62 Elena del Rio

Alchemies of Thought
in Godard’s Cinema:
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty:
Elena del Rio

Notwithstanding Deleuze’s indictment of phenomenology for its

alleged failure to meet the challenges of immanence and difference,
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s philosophies and their implications for a
theory of cinema remain close in many important respects. Both Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Deleuze’s transcendental
empiricism dismantle epistemological systems that are grounded in non-
corporeal acts of signification or cognition. The drive to determine a clear
dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived,
objective reality and subjective experience, is equally suspected and
accordingly undermined by both thinkers. In the continuity of human
body and world that both these philosophies propose, a sensational and
affective approximation to the world replaces the purely mental and
visual methods of the disembodied cogito. As made apparent in his book
on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the world-
body of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work:
“sensation has no [objective and subjective] sides at all; it is both things,
indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: at
the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through
sensation, one through the other, one in the other” (Francis Bacon, 27).
But despite the many ideas Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze share, it is
also important to acknowledge the difference that separates them—a
difference that renders their respective modes of thinking unique and
therefore equally necessary. As many commentators have noted,
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze part ways at the juncture where sensation
and affect are variously theorized as either belonging to the realm of
subjectivity or as operating in a desubjectified field of forces. Thus, while
for Merleau-Ponty sensation and affect are subjective phenomena arising
out of an intentional and individuated rapport with the world, Deleuze
regards the sensational and the affective as material flows whose
individuation and exchange does not rest upon subjectified intentions,
but rather upon the workings of a non-organic, anonymous force or life.

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2005

62 . SubStance #108, Vol. 34, no. 3, 2005
Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 63

I would like to use the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as a testing ground

for the potential reversibility, as well as the tensions, that arise when
one applies Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s diverse modes of thinking to a
kind of cinema that seems equally suited to both. In many notable ways,
the examples of Godard’s 1980s cinema that I will discuss—Passion (1981),
Scenario of Passion (1982), and Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989)—can be seen as
film performances of paramount philosophical concerns in Merleau-Ponty
and Deleuze’s writings. The micropolitics of perception exemplified in
Godard’s cinema counters the ideology of the visible at work in Western
forms of representation by restoring the materiality and physicality
and the sense of duration to acts of (technological) perception. Godard
strips the image of its representational properties, while foregrounding
the incantatory qualities that turn the image into a disclosing event or
gesture. Godard is not interested in the visible as a static aesthetic form
or fixed ideological construct; rather, his attention to bodily gesture and
movement acts out an involvement with the visible as a mode of constant
becoming, where figures come into being from a latent ground of visibility
and virtuality. Furthermore, the body figures so prominently in these
films by Godard as to transform what initially might be construed a
proliferation of individuated bodies into a corporeal continuum of
sensation and affect.
But besides using the image to interrogate the material and sensory
continuity between body and world, Godard’s cinema explicitly
addresses the very point of contention between Merleau-Ponty and
Deleuze: the subjective versus the non-subjective perspectives. Godard’s
tendency to include his own body in these works does not answer the
question by either privileging the subjective or the non-subjective.
Instead, as I will try to show, Godard’s ambiguous stance between a
potentially narcissistic self-presentation, and the dissolution of identity
into anonymous material sensation affirms the continuity of subjective
and non-subjective as overlapping, coexistent planes. In this way,
Godard’s films unwittingly reveal the philosophical impossibility of
keeping the subjective and the non-subjective locked into a binary
relation. For while Merleau-Ponty’s position may emphasize the
subjective pole, his phenomenology does contemplate the role of the
prepersonal and pre-reflective in a way that approximates his thinking
to the anonymity of material forces and affections espoused by Deleuze.
Conversely, although Deleuze undoubtedly favors the molecular plane
of consistency/immanence over the molar plane of organization, he does
admit in A Thousand Plateaus that an excessive stripping away of subjective

