertwine the roles of author and viewer further accords with a Montaignian tradition of the essayistic. Montaigne, as a decisive gesture of his project, enacts a continuous overlap of reading and writing (and rereading and rewriting), in effect figuring throughout the Essais as his own ‘first reader’ and exhibiting strategies that he hopes to pass on (Starobinski 27). In Godard’s self-portraiture in Histoire(s) du cinéma, he casts himself as what I wish to call the ‘first viewer’, that is, a persona who embodies, within the video series, the form of seeing he tries to share with his audience. In this account, we are the ‘second’ viewers.17 In the context of recent discussions of the essay film, this might not seem an altogether fresh claim. As I noted above, for instance, Rascaroli defines Farocki’s role in roughly similar terms in her reading of Images of the World. But I am not simply locating the essayistic and its interactive potential in a bound-to-succeed ‘interpellation’. In the case of Godard, the work of essaying starts after and goes beyond such a mechanism and has to do with a more intricate notion of the image.

By portraying himself as a writer/reader/spectator displaced from the technical apparatus of image production, and by shifting the emphasis, within his conception of

Figure 5 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), chapter 1B: ‘A Single (Hi)story’.


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montage, from issues of making to viewing, Godard implies that the images at stake in Histoire(s) are primarily spectatorial and as much mental as material. An image, in this Godardian sense, requires some further explanation. First, an image for Godard is to be distinguished from a mere shot or picture viewed in isolation. An image is comprised of at least two elements, held together in dynamic tension—it is a composite structure, an ‘ensemble-being’ as Nicole Brenez well describes it (‘Ultimate Journey’). To speak of an image in this sense is thus already to evoke montage. Secondly, an image, no matter how affecting, instructive, or emblematic it appears at any one stage, is always at some level unfinished and open to still further development, to still further thought. If it arises in crystallized form as a superimposition, it is still to be grasped as an unfolding, with a trajectory as yet undetermined. And thirdly, an image for Godard is always at some level a mental construction.18 Here his reliance on super-imposition, a technique that is closely aligned with the expression of thought in early avant-garde French film theory, is of vital significance. Godard insists that he uses the device in Histoire(s) ‘not all the time, but to remind, to show that it’s there’ (Godard and Ishaghpour 34). It is therefore not limited to the material ensembles that he offers; it involves a constant interplay between the actual and the virtual, between the patent and the latent, and between the images that materialize on screen and deliberate lacu-nae that place the burden of making connections on us. Implicit in this notion of an image is the principle that the viewer, that is, the second viewer, must become skilled in the practice of montage also.

Figure 6 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), chapter 1B: ‘A Single (Hi)story’.

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In short, the stipulation of ‘at least two’ pertains both to the composite nature of the image and to the conditions of its reception, the seeing together at stake in the series. Because Godard alone cannot confirm the strength and validity of his findings through montage (a fact he openly raises),19 the process he sets in motion necessarily appeals to the perceptual acuity and critical judgment of the viewer he addresses. Montage, in this formulation, isn’t an assured device. Unless this mutually constitutive relation between fellow viewers sharing in the constructive labor takes shape—unless Godard is indeed able to share the perception of an affinity—there is no montage at all, merely virtuosic collage wherein the ensembles fail to detect historical relation-ships. Hence, the efficacy of montage in its essayistic, Godardian sense lies not within the shaping intelligence of the artist as it transports the viewer along a preset course of thought and emotion (as in, say, the more coercive montage strategies of Sergei Eisenstein or Alfred Hitchcock) but instead within a mutual galvanism between author and spectator, a tacit interaction that is continually retested, ensemble after contingent ensemble.

Through his self-portrayal, Godard devotes his body and voice to this potential rela-tion throughout the series. Whatever significance he attributes to himself in the history of cinema that he recounts turns on his ability to abandon his legendary status as an auteur (in the reductive sense of a genius creator) and to enter into implicit bonds with others through citation and through a shared form of seeing. Histoire(s) stages a kind of ‘becoming medium’ on his part—a dispersion of his authorial self into the fabric of his work, into citation as a dialogical act, and into a manner of seeing that he formulates and tests from the position of a spectator.

