Who Wants to Die for Art!?!”: Reflections on a Meta-Film Sub-Genre: Part III
𝘗𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘵 𝘭𝘦 𝘍𝘰𝘶: The Rebel Artist in Search of a Cause
Thus far in this series — an ongoing study of films in which “artists gravitate toward madness and murder to break through the unsatisfying limits of representation so as to discover and work within the Real” — I’ve looked at two movies that belong to the classical era of Hollywood cinema. The first, Rope (1948), remains an unsettling outlier within the classical Hollywood mode of production, in no small part due to its subversive implication that the viewer desires the same aesthetic transcendence as violently sought after by the film’s killers. In contrast, the second movie, Young Man with a Horn (1950), adheres faithfully in style and message to Hollywood’s portrayal of aesthetic transcendence — or at least to the destructive methods that may be taken to achieve such transcendence — as inherently against the viewer’s interests, even as the film contains key generic and narrative excesses that threaten to expose its unresolvable thematic contradictions.
What unifies a film like Rope and a film like Young Man, then, is not a shared approach toward or even a shared idea about the violent potentialities of aesthetic transcendence, but rather a shared underlying assumption: that art is an individualistic endeavor in the name of, or on the road to, capital-G Genius. Along with other creative heroes of Hollywood cinema, the murderous aesthetes of Rope and the uncompromising jazz trumpeter of Young Man believe art the sole province of a chosen few lucky enough to be blessed with visionary brilliance. Whether triumphant or doomed — or whether sensible or monomaniacal — in realizing their vision, these artists are typically depicted as above and beyond the concerns of social reality, able as they are to vault that reality in pursuit of the aesthetic sublime or, failing that, achieve martyrdom when persecuted by society for daring such. Thus the classical Hollywood text portrays society’s influence upon the artist as almost exclusively confined to the realm of aesthetics, which in turn remains the near-exclusive province of the influence the artist exerts on society. The work of Czechoslovak director Milos Forman is exemplary in this regard. As a master of the artist biopic, Forman repeatedly conceived — in Hollywood productions like Amadeus (1984), Man on the Moon (1999), and Goya's Ghosts (2006) — the artistic genius as preternaturally outside his time instead of a product or agent of it. Mozart, Andy Kaufman, and Goya prove themselves creative mavericks not by reappraising art’s function as related to its social and political uses, but instead by removing artistic practice as far as possible from the contaminating interference of society.
There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but it’s remarkable how even more unconventional and experimental instances of the artist-centered Hollywood film de-emphasize or simplify the artist’s relationship to social reality. For instance, Images (1972) and The Shining (1980) subtly critique their artist-protagonists’ positions within larger social structures, but these critiques take a backseat to critiques of the artist’s familial and personal relationships. Not coincidentally, both films take place within isolated environs geographically distant from “the real world,” and both films depict the artistic crisis as hallucinatory psychodramas that might be entirely, or at least largely, confined to the warped perceptions of their protagonists.
In contrast, European films have historically been more concerned with the artist’s relationship to complex social, political, and historical forces — or at least these films became so concerned during the lead-up to the convulsive events of May-June 1968, when massive strikes, riots, and institutional takeovers by the political Left roiled several continental nations. Indeed, one can detect a notable shift from the psychologically penetrating yet nonetheless individual-oriented studies of the artistic personality in pre-’68 European art films like 8½ (1963) and Persona (1966) to the social- and group-oriented surveys of artistic practice in post-’68 films like Out 1 (1971) and Munch (1974). Significantly, the beginning of this evolution was signaled by a forward-looking landmark of the “artists gravitating toward madness and murder” sub-genre: Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), a film that expresses the overwhelmed and conflicted sense of moral responsibility among a post-World War II generation of European filmmakers who felt called to directly intervene in, rather than merely represent, social reality.
In “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” his study of the “art film” as a loose contingent of mostly European films that emerged after World War II as a counterforce to the dominance of classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell defines the genre as intensely ambiguous in its depictions of character motivation, narrative logic, and even the fictional integrity of the film text. (“Authorial expressivity,” as Bordwell coins the term, occurs when the director makes his hand in the work so conspicuous as to trouble or even destroy the illusion of reality that Hollywood films work so hard to implement and sustain.) Pierrot, it can be proclaimed with considerable confidence, represents a high watermark of the art film, and in no small measure due to its despair over the artist’s ambivalent, uncertain role in an era of aesthetic, technological, and political turmoil. Yet Pierrot also admits to the limitations of the art film, especially in the genre’s inability to transform social reality. As Bordwell admits, in the art film “there is seldom analysis at the level of groups or institutions … social forces become significant insofar as they impinge upon the psychologically sensitive individual” (58).