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64 Elena del Rio

forms and functions may result in a dangerous regression to the

undifferentiated. In this text, he asks whether it may be “necessary to
retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal
subject from which to extract materials, affects, and assemblages” (270).
It is not my intention here either to prioritize Godard’s film work
over the philosophical work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, or vice-versa.
Instead, if any priority should be acknowledged from the outset as an
underlying concern of this essay, I would point to Deleuze’s insistence
upon the naturally shared affinities between cinema and philosophy:
“Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in
the mind…One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from
cinema to philosophy” (“Interview with Deleuze,” 366). In the same non-
hierarchical spirit that animates Deleuze’s words, I will try to avoid a
model of reflection whereby one discipline is considered the dominant
or privileged term in relation to the other. Instead, I will attempt to show
how cinema and philosophy can resonate with each other by enacting
the same problems and posing the same questions. Godard’s cinema and
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s philosophies are thus different terrains
with conditions similar enough to allow for the same tremors of thought
to occur(“Interview with Deleuze,” 367). And it is in the intersection
between the two disciplines that I would like to situate this analysis.
More specifically, I will set such dialogic encounter of cinema and
philosophy in relation to two areas explicitly explored in Godard’s
cinema: the filmmaker’s passive and receptive role in his conception of
the film, and the use of montage as a privileging of the temporal and
affective dimensions of the image over its mimetic properties.

Witnessing the (In)Visible / Actualizing the Virtual

In the words of Jean-Luc Douin, the anecdotal level of Godard’s film
Passion may be explained as follows: “We see a Polish filmmaker (Jerzy
Radziwilowicz) engaged in making a film where he stages some tableaux
vivants executed by the great masters. The filmmaker is attracted to the
manager of the hotel where he is staying (Hanna Schygulla). This woman
is married to a factory manager (Michel Piccoli) dealing with his workers’
impending strike. The factory manager is assaulted by a union worker
(Isabelle Huppert), who in turn is in love with the Polish filmmaker”
(Godard par Jean-Luc, 213). This banal plot aside, Passion stages the kind of
perceptual drama that is already afoot in Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le
Fou—a drama Pierrot/Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) tenuously reveals
as he reads from a book about Velázquez during the film’s opening

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 65

sequence: “After fifty years, he did not paint anything definite. . . He did
not capture anything in the world except the mysterious exchanges that
drive forms and colors to penetrate each other.”
Like the Spanish master Velázquez, embarked on a search for
transparency and shadow, Godard shows no interest in representing
sharply defined characters or situations. Instead, the filmmaker’s gaze
turns its activity of seeing back on itself, looking not to what appears as
visible, but to the visible’s mode of appearing. At the most fundamental
level, the tableaux vivants in Passion conduct their investigation of
appearance by stressing the shared reliance on lighting of both painting
and the cinema. Godard uses the first tableau, Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, to
meditate on the ontology of the painted image and the cinematic image
alike. While the camera slowly scans the faces of these characters, a
female voice-over says: “It’s not a lie, but something imaginary. Never
exactly the truth, but not the opposite either. It’s something separated
from the real world by calculated approximations of probabilities.” As
Godard interrogates the coming into being of figures from the
indeterminate and latent ground of the visible, his gaze bears a striking
resemblance with the painterly gaze described by Merleau-Ponty:
Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all the objects of his quest
are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual
existence…The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly
cause something to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose
this worldly talisman and to make us see the visible. (Primacy of
Perception, 166)
If Godard’s preference for tracing the visible’s mode of appearing can
be elucidated through a phenomenological perspective, so it can be
through Deleuze’s theory of cinema. When describing the power of the
affection-image in the cinema, Deleuze stresses the same fundamental
conditions of perception that draw the phenomenologists’ attention,
conditions he calls “pure singular qualities or potentialities… pure
possibles” (Movement-Image, 102). In reference to G. W. Pabst’s film Lulu, he
writes:
There are Lulu, the lamp, the bread-knife, Jack the Ripper: people
who are assumed to be real with individual characters and social
roles, objects with uses, real connections between these objects
and these people—in short, a whole actual state of things. But there
are also the brightness of the light on the knife, the blade of the knife
under the light, Jack’s terror and resignation, Lulu’s compassionate
look…these are very special effects: taken all together, they only
refer back to themselves, and constitute the “expressed” of the state
of things. (102)