ADAPTIVE DREAMS AND DIFFICULTIESIn this respect, Histoire(s) replays the ending of JLG/JLG, its project of authorial self-overcoming. Indeed the series concludes, or at least comes to a provisional end, on a chord that again stresses this task. In a parting gesture that culminates an episode already thick with references to his prior work, Godard himself enters the flow of frag-ments as a figure trying to seize hold of something irrecoverable, something that faintly glimmers in the work of other artists and poets before him, and he does this by layering citations that already contain variations on this purpose. Following two shots taken and transformed from JLG/JLG—they are now made to recombine with Mischa Auer look-ing through a magnifying glass in Welles’s Mr. Arkadin (1955) and also with the razor-slashing of the eye in Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929)—we hear the voice of Ezra Pound reading from his Cantos, while we see Orson Welles as Othello, spying on Desdemona as she walks through a dark, temple-like structure. Already in play here are the underlying motifs of adapting, recapturing, perceptual detection, and potentially seeing anew. Where Welles adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy, Pound creatively retranslates, from an older Latin translation into archaic English, Homer’s The Odyssey, specifically the nekyia scene from Book XI where Odysseus and his crew, upon summoning souls of the dead, encounter the ‘pitiful spirit’ of their fallen friend, Elpenor.

On the heels of the Welles and Pound citations, we see a shot of a single yellow rose standing out against a hazy, verdant backdrop, momentarily coupled with the text ‘machine of dreams’ (a subheading gleaned from Jean Epstein’s text The Intelligence of a


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Machine). The flower is from Godard’s own Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), but where it is white in that earlier film to express mourning for the death of Sophie Scholl, a German student beheaded in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, here the color has changed, through videographic tinkering, to yellow. We catch an intertitle, ‘Jorge Luis Borges’, that alerts us to the relevance of this switch, and then Godard’s graveled voice states: ‘If a man … If a man wandered through paradise in his dreams and kept a flower to remind him where he’d been and on waking found the flower in his hands … What’s to say, then? I was that man’. As he speaks, a black-and-white photo of him unshaven and wearing sunglasses appears in two consecutive ensembles: first, in a pulsing alternation with the yellow rose, then, in a superimposition with a cropped reproduction of Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh II (1957) (figures 7 and 8).

We have here, in these last seconds of Histoire(s), Godard’s montage at its most acutely palimpsestic, the idea of layering already built in to the citations he gathers. The tale of a man waking from a dream and holding a flower as proof of his journey through Paradise comes from Borges citing Coleridge who, in turn, was already adapting lines by Jean Paul. By another extension, the yellow tinge of the flower owes to Borges’s short poem ‘A Yellow Rose’, in which an aging poet hailed by others as ‘the next Homer and the next Dante’ is given a yellow rose on his deathbed and, after uttering to himself some inadequate poetic lines that even he finds boring, suddenly sees the rose ‘the way Adam must have seen it in Paradise’ and realizes that his words hardly begin to mir-ror, let alone possess, the things of the world they name (77). Godard has chosen and arranged the last fragments of his video series with utmost care, so that collectively they

Figure 7 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), chapter 4B: ‘Signs Among Us’.

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riff on notions of lost friendship mourned, of journeys to underworlds and paradisal realms, of dream states and waking discoveries, and end-of-life revelations. There is also, coursing through these scenarios of authors drawing on authors before them, a strong undercurrent of failure and remove, a sense of irretrievability despite the proof-of-passage suggested by the rose. We find in these different examples ghostly recreations that depart from the sources on which they are based. Bacon’s painting distantly evokes the spirit (and drowns out the optimistic mood, with a heavy impasto that gives the artist-figure a torpid and somber character) of van Gogh’s autobiographical The Artist on the Road to Tarascon (1888), the original of which is believed to have been destroyed when the Allied forces bombed Madgeburg in 1945 (Lack 329). In Pound’s recitation of his own Cantos, we find an attempt to channel, from classical antiquity into a modernist poetics of citation and commentary, the spirit of Homer’s epic verse, now freed from its narrative confines, so that it might illuminate the present and future. But Godard’s use of montage (which here builds toward a finale to a series that has untiringly addressed the ethical responsibilities of art and the atrocities of the twentieth century, in particu-lar those attributable to fascism) undermines this goal by inviting us to measure the undeniable lyricism of Pound’s vocal performance against the insidious cultural aims and delusional view of history toward which his poem, cited at its germinal root, would eventually work.