Among all of Godard’s pre-Dziga Vertov Group films, Pierrot points most emphatically, even if by way of self-negation, toward an artistic practice that might intervene in social reality. As in many European art films of the same period (again, most notably 8½ and Persona), Godard depicts the artist’s crisis over his social role as a sort of schizophrenia. Unlike his peers, however, he refuses to clearly demarcate that schizophrenic division as representing the inhibited, compromised realm of mundane reality on one hand and the liberated (and liberating) realm of the imagination on the other. Instead, Godard represents the split as occurring in individuals alienated from Western capitalist society and drawn toward the Real through the diametrically opposed poles of violence and aesthetic transcendence. Pierrot’s alienated anti-hero couple remains unsuccessful in approaching the Real (and there’s no question that both members of the couple desire the Real — at one point when they ask each other what they want, both characters list several feelings or ideas, only to arrive at the same ultimate goal: “Everything!”) or changing — and, in effect, redeeming — social reality through violence and aesthetic transcendence. Godard himself, however, evokes in Pierrot a socially conscious Real that circumvents transcendence entirely, and he does so by embracing a liberated “open text” cinema that acknowledges its own incompleteness and fractured nature as an “imperfect” product borne of imperfect socio-political conditions.
Pierrot’s plot (as based on Lionel White’s 1962 novel Obsession) conflates two clichés: the cliché of the resigned bourgeois who breaks the chains of conformity by shacking up with a beautiful young woman, and the cliché of a man’s undoing by a femme fatale who lusts for nihilistic thrills. Both story types hinge upon violence: the first offers the myth of sexual, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual rejuvenation through violence, while the second neutralizes that rejuvenation by using violence to symbolically punish the man for his transgressions against society, the family, and the law. But while obsessed throughout his career with violence, Godard has never been interested in its rejuvenating or moralizing dimensions. This is why in Godard’s films violent acts (e.g., the climactic yet dispassionately depicted death of the prostitute protagonist of Vivre sa vie [1962]) are so often portrayed as senseless eruptions, and this is why he usually represents them from a cold, detached vantage point, as if providing objective reportage of society’s most symptomatic signs of discontent and discord.
At key points in Pierrot, however, violence is aestheticized to a disturbingly artificial degree, and in a way that feels radically different from anything previously attempted by Godard and his contemporaries. There are indications early in the film that only extreme stylization can express the urges of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a pent-up television producer and bored family man who longs for explosive liberation. When, for example, Ferdinand attends a party of dull elites, conversation is almost entirely comprised of quotations from commercials and advertisements, gels are used to saturate each room of the party with a distinct color, and — in a moment not clearly defined as actual or imagined — Ferdinand unleashes his rage by demolishing a cake and smearing the partygoers with its contents.
Later, after Ferdinand runs off with babysitter Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), Pierrot’s violence becomes less playful and far more brutal and disorienting. After Ferdinand drives away from his old life, Godard cuts abruptly to a scene of domestic bliss/horror: Ferdinand and Marianne have made a barely furnished apartment both a temporary love nest and a den of iniquity, its interior scattered with assault weapons and a corpse amidst the typical accouterments of cozy domestic life. The characters’ indifference to their surroundings amplifies the shocking revelation of their suggested recent activities. Ferdinand smokes in bed as Marianne performs a musical number, and at one point the latter walks by a crumpled body as if it were just a towel that had been carelessly dropped on a bed. The incongruence between situation and character is echoed in the mise en scène of the apartment, a sort of demented pop art installation in which machine guns share the same space as Picasso replications, posted magazine clippings, and various household items. It is through such a jarring environment that Godard uniquely communicates the theme of Pierrot: the perverse blend of creativity, politics, and violence that results from clashing motivations within the alienated artist who desires to surmount societal limitations and injustices.