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Thus Deleuze distinguishes the actual state of things of the visible, which
in cinema coincides with objects, characters, and their actions at the
level of plot, from the affective qualities brought on at the point where
faces or whole bodies are touched by different configurations and
movements of light. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze is equally intrigued by
the question of what the light does “to suddenly cause something to be
and to be this thing.” And he reaches a similar conclusion: what is
expressed by the image is never entirely explained or exhausted by the
spatiotemporal connections the plot establishes as sufficient rational
causes. As he remarks, “however much the precipice may be the cause of
vertigo, it does not explain the expression it produces on a face…For the
expression exists without justification…as expressed, [it is] already the
event in its eternal aspect” (102).
Godard’s semi-scientific, semi-philosophical observation of the
primordial elements that ground appearances and their perception
demands attention not only to lighting, but also to gesture and
movement. In his filmic recreation of Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, the female
voice-over accompanying the image also emphasizes the capacity of the
body to speak for its subject: “Don’t scrutinize the structure or the
distances…do like Rembrandt, examine human beings attentively, at
length. Look at their lips and into their eyes.” Immediately thereafter, the
film cuts to an image of Isabelle Huppert, the factory worker, her back to
the camera, looking sideways, with her eyes and lips unmistakably
fleshing out her expectancy and her frustration. Godard’s belief in the
revealing function of the gesture is fully shared by both Merleau-Ponty
and Deleuze, as shown in their respective writings on film. In “The Film
and the New Psychology,” Merleau-Ponty writes:

Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the
bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behavior or
styles of conduct which are visible from the outside. They exist on
this face or in those gestures, not hidden behind them. (52-53)

Implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of gestural style is the lack of

distinction between signs and their significance, between the gesture
and its meaning as affective content. Thus the meaning and intentionality
captured in Isabelle’s gesture resonate with the phenomenological notion
that the body functions as a primordial ground of semiosis. As film
phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack notes, it is at the radical level of the
lived-body where the genesis of speech and writing occurs (Address of the
Eye, 41).

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 67

Turning to Deleuze’s cinema books, we find an equally strong

emphasis on the body as the constantly moving and deterritorializing
surface that can put us directly in touch with the unthought. Deleuze’s
attention to the close-up as an instance of the expressive powers of
faciality in The Movement-Image is matched by his concern with the bodily
attitudes and postures that form the locus of affection in The Time-Image.
Here, he writes of cinema’s capacity to restore belief in the world via the
body:
The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from
itself…It is on the contrary that which it plunges into…in order to
reach the unthought…the body…forces us to think what is concealed
from thought, life…To think is to learn what a non-thinking body is
capable of, its capacity, its postures. (189)
In Passion, Godard materializes the sense of embodiment of the
painterly gaze by allowing the figures to move and change positions in
front of the camera. This mobility, enacted as a series of entrances and
exits, appearances and disappearances, of the human figures, recreates
in cinematic form the intermediate stages in the process of painterly
creation—its invisible hesitancies as well as its visible choices. But even
more importantly, the “otherness” of the cinematic tableaux in relation to
the paintings lies in a conceptual difference between the painting and its
reenactment as a performative event. Rather than representing static
wholes aspiring to reproduce the original painting with exactitude,
Godard’s tableaux act upon our senses as moving fragments that
reintroduce the body and the notion of temporality into the acts of
perception and expression. Implying a shift from representation to
performance, these tableaux constitute unique and original events of
perceptual interrogation in their own right.
While Passion investigates the perceptual conditions of painting and
the cinema, Scenario of Passion is doubly marked by this inquisitive mode,
for in it Godard traces the conception and birth of Passion itself. Standing
before a blank screen, and waiting for the film to materialize on it, Godard
tells us about his preferred method of creating a screenplay—seeing
comes before writing.
The world described in Passion had to be seen first, to see whether it
existed before being filmed… You have a writer’s job, but you don’t
want to write. You want to see, to receive. You’re before a white
page, a beach, but there’s no sea. You can invent the waves. You
have only a vague idea, but [it] is already movement.
In Scenario, Godard becomes a witness to the process whereby latent/
virtual movements and tendencies sediment in the form of a particular
film. As practiced by Godard, the work of seeing involves the acceptance