‘I was that man’: Godard’s self-inclusion in this history of adaptive endeavor at once claims for the French-Swiss director a singular status and ambiguously stitches him

Figure 8 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), chapter 4B: ‘Signs Among Us’.


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into a fabric of co-belonging, via citation. His voice and visage lay claim to these part-ing ensembles even as he speaks words and orchestrates image-matters that are not, in terms of their origins, his own. As is typical of the series, the lines of thought raise more issues than they resolve. Whether Godard allies his project with one of these other figures more strongly than the others is left uncertain, but we can be sure that for him, the rose parable has to do with cinema (the ‘machine of dreams’ named by an intertitle) and with his own participation as a critic, spectator, and filmmaker in a form of cinema that enabled a way of seeing to be shared (a thinking cinema that Histoire(s) reanimates while admitting the impossibility of a total recovery). The rose retained from his dream is the vestige of this glimpsed reality on which his video series is founded. Whether JLG remains ‘that man’ holds to the extent that across the preceding chapters, he succeeds in bringing into sight revelatory images and making this form of seeing shareable. Hence, the importance of the repeated, conditional ‘If …’ that begins his claim.

It must be said that the barriers to meeting Godard halfway in this adventure are considerable. The citational density tends to overwhelm us, and the speed and intricacy of the videographic process outstrip us at nearly every turn. In fairness to Godard, titles warn us in the opening seconds of the series, ‘hoc opus/hic labor est’ (this is the task/this is the toil), a citation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Further titles, accompanying the first sight we encounter (James Stewart as Jefferies in Hitchcock’s Rear Window [1954], his eyes shifting behind his telephoto lens), announce that ‘every eye’ must ‘negotiate for itself ’ (dialogue snatched from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) the relations between the assorted fragments, since Godard, now citing a Robert Bresson dictum, will refuse to ‘show all sides of things’ and will ‘leave a margin of indefiniteness’.

Because of their unrelenting difficulty, Godard’s late films and videos, Histoire(s) included, have been dismissed by some critics as hopelessly abstruse—as failing, in their total disregard for the audience, to impart a meaningful message or to begin to work out the myriad issues and paradoxes that arise (a line of critique that his most recent fea-ture, Film Socialism [2010], only exacerbates by mysteriously concluding with ‘no com-ment’ written on the screen). But such a view neglects the ways in which an essayistic manner purposely stops short of fulfillment, wielding an aesthetic of inachevément with a view to inviting and to an extent cultivating the activity of the spectator (for whom there are risks, responsibilities, and possibly even dangers in this rapport, as the reference to Hitchcock’s Jefferies as our stand-in acknowledges).20

This challenging play of fragments through montage has been at the crux of the cinematic essay’s numerous stylistic and political retoolings since its inception fol-lowing World War II. Initially it responded to the traumas at mid century, urging its audiences to piece together fractured histories and to reckon with their lingering implications. Shifting gears during the political upheavals of the 1960s, many of the same film essayists turned to militant projects in a bid for revolution, and their aes-thetic strategies accordingly took a more didactic (and often a more doctrinaire) cast. In Godard’s Histoire(s), in Farocki’s ‘soft montage’ (a double-projection method that asks the viewer to labor imaginatively between screens), and in Kluge’s more kalei-doscopic efforts to spark the image-forming abilities of the spectator, the cinematic essay again changes tack, this time in the fallout of its political disenchantment, by bringing back tentative reflection and by balancing its contentions, its lessons, with a

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freer play of sounds, images, and ideas. (In essence, these figures adapt their projects to a condition in which it seems there is no longer a collective subject, postulated in advance, to mobilize.)

For all the modifications to their approaches, these essayists have remained, at a fun-damental level, pedagogues: not so much because they teach through the transmission of arguments at the level of content but because the form of thinking they model tries to gain the viewer’s co-involvement in a tireless process of investigation,21 one that radi-cally commits to and perpetuates what Gilles Deleuze and Serge Daney have described as a ‘pedagogy of perception’ extending from the postwar modern cinema (Deleuze 70–74). Over and above the goal of delivering a thesis to be accepted or rejected, these figures hope to improve intellectual agility by instilling a ruminative, detail-driven man-ner of spectatorial exertion, proportionate in its intensities to the one they exhibit. And it is toward this end—toward this supple means, rather—that they direct their adaptive energies, through their repeated, their revisional, and their always complex exercises of self-portrayal and citation.