This clash informs the remainder of the film in two major ways. First, whenever Ferdinand and Marianne, at the latter’s instigation, embark on lurid, violent adventures, Godard cuts these adventures up in montage sequences that render them virtually impossible to understand in coherent spatio-temporal and narrative terms. Second, whenever the lurid, violent adventures come to a halt so that Ferdinand can reflect, a dramatic and symbolic rift opens between himself and Marianne. In the former instances, Godard nullifies the sensationalist and titillating allure of a violence as yet unconnected to and unsupportive of socio-political change. Through cubist-style cutting, Godard reveals the underlying motivations of his characters’ violent acts as garbled and gratuitous, and he intentionally alienates the viewer so as to evoke the characters’ alienation from their own violent rebellion. Furthermore, the sequences sever the possibility that cultural productions can properly represent or respect the real-world violence to which Pierrot’s artificially staged violence refers. In a later scene, when Ferdinand is tortured by a pair of rival criminals, Godard cuts to shots of Picasso portraits (one of which is shown upside-down) so as to mock the notion that high art — from modernist painting to the European art film — can effectively “capture” the nature or origin of brutal violence.
That Godard believes violence might otherwise be used against the social and political structures that define his characters’, and his viewers’, reality is evidenced in Pierrot’s frequent references to current events: third world gun-running, the Vietnam War, and even the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Yet these references remain free-floating signifiers untethered to a program for social and political change, and they are frequently communicated through fragmented aural montages that complement the fragmented montage sequences. (A sample of the audio track, in which Ferdinand and Marianne rapidly and alternately speak in voiceover: Marianne: “Marianne tells —” / Ferdinand: “— Ferdinand —” / Marianne: “— A story —” / Ferdinand: “— All mixed up —”/ Marianne: “— I knew some people —” / Ferdinand: “— like in the Algerian war —” / Marianne: “— I’ll explain everything —” / Ferdinand: “— like waking from a bad dream.”) The closest the film comes to articulating a cohesive socio-political viewpoint is Ferdinand’s defeatist lament that he and Marianne are as remote from civilization as the Moon, a galactic outcast he imagines as caught between the colonizing machinations of American consumerism and Soviet totalitarianism.
How to process the complications of a world gone mad? After fleeing the criminals they double-crossed, Ferdinand and Marianne hide out on a remote, uninhabited seashore where Ferdinand takes to creative writing. It is here that Godard slows the pace of Pierrot, a move that both fosters and echoes Ferdinand’s longed-for rebirth as a reflective artist. “I’ve found an idea for a novel,” he announces to the camera, “I won’t describe people’s lives, but life itself, just life. Everything that takes place between people: space, sounds and colors. It should be possible. Joyce gave it a try, but one should be able to improve upon him.” But such a desire for transcendence proves over-ambitious in its all-encompassing scope, with Ferdinand’s representations of “life itself” and “everything” through a literary Gesamtkunstwerk appearing in inserts as fragments of sentences and words that are riven from any totalizing context.
And so, whereas Marianne’s attempt at the Real through violent action lacks a socially progressive purpose, Ferdinand’s attempt at the Real through creative contemplation leads to an artistic practice so macroscopic in its dimensions that it becomes marooned from social reality altogether. Rather than becoming an agent of change, the renegade artist has extricated himself from society under the pretense of redeeming it through transformative representation. Ferdinand has thus made good on his opening narration, a quotation from an art history book that describes the older Velázquez as having finished with “painting definite things” and as retreating from political and social upheaval by becoming a “painter of the night, of vast expanses and of silence.”
Many critics, even those sympathetic to Godard, have accused Pierrot of propagating a misogynist dichotomy between the intellectually serious male artist and the superficial, frivolous female pleasure seeker. (Marianne: “Think what we could have done with that money. We could have gone to Chicago, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo. You idiot!” Ferdinand: “I’d have gone to Florence or Athens.”) It seems to me, though, that Ferdinand and Marianne represent the two halves of Godard’s divided creative consciousness, a consciousness he was desperately struggling to unify in purpose and method. Together, Ferdinand’s and Marianne’s separate impoverished stances toward the Real form “Pierrot.” Marianne ascribes this name to Ferdinand after she frees him from his former life, but Ferdinand never accepts the epithet (“Must I remind you that my name is Ferdinand?” is his constant refrain) since it emblematizes their inability to effectively rebel against society: in the Western artistic tradition Pierrot is the archetypal “sad clown,” the continually frustrated seeker whose designs always end in self-sabotage and failure.