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68 Elena del Rio

and testing of possibilities that already exist at the level of the virtual,
and not simply the creation of something out of nothing. This distinction
is important because it subverts the dichotomy of actual and virtual by
placing these terms in a processual continuum. In Ronald Carrier’s words,
“while the virtual and the actual differ from one another, they are not
opposed to one another because they are both real” (“Ontological
Significance,” 194). As he engages in the labor of “seeing,” Godard comes
close to describing his job as a process that turns the virtual into actual,
hence he does not begin with stories, but with places and movements.
The actors have to be seen before they are assigned their lines, and, instead
of embodying roles, they are to be considered first and foremost as
inscriptions of movement.
Godard rejects the position of perceptual mastery sometimes
attributed to the filmmaker in favor of a kind of perceptual work or
labor. Just as in Histoire(s) Godard’s body is seen moving and speaking
amidst the visual and aural apparatuses of the film’s body, in Scenario he
shows himself not as a disembodied creator of the film’s script, not even
primarily as a pair of eyes, but rather as a perceiving hand that strives
to trace the movements and gestures that constitute the possibility of a
story. Jacques Aumont has described Godard’s corporeal investment in
Scenario as “the bold mise-en-scène of a body embracing the fantasy-
screen” (“The Medium,” 207). As Aumont has also noted, it would be
easier for Godard to do his job as a filmmaker blind than without hands
(209).
In the case of Godard, the act of “embracing” the screen is no mere
metaphor, but rather a literal action that brings together the filmmaker’s
body and the screen as body temporarily in one single corporeal
assemblage. The synthesis Godard achieves with the screen is powerfully
conveyed at the end of Scenario, where Godard literally embraces the
screen, thereby underscoring his role as a kind of shepherd or guardian
of the cinema. Recalling his playful tendency to split words into their
phonetic materiality and their semantic content, Godard uses the French
phoneme “mer” to mean simultaneously “sea” and “mother.” Godard
addresses himself to an anonymous man standing on a pier and
encourages him to go back home to the outstretched arms of both sea—
mer—and mother—mère. The affecting aspect of this moment lies in the
way Godard puts his arms around the man’s body, keeping him in a kind
of protective aura as he walks away from the sea and back into the land.
Godard’s gesture shows a total, uncompromising belief in the image—
the ability to dwell in the image and to let the image inhabit his body.

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 69

The filmmaker thus performs what he himself says at one point in Scenario:
“The screen is a wall made for jumping over.” Crossing over to the other
side, Godard becomes at once everyman, child, mother, seer, and above
all, cinema. Rather than simply authorizing images and sounds, he
witnesses the autonomous unraveling of the cinematic process—a process
that includes but outstrips him.
At this juncture it would be pertinent to recast the central question
that I posed in my opening remarks: Is Godard’s explicit contemplative
activity in Scenario better understood by reference to the
phenomenological idea of expression as creation or emanation from
consciousness, or is it more appropriately situated in a subjectless field
of perceptions, sensations, and affects? Does human consciousness—
however embodied or even prereflective—lend organization and
transcendence to a chaotic circulation of material flows, or is
consciousness simply one material flow overlapping with others? Rather
than attempt to offer a definitive answer, I will argue that Godard’s way
of being-in-the-world as a filmmaker has a somewhat deconstructive
effect on the binary structure of such questions. That is, Godard’s presence
instantiates a web of actions and passions that is irreducible either to
conscious subjectivity or to a subjectless circulation of perceptions and
affects. Instead, I would say that Godard lends his mind and his body to
a process that allows these perceptions and affects to take place. In so
doing, he acts as a stage, channel, or catalyst—the meeting point where
certain processes of perception, sensation, and affect can converge and
interact to produce something new. Godard’s reflexive activity searches
and investigates, yet his prevalent attitude is that of one who waits for
something to be brought forth from its latent state. As he says in Scenario
referring to his own role, “you’re there in the dark, lying in wait for
sound and language.”
If we look at Histoire(s), the video work that I will come back to later,
Godard’s agency continues to be inscribed as a perpetually reconfigured
combination of actions and passions. Here, the continuum of filmmaker
and electronic typewriter forms a bodily assemblage that gathers
intensity from Godard’s own presence, while at the same time rendering
it remarkably impersonal. In Histoire(s), Godard undertakes a writing of
cinema history through cinema’s own images and sounds, repeatedly
insisting on the irrelevance of he or she who might tell the story of the
cinema: “L’HISTOIRE—PAS CELUI QUI LA RACONTE” (The [hi]story,
not s/he who tells it), he says; it is the images themselves, Godard implies,
that write their own concealed history. Furthermore, Godard uses a