NOTES1 Jean-Pierre Gorin, through his curatorial efforts, has offered a useful alternative by approaching the cine-matic essay as ‘[a]n energy more than a genre’, an intensive and unruly process that relies on a Nietzschean sense of instinct and rumination. See Gorin, ‘A Proposal for a Tussle’ (2007).2 Adorno’s argument for and demonstration of the essay is articulated specifically against the systematic nature of Cartesian method and the scientific positivism that it undergirds.3 This is not to ignore the rich tradition of the essay in Britain, which, as Corrigan shows in his recent book The Essay Film (2011), is well worth considering in relation to audio-visual examples. Certainly the verbose, witty commentaries of Patrick Keiller (delivered by an unnamed narrator recounting the deeds of ‘Robinson’, an alter-ego for the director) work within that tradition.4 This brief and rather diverse list is intended not so much to suggest neat comparisons between figures but to indicate the intergeneric span of essayistic writing that retains a kernel of Montaigne’s reflective spirit.5 A notable exception is Corrigan’s The Essay Film (2011), ch. 1. Corrigan’s perspective is somewhat dif-ferent from my own, however, in that his study is focused more on the single-work-as-essay, whereas I am trying more to conceptualize a process essaying over time and across multiple works.6 By ‘act’ I mean partly to suggest a performance relentlessly conscious of itself as such. On Montaigne’s conception of the term essai, see Hugo Friedrich’s Montaigne (1991) and Richard Scholar’s Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (2010).7 With his Essais, Montaigne is also a progenitor of the ‘literary self-portrait’, the poetics of which have been studied by Michel Beaujour. This is to say that Montaigne’s work anticipates other such notable examples as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (1782), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1888), Michel Leiris’s L’Age d’homme (1939) and La Règle du jeu (1948), André Malraux’s Antimémoires (1967), and Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975)—all texts in which the author is ‘bodied forth’ as a dense patchwork of thoughts, impressions, and citations, not so much a stable auto-biographical subject whose life assumes the shape of a linear chronicling. See Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait.8 I am drawing here on Antoine Compagnon’s influential account of the ways in which Montaigne’s pro-cess fundamentally diverges from the shoring up of anterior authority that marks citation in Renaissance writing. See Compagnon, La Seconde main, ou Le Travail de la citation (1979), esp. 279–312. See also Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit (1995), ch. 2.9 If I have misgivings about interpellation and enunciation theory as a way of defining the essay, this is because such an approach risks subjecting the form to precisely the kind of interpretive matrix or ‘scaf-folding’ that Adorno guards against in ‘The Essay as Form’. Further, the rhetoric of interpellation is self-sustaining and surefire, which, I would argue, runs counter to an essayistic investment in contingency.