Pierrot the archetype and Pierrot as the couple’s collective alter ego are artistic creations rather than artists, and so it’s only fitting that at the climax of Godard’s film Ferdinand — after following the two-timing Marianne to a small rocky island where he kills her and her lover — paints his face blue, wraps multiple layers of pop art-colored dynamite around his head, and blows himself to smithereens. Descending to the endpoint of despair over the futility of both Marianne’s reckless violence and his own creative illusions, Ferdinand makes one last attempt at the Real by finally accepting his role as a work of self-immolating art. (In the scene just prior to Ferdinand's final confrontation with Marianne he waits on a dock while a man regales him with a story of also being driven mad by the illusions of love and art. The man explains that he constantly hears the melody that in the past accompanied his three attempts at wooing different women. The man asks if Ferdinand can hear the melody that plays on the film’s soundtrack. Ferdinand answers no, and the soundtrack music cuts out — art no longer serves for him as a conduit to the Real.)
Just prior to the suicide, Godard cuts to an insert of one of Ferdinand’s writings, in which he puns upon the French words for “art” and “death.” But even the fulfillment of this role is equivocal, with Ferdinand regretting it a moment before the explosion. Suicide is thus stripped of its definitiveness as a “solution” to the question of the divided (artistic) subject, the romanticism of suicide and the “purity” with which it imbues its victim with another false Real that leaves socio-political reality not just unchanged but irresponsibly abandoned. The film’s final lines, a posthumous voiceover by Ferdinand and Marianne that quotes Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Eternity,” can only long for the Real as a vision of Edenic nature, a vision far beyond the complex challenges of socio-political reality: “It has been found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.”
So much for Ferdinand/Pierrot’s attempt to extract himself from socio-political reality by conceiving himself as the Real — as a living artwork that becomes Real only via the inexorable act of self-inflicted violence. Yet if in fiction the alienated artistic subject finds merely one more dead-end in aestheticization through a transcendent act of self-destruction, how can the alienated director avoid a similar dead-end in fashioning his own artistic response to the demands of socio-political reality? Godard remains one of the towering figures of the post-World War II, post-classical cinema if for no other reason than his resolute denunciation of the Real as possible or even desirable through artistic transcendence or perfection. Indeed, Godard was the first major “high art” director to make imperfection central to his aesthetic project.
One of his greatest works, Pierrot le Fou eschews — as Marianne and Ferdinand fail to eschew — any aspiration for the Real, and yet in this eschewal Godard ends up evoking (though never claiming) the Real by making Pierrot a gloriously “open text.” A text such as this not only juxtaposes several multivalent artistic modes and methods — and thereby underlines and questions their competing representational positions vis-à-vis socio-political reality — but it also encourages an unusual degree of interactive engagement from the viewer, who must imaginatively “fill in” and “repair” the film’s structural gaps, disruptions, and intentional mistakes by pondering the typically repressed social and political fault lines that may have occasioned such errata. Pierrot evokes the Real, then, not through a violence that rages against, nor an aesthetic transcendence that exalts itself over, social reality, but instead through the acceptance of the fallibility of an artwork that expresses its creator’s incertitude in the face of that reality.
Only two years — though also five films — after Pierrot le Fou, Godard “went underground” to make politically radical work outside the production, distribution, and exhibition channels of the mainstream film industry. It was a move that, though largely unprecedented, anyone who had been paying sufficient attention to his career should have seen coming from a mile away, since in his new capacity as a member of the Dziga Vertov Group, a “collective” comprised of himself and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard had finally found a marriage between direct action and creativity in responding to various social problems and fissures. Does that mean Godard had forsaken the cinematic “open text” in favor of a hardcore Leftist “Truth” and therefore a belief that the Real could be obtained through strict adherence to the party line? Absolutely not. Indeed, the criticism that is often leveled at Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group period — that it didactically proclaims a privileged position of socio-political knowledge that the viewer can only accept or reject rather than interpretatively participate in — holds little water when one considers that the Group’s work follows through on and honors the creative lessons Godard had learned from the first decade of his commercial work. How and why he did so demands another essay for another time, but suffice it to say that just as the “open text” strategies of Pierrot can be seen in refracted form in a Dziga Vertov Group work like British Sounds (1969), so too can the Group’s interventionist objectives — objectives that posit the amalgamation of social and creative responsibility — be seen as a glimmer in the decidedly imperfect, decidedly non-transcendent eye of Pierrot.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism. Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 1979). 56-64. Print.