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70 Elena del Rio

typewriter whose electronic memory allows it to act independently of

the human writer. This electronic machine functions to dissolve the very
idea of authorship into a complete physical involvement with the object
being examined: the body of cinema itself. As the typewriter spits out
Godard’s words, these rhythmic sounds become a live soundtrack, which
in turn models the very rhythm of the images as they appear and
disappear in front of our eyes. The process of turning thoughts into
sounds rids Godard’s statements of their analytical baggage, lending
them instead the gravity and material weight of bodily processes. With
this series of transformations and unlikely combinations, Godard proves
that his true vocation is not so much to be a masterful cinematic author
as it is to experiment with and observe the autonomous processes of a
kind of cinematic alchemy.
As Leonard Lawlor argues, much of the difference between
phenomenology and Deleuze’s philosophy lies in their respective stresses
on generality and singularity as constitutive of sense. The common sense
espoused by phenomenology constitutes for Deleuze the loss of
singularity, ultimately resulting in a “cliché [or] generality under which
particulars would be subsumed” (“End of Phenomenology,” 16). Yet,
according to Lawlor, the generality of sense Merleau-Ponty speaks of
“cannot be reduced to a law or formula” (23); rather, the notion of
generality itself is always rooted in the singularities of the sensible (23).
Godard’s is undoubtedly a cinema of singularities and multiplicities that
can hardly buttress the kind of familiar expectations forged by common
sense or general opinion. The function of Godard’s conscious agency in
the midst of his cinema is to provide a sensitive point or conscience
where singularities of perception and affection can form, coalesce, and
continue to transform even beyond his punctual intervention. Lawlor
refers to this conscience as a “boiling point,” perhaps borrowing from
the kind of scientific, empiricist discourse Deleuze himself uses in his
first cinema book, where he writes that “[Affects] have singularities
which enter into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex
entity. It is like points of melting, of boiling, of condensation, of coagulation,
etc.”(Movement-Image, my emphasis,103).
Godard’s positioning between activity and passivity can also be
explained by reference to what Carrier calls a “passive/connective
synthesis,” which provides a way of addressing human being and even
agency while avoiding the potential pitfalls of a discourse of
consciousness. Carrier defines the passive synthesis as “tak[ing] place
prior to conscious activity” (“Ontological Significance,” 191). The passive

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 71

synthesis thus seems rather analogous to the notion of pre-reflective/

unreflective vision, the transcendental field of the prepersonal and
anonymous described by Merleau-Ponty. Drawing from Brian Massumi’s
example of the natural process of sedimentation (User’s Guide, 48), Carrier
explains that human affections are produced through a similar process
involving a series of contractions and contemplations:
Grains of sand come to rest next to one another, accumulating in a
layer of muck at the bottom of a body of water. Each grain is an
element drawn from a flux…and contracted into the muck at the
bottom. Which grains are selected to make up a particular muck is at
once a matter of chance…and of necessity…The process of
sedimentation results in the production of a new individual being
(the muck), which is the product of a process of contraction (of the
grains of sand) and contemplation (the selectivity being explicable
in terms of physical laws)…For Deleuze and Guattari, an individual
human being…is composed of a multitude of such contractions and
contemplations taking place at several levels at once…The subject
as conscious agent, insofar as its conscious agency is the product of
the synthesis of actions, is itself the ongoing product of a complex
and unconscious passive synthesis…as collections of affections
produced by the connective synthesis of contraction and
contemplation, an individual human being is caught up in a multiplicity
of series of actions and passions. (“Ontological Significance,” 191-
92)

Like the grains of sand that accumulate and contract through a selective
process over which they have no grasp or control, the passage of Godard’s
virtual images into actuality is equally bound by laws of both chance
and necessity. Thus, for example, the fact that the first image appearing
in Godard’s screen in Scenario is that of a woman (Hanna Schygulla)
running with a bouquet of flowers toward a car must be at once a matter
of pure randomness and of absolute necessity. While it does not follow
any readily apparent logic, it nevertheless must be connected to a
multitude of other material flows and affects that determine its
appearance at that particular moment in time beyond all conscious
predictability or calculation. Godard as subject is thus not altogether
absent from the “complex and unconscious passive synthesis” that takes
place in Passion and Scenario of Passion. Moreover, passivity does not mean
absence of action. On the contrary, the passive synthesis implies a
heightening of the power one has of being acted upon, no less a power
than that involved in acting itself. And this is what I think the very title
of Godard’s film points to: Passion names the transmutation of perception
into affection by virtue of the power Godard has to be acted upon or to be
affected by the very things or images he perceives.