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10 Guy Debord’s Situationist theory and practice of détournement, which evolves in some ways from earlier, Lettrist tactics of ‘chiseling’ and ‘hypergraphy’, deserves mention in any history of the cinematic essay’s appropriation techniques, though Debord’s work is more stringently didactic than the Montaignian sense on which I am concentrating here.11 On Godard’s career-long exploration of various interlocutory setups, see Nicole Brenez, ‘The Forms of the Question’ (2004).12 According to Jean-Pierre Gorin, when he and Godard were collaborators, the latter often spoke of his desire to emulate Montaigne. See Gorin’s comments, included as a special feature on the DVD of Chris Marker’s films La Jetée and Sans soleil, released by The Criterion Collection. He refers to Godard’s ‘dream to be Montaigne’ in the section ‘Que sais-je?’ of the features for La Jetée.13 On this score, Godard’s style of self-positioning in interviews begs comparison to that of Alexander Kluge, whose work has likewise shown an abiding concern with all manner of dialogical setups or dis-positifs, from courtroom interrogations to more intimate, lamp-lit conversations, and recitals of other texts with his motley crew of recurring discussants.14 In the essay film, this paradox of shedding and reinforcing authorial stature is common. There is perhaps no better example than Orson Welles’s meditation before the cathedral at Chartres in F for Fake. He reflects on the collective force of art and the ‘anonymous glory’ of the premodern Gothic architecture. But the style, the eccentricity, of his vocal delivery, as it couples with elegant superimpositions that emphasize less the edifice itself than a way of looking applied to it, renders the scene another testament to his distinctive persona and command of his medium. ‘Maybe a man’s name . . . doesn’t matter . . . all that much’ para-doxically renders the scene an anthology moment in his own corpus.15 To be precise, this final shadow answers—and forms a bookend with—an earlier one of Godard’s that begins the film, a shadow that passes over a photo of himself as a child. My thanks to Andy Horbal for pointing this out.16 The centrality of the Shoah to Godard’s arguments has so far received more scholarly attention than any other aspect of Histoire(s). For contrasting views, the first antagonistic, the latter two more embracing, see Jacques Rancière, ‘The Saint and the Heiress’ (2002); Libby Saxton, ‘Anamnesis and Bearing Witness’ (2004); and Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Montage-Image or Lie-Image’ (2008).17 My sense of the relation between ‘first’ and ‘second’ viewers is informed by Michael Fried’s various riffs on such a concept in his studies of modern painting, including but not limited to the self-portrait. To cite just one of his writings that summarizes and then expands on positions he develops elsewhere in studies of Courbet and Manet, see Fried, ‘Immersion and Specularity’ (2010).18 The bringing together of heterogeneous elements to make an image is a process that Godard adapts from a text he has cited frequently since the 1980s, Pierre Reverdy’s 1918 poem, ‘L’Image’:

The image is a pure creation of the mind.It cannot be born of a comparison but of the rapprochement of two more or less separate realities.The more distant and just the relation between these realities that are brought together, the stronger the image will be—the more emotional power and poetic reality it will have.These lines are often referenced in scholarship as a kind of mantra for Godard’s late montage, but in Histoire(s) his working notion of an image is further complicated by several citations (in the form of photographed pages, accented with an iris) of Samuel Beckett’s single-sentence prose piece ‘The Image’ (1959), which suggests, more than simply the juxtaposition of diverse ‘realities’, a chaotic and arduous process of striving and perhaps even stammering to form an image. What’s more, in the Beckett story, a sort of Proustian parody, the context for this struggle is an aging man trying to seize hold of a memory of adolescent love.

19 We find Godard discussing his incapacity to affirm the value of his montage in his earlier video essay Scénario de ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie)’ (1979). There, while he tests out some of the same montage procedures that occur in Histoire(s), he tells us in voice-over: ‘What I’m trying to show you is how I see things, so that you can judge whether I am able to see, and what I have seen. I want to show you the relationships between images and then you would be as in a court of law where you are both the defendant and the prosecutor . . . and you can see if I see something. I show if there is something to see and how I see it. And you can say, “No, he’s wrong, there’s nothing to see”’. For an incisive, largely Kantian and Wittgensteinian study of Godard’s adherence to a ‘public aesthetics’ in his late video montage, see Richard Neer, ‘Godard Counts’ (2007).

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20 The cinematic essay that most overtly casts the viewer in a position of potential risk and danger is Ferdinand Khittl’s Parallel Street (1961), where the surrogate audience is charged with putting into the right order, within ninety minutes (the film’s running time), an eclectic group of film clips. The consequence of their failure is death, and we are told that many others before them have already met that fate.21 It’s quite fitting, then, that Farocki and Kluge, especially the former, are fascinated by scenarios of training. The cinematic essay is itself devoted to a retraining of perception. And it is largely through that commitment that the adherents I have stressed in this article remain—to borrow from Robert Musil’s terminology in The Man Without Qualities—the most adept ‘possibilists’ of their craft.

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Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004: 364–79.Scholar, Richard. Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010.Silverman, Kaja. “The Author as Receiver.” October 96 (2001): 17–34.Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1985.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI would like to thank Karen Beckman, James English, Warren Breckman, and the other participants in the 2011–12 Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania for their comments on an earlier version of this article. I wish also to thank Gregg Flaxman, Shayne Legassie, Jessica Wolf, Tyler Curtain, and Beverly Taylor for feed-back on a talk at UNC Chapel Hill on which this argument expands. Some of the main positions of this piece grew out of conversations with Adam Lowenstein, Dan Morgan, Alex Greenhough, and David Fresko.

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The Cinematic Essay as Adaptive Process