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SUSAN SONTAG
torial element is emotional, immediate; but words (including signs, texts,
stories, sayings, recitations, interviews) have a lower temperature. While
images invite the spectator to identify with what is seen, the presence of
words makes the spectator into a critic.
But Godard's Brechtian use of language is only one aspect of the
phenomenon. Much as Godard owes to Brecht, his treatment of language
is far more complex and equivocal; and relates rather to the efforts of
certain painters, who use words actively to undermine the image, to
refute it, to render it opaque and unintelligible. It's not simply that
Godard gives language a place that no other film director has before
him. (Compare the verbosity of Godard's films with Bresson's verbal
severity and austerity of dialogue.) He sees nothing in the film medium
that prevents one of the subjects of cinema from being language itself
- as language has become the very subject of much contemporary
poetry and, in a metaphoric sense, of some important painting, such as
that of Jasper Johns. But it seems likely that language will become
the subject of cinema only at that point when a film-maker is obsessed
by the problematic character of language - as Godard so evidently is.
What other directors have regarded mainly as an adjunct of greater
"realism" (the advantage of sound films as compared with silents) be–
comes in Godard's hands a virtually autonomous, sometimes subversive
instrument.
Not only does Godard not regard cinema as essentially moving
photographs; on the contrary, precisely the fact that movies, which pur–
port to be a pictorial medium, admit of language being added in is
what gives cinema its superior range and freedom compared with other
art forms. Pictorial or photographic elements are in a sense only the
raw materials of Godard's cinema; the transformative ingredient is the
presence of language. Thus, to cavil at Godard for the talkiness of his
films is to misunderstand his materials and his intentions. It is almost as
if the pictorial image had a static quality, too close to "art," that Godard
wants to infect with the blight of words. In
La Chinoise,
a sign on the
wall of the student Maoist commune reads: "One must replace vague
ideas with clear images." But that's only one side of the matter, as
Godard knows. Sometimes images are too clear, too simple.
(La Chinoise
is Godard's sympathetic, witty treatment of the arch-Romantic wish to
make oneself entirely simple, altogether clear.) The highly permutated
dialectic between image and language is far from stable. As he declares
in his own voice at the beginning of
Alpha
ville
:
"Some things in life
are too complex for oral transmission. So we make fiction out of them,
to make them universal." But again, it's clear that making things uni-