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The Cinematic Body without Organs: Montage as Auto-Affection

Whether in their emphasis on art or nature, Passion and Scenario revel
in open spaces and in the phenomenological enigmas of perceptual
receptivity. Such philosophical inclinations are matched by a cinematic
style of sweeping camera movements and long takes—a decisive
preference for space and mise-en-scène over time and montage. In
Histoire(s), on the other hand, Godard collapses all sense of discernible,
locatable space into the dimension of temporality. Here, the work of
montage transforms perception into sensation. As Godard juxtaposes
image and sound fragments from a myriad of films and other textual
sources, the resulting amalgamation of incompossible realities produces
nothing of the order of usable perception, instead triggering pure affective
intensity. In Histoire(s), Godard takes the cinema beyond the intentional
phenomenological project of the lived-body to situate it firmly within
the deterritorialized plane of the Body without Organs (BwO). Montage
is the method that enables Godard to harness the force of the image in
such a way as to evacuate its identitary form and function, and to
transform this force into a ceaseless becoming in excess of all use or
reason.
My argument here is that Histoire(s) performs the history of cinema
as the becoming of a BwO. Godard’s work conforms to the basic premises
of this Deleuzian notion. To sum these up, the BwO is not opposed to the
organs, but to the organism’s restricting organization, which, in Deleuze’s
words, “tr[ies] to stop or interrupt the movements of
deterritorialization” (Thousand Plateaus, 270). The BwO belongs to the
plane of consistency, where individuations are formed and dissolved
according to desubjectified forces or affects called haecceities. These
“consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules
or particles, capacities to affect and be affected” (261).
Initially, at least, Histoire(s) presents itself to us as a seemingly chaotic
and borderless multiplicity of bodies. But, regardless of patterns and
tendencies that we may be able to discern through multiple viewings,
the deterritorializing effects of its images remain. As in Scenario, Godard’s
own body is also visible at some points in these video works, either
quoting from books or manipulating different writing or filming
machines. Another form of possibly individuated bodies is, of course,
the staggering number of both well-known actors and anonymous people
that populate the screen, and lastly, Godard’s decision to offer an embodied
history of cinema by establishing a strong corporeal link between the
movements and gestures of collective history and those performed by

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the individual body. But any attempt to separate out the different
corporeal axes of Histoire(s) is likely to be superseded in the viewer’s
experience of these works by a more enveloping and overwhelming sense
of embodiment that does not withstand analytical distinctions between
planes or levels. Simply put, all of these different bodily manifestations
coalesce in one single body, a univocal plane of consistency that disregards
clearly defined borders or identities, hence a BwO.
Enormously effective in producing the all-enveloping sense of
anonymous corporeality characteristic of Histoire(s) is Godard’s
manipulations of the speed of the image. Through a jerky succession of
frames, Histoire(s) decomposes the cinematic construction of movement.
As Godard attempts to visualize the minimal units of bodily movement,
naturally impossible accelerations or decelerations of the visual track
extricate the body from its subjectifed status, pushing it to the limits of
impersonal, molecular existence. But, contrary to all conventional
methods, Godard entrusts such molecular intensities and singularities
with the task of conveying the force and violence of collective history.
Godard’s historical method is thus ostensibly at odds with the traditional
dichotomy between the individual body and the collective trajectory of
history. Here, the larger historical forces and movements are referred
back to those minimal gestures of the body where intentions and desires
are more likely to be recognized.
In the Nazi sequence of Episode 1, one of the most historically charged
segments in Histoire(s), the historical gesture is not confined, for example,
to newsreel images of Hitler. In a seemingly arbitrary manner, the images
of historical “truth” are interspersed with bodily fictional
representations that range chronologically from such Fritz Lang movie
classics as Dr Mabuse (1933) and M (1931) to more contemporary references
to Nazism in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marlene (1981). Thus, to
establish the historical significance of the body, the segment opens with
a familiar cinematic icon—the close-up of the murderer in M (Peter Lorre)
pulling a knife out of his pocket and showing his readiness to strike
again. To the sound of Nazi military music, the image-track then cuts to
the close-up of an isolated hand against a dark backdrop, tensely clenched
and closing in slow motion. As Godard’s voice-over repeats the hypnotic
line “HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA,” the image of the closing fist reappears,
this time rapidly alternating with flashing, still images of Hitler against
a similar dark backdrop, one arm raised in megalomaniac defiance, the
other one resting over his own chest. Godard’s voice-over then repeats
“HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA,” this time adding “WITH AN ‘S’; WITH AN

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74 Elena del Rio

‘S.’” Hitler’s hysterical voice is then heard over a succession of images of

anonymous bodies of ordinary people being displaced by the war.
Godard’s choice of images and shots shows to what extent he thinks of
the body as fully involved in a collective network of meanings and
affections: a hand being raised, a look averted, a forward movement
stopped in mid-action, a fist closing in a menacing gesture—these are the
signifiers of history at its most revealing.
Histoire(s) implements to great effect the relation between speed and
affect as theorized by Deleuze. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze defines the
body as the “sum total of the material elements belonging to it under
given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness… the sum
total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of
potential” (260). Insofar as Histoire(s) treats the image as a body—a material
and sensible aggregate—it seems totally appropriate to see the film’s
orchestration of the moving image through the lens of the Deleuzian
body. The image, then, works as “the sum total of the material elements
belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness… the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given
power or degree of potential.”
Like the BwO, the Godardian image is free from a static form or
substance, and equally free from the responsibility of either reflecting or
obscuring the so-called “real” world. Whether moving or still, the image
is never stable, fixed, or truly arrested, but rather always in between
movement and rest, and always capable of affecting or being affected by
other images. The intrinsic connection between montage and affect is
crucial in this regard. In his “Notes on the Translation” of A Thousand
Plateaus, Massumi provides a definition of Deleuzian affect that is easily
transposable to the context of montage; the image’s affective potential is
thus “simply an ability to affect and be affected…a passage from an
experiential state of the body [image] to another…an encounter between
the affected body [image] and a second, affecting, body [image]” (xvi). In
the cinema, it is the temporal succession of images in montage that
materializes the image’s “ability to affect and be affected.” As Histoire(s)
implies both visually and verbally, the kind of image that does not
contaminate or become contaminated by other images is void of any
cinematic significance. A female voice-over makes precisely this point
while images from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are
shown on the screen: “An image seen out of context, as long as it is clear
and interprets an expression, will not alter on contact with other images.
Other images will be impervious to it, and it will be impervious to them.

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 75

No action, no reaction. Therefore that image is useless within the

cinematographic system.”
While Godard’s montage techniques undermine the exercise of a
rationalist epistemology (by blurring distinctions between films, genres,
or art forms), they are no less effective in shattering the veneer of
sentimentality that has informed the mainstream reading of images from
the cinematic classics. Godard’s practice of montage not only interferes
with the viewer’s cognitive mastery of the isolated image/film, but it
also generates an affective or pathetic charge in the image that is decidedly
of a different order than the pre-packaged emotion elicited by the original
film. Repeatedly throughout Histoire(s), the juxtaposition of images and
sounds from different films, concepts of filmmaking, or genres is uncannily
orchestrated to bring to the fore that which remains unspoken in the
original movie. Pathos thus arises as the viewer is shocked by the uncanny
simultaneity of two facts or realities that cannot be reconciled through
rational means. On the other hand, an ineluctable interdependence
between the two elements juxtaposed impresses itself upon us. The
paradox informing the logic of montage favored by Godard exemplifies
the inextricability of sense and nonsense that both Merleau-Ponty and
Deleuze stress. As Lawlor explains, “not imprisoned in a sense, the
paradoxical element actually generates too much sense… Having no sense
and producing too much sense, the paradoxical element is a repetition
without original” (“End of Phenomenology,” 20-21).
For example, at one point, the image of Rita Hayworth in Gilda
(Charles Vidor, 1946), the epitome of Hollywood’s ideal of female glamour,
alternates with images from two films by Carl Dreyer: Day of Wrath (1943)
and Ordet (1955). The narcissistic isolation of the Rita Hayworth image is
challenged here by the pathetic force of Dreyer’s images—the woman
charged with witchcraft and burned at the stake in Day of Wrath, and old
father Borgen calling out for his mad son Johannes in Ordet. Another
telling example of this kind of montage consists in the juxtaposition of
the Lillian Gish character walking in a deserted street in D. W. Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms (1919) and the Marlene Dietrich character reveling in a
saloon game where women ride on men’s backs in Lang’s Rancho Notorious
(1952).
The pathetic or affective qualities readily available in both the Dreyer
and Griffith films are superseded here by a more encompassing sense of
pathos that we may very well call historical. The affect arising in the
interstices of these juxtaposed images is related to cinema’s memory of
itself; it is not a human-centered affect, but rather an instance of cinema’s

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76 Elena del Rio

self-affection—the “affection of self by self” as the definition of cinema’s

temporality. This self-affection leaves aside facile and self-indulgent
sentiment to interrogate instead the necessary interdependence between
cinematic constructions of sexuality and morality that are
conventionally held to be worlds apart from each other. For example, to
what extent does the body of the glamorous woman necessitate the
simultaneous deployment of the victimized or forsaken woman in order
to perpetuate the pleasure-effects it calls forth in the viewer? Is not the
Hollywood star, despite the star’s claims to inhabiting a world beyond
ordinary morality, very much the result of a displacement and repression
induced by the dominant moral codes of sexuality, gender, class, age, and
race?
As these examples show, the Godardian montage functions as a BwO
insofar as it opens the field of cinema’s potential powers beyond formal,
narrative and ideological restrictions. The BwO does for an individual
human being what Godard’s montage does for the history of cinema—
they both instantiate a process that “deactualizes the affections [one]
possesses in virtue of having been subjected to organization”
(“Ontological Significance,” 203). By separating images from the narrative
organization that constrains them, and by juxtaposing them with other
images through principles of dissociation rather than resemblance,
montage deactualizes the organized affections of classical cinema and
actualizes potential affections that concern cinema’s memory of itself, its
potential for auto-affection. The BwO consists of affections that are
assembled without regard for dominant or hierarchical organizations.
Similarly, the juxtaposition of images in Histoire(s) follows a logic that
does not withstand the binaries and repressions shaping the actual
history of cinema. Neither objective nor subjective, the history of cinema
we are given opens up the medium to the possibility of revision in
desiring-production, offering a virtual performance of what cinema could
have been, of the powers of affection it could have mobilized. In drawing
upon “that which was never present to reflective consciousness, but
fully present to pre-reflective consciousness” (“End of Phenomenology,”
23), Histoire(s) also enacts Merleau-Ponty’s correlation between the
unreflective and an originary past. Just as mimicry repeats an object by
performing what is virtual in the object, Histoire(s) repeats its object—the
history of cinema—by performing history as a becoming and cinema as
montage. This is a performative rather than a representational activity
insofar as the work produces a reality in excess of its object. Instead of
lacking in relation to the object, which is always the lament inherent in

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Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema 77

representation, performance conceives and generates a new object, hence

the false begins to resonate with the power of truth.
Godard’s exploration of cinematic appearance clearly situates the
medium on the plane of immanence. On this plane, cinema contains
unlimited ontological possibilities. In the filmmaker’s words,
As soon as you freeze an image in a movement that includes twenty-
five others, you notice in a shot you have filmed…that suddenly
there are billions of possibilities; all the possible
permutations…represent thousands of possibilities… you notice that
there are entire worlds contained within [a] woman’s movement—
corpuscles, galaxies, different each time—and that you can travel
from one to another in a series of explosions. (Godard sur Godard,
461-62)
From this standpoint, the cinema is an infinite set of images that
distinguishes itself from chaos only by virtue of the extractive or
subtractive order that the filmmaker brings to them. In this quote, and
even more literally in Scenario of Passion, Godard as subject functions as a
force of extraction, what Gregory Flaxman calls “the process of drawing
order from [the] ‘chaos of light’ as if through a sieve” (“Cinema Year
Zero,” 93). In this Bergsonian/Deleuzian light, the subject is not so much
the locus of consciousness as the interval or gap that interrupts the flux
of infinite images to expose one singular shot or frame out of that flow.
If the Godardian cinema is preeminently a cinema of immanence, the
question is whether the phenomenological perspective is still capable of
addressing the force of its perceptive and affective flows without turning
immanence into an immanence to consciousness. Several commentators,
such as Lawlor (whom I have quoted repeatedly) and Dorothea Olkowski
(“Merleau-Ponty and Bergson,” 32), regard Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible
and the Invisible as a marked departure from the philosophy of
transcendental consciousness practiced in The Phenomenology of Perception.
In the later work, Merleau-Ponty no longer conceives being as subject,
but rather as infinity. Lawlor quotes Merleau-Ponty: “The extraordinary
harmony of external and internal is possible only through the mediation
of a positive infinite or…an infinite infinite…If, at the center and…in the
kernel of Being, there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or
indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained
in it” (Signs, 148-49; quoted in “End of Phenomenology,” 29). With these
words, Merleau-Ponty seems to recognize an immanent plane where all
forms of life, intelligence, and meaning are simultaneously created as
differential strands of élan vital that form by internal differentiation and
division. Merleau-Ponty’s positive infinite may be regarded as a pure

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78 Elena del Rio

plane of immanence that “expresses itself without end” and without the
possibility of transcendence “enter[ing] and limit[ing] it” (29). It is in
this sense that cinema, as Godard sees it, “expresses itself without end,”
pressed towards an affective self-encounter that is no longer dependent
on transcendental identity. The filmmaker’s quest for an open-ended, yet
immanent cinema may be summarized in his own famous statement:
“Ce n’est pas une image juste; c’est juste une image.” It is not a just image; it is
just an image.
University of Alberta

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