„Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge.” – W. G. Sebald

Any film directed by Jean-Luc Godard in the past two decades erects playful barriers in the path of their complete decryption – but probably none other than his 2001 film, Éloge de l’amour, is capable of creating a deeper frustration towards this willful sort of opacity. Sine here, beyond the scaly surface of quotes, references and delayed dialogues that block the path to meaning, we can grasp at a true fiction film that lies in a germinative state, which refuses itself to us exactly when it manages to lure us in with the promise of a full, head-to-toe story. This sensation is amplified by these images that are shot in a sumptuous black and white, worthy of a William Lubtchansky, which reveal a bourgeois and bohemian town, perpetually nocturnal, where a film like in the old ages could be born, with “a girl and a gun”… Sometimes, as I felt overwhelmed by Godard’s unanswerable intertextual games, I just abandoned myself to a feeling of plenitude and simply glided from image to image, savoring their non-vulgar beauty, like in the case of this shot of a beautiful Parisian façade, as it’s crisscrossed by the lush lights of reflectors. After all, I don’t think that this idea should be discarded: it’s as if, favored by the supreme gesture of the incomplete object which is cultivated by Godard, there could be this town privilege of sorts between an image without a context, that is still absolute in the attraction that it exerts, an unattributed quote, spoken on a hollow tone, and the residue of a resigned story, which knows how to make its way towards us after so many other similar stories.

Two things are worth mentioning about Godard, especially since we see them increasingly and fervently at work since his magnificent Histoire(s) du cinéma, where the filmmaker re-edited the world and offered it a sole anchor under the shape of the history of film seen, unseen and dreamed of. Ever since then, Godard seems to have finally detonated the imperative of the story in favor of dissipated flashed, which set the history of art at our feet, in a suite of images lacking legends. Even more radical than Malraux himself, the filmmaker might be placing a little too much trust in our capacity to let ourselves blinded (or, at least, temporarily intoxicated) by the power of art, which, in the happiest of cases – and the only ones that truly matter – is self-evident, and needs no explaining. That’s also the basis of Adrian Martin’s assertion that “Part of the magic of his work […] is when, as a spectator, you feel you suddenly see or grasp one of these secrets, in a moment of illumination that carries a strange, potent emotion”. It’s true, and probably it’s this playful tactic – that is also a form of strange violence, enacted for “our own good” – is where this cinema extracts its profound force to displace the spectators’ conscience from. Shy, and thus arrogant as a result of this shyness, Godard appears in his own films probably a bit more than he should, and not even the armor that he’s created out of reference for him to hide in – from the most accessible, such as Picasso’s “I do not seek. I find”, to the most arcane – cannot deflate his ego.

Godard, arrogant? For the conformist spirits of this age that is scarred – social media obligent – by an increasingly acute lack of curiosity, it’s clear that the edits and connections that the filmmaker puts into play will be tiring, in all the senses of the term. (A director such as Harun Farocki, a brother to Godard in terms to his trust in the image from which one must ask for everything and nothing at all at the same time, does indeed set himself apart through a fundamental modesty of the ways in which he questioned the visual world in which we are living in, without this fact, however, opening his work up to a larger audience.) I like to think that – it’s the second thing worth mentioning about him – that, in his double capacity as a director who set foot upon the field when cinema was showing its first signs of aging, and as a critic who melded his artistic becoming into this old age, Godard knows better than anyone what it means to be the one who arrives after. As such, even though much has changed in his art from his beginning to the present, and it’s not an exaggeration to notice that his films, no matter what shape they may take on, are marked by the characteristic of a post-battle object. Godard is increasingly terrorized (or incited) by the though that he has arrived to us later than the one who shot Anna Magnani in a gesture of anti-fascist resistance, of the one who shot Monument Valley with innocent eyes, of the one who knew how to collect all of the tears shed by medieval Japan. For an ultra-scrupulous artist such as him, an archeologist to the same degree that he is an inventor, any “full” contemporary story must contain within itself an indecent kernel. What’s left for him to do is to re-edit, encyclopedically so, the stories of others, the thoughts of others, together with the fragments of emotion which – until proven otherwise – still belong to him. To invent is to reinvent, said one poet, and there has probably been none other who knew how to reinvent more brilliantly than Godard.

And so, Eloge de l’amour – the pulverized film that I described, almost as if I had guessed at it, in the above lines – is a sort of garden of forking paths, in which past and present are kicking each-other under the table, while the dialogues, always borrowed (“that line belongs to Max Ophüls”, someone says at one point), bringing the world up again and again, and doing so in terms that are imperatively cinephile (the filmmaker’s very first level of sentimental education). All across the film, we follow three couples that are moving around through uncertain timelines and throughout these spaces in which, starting with the eighties, Godard set up a discreet camp: train stations, bistros, city limits, country houses, always with an opening towards Switzerland. These couples have something that is indeterminate about them – reduced to the essentials of a few lovelorn dialogues that lack a “suite of ideas”, the only possible in times of catastrophe -, the spaces thus seem to be illusions, pretexts. In the end, everything comes down to a melacholic superimposition, set to the music of Arvo Pärt, lying between the indefinite, shapeless present and a past that never comes to pass.

Godard is one of those for whom war, ruin and especially Auschwitz will constitute what is “the stain of the century”, as Primo Levi called it, and whose dim, indirect, yet constantly present memory will always be one of the subterranean motors to his creative gestures. In the beginning we discover a title, the most beautiful of them all. Then, we discover some images, a Paris constructed from all of the cinephile nights, from Bresson’s to Pialat’s, or a sea burnt by an exaggerated contrast. It’s a disappointment that what the film truly talks about is, in fact, the inability to tell a new, novel story about love – or is it a happiness aimed at the contact with its still-lingering romanticism? In principle, a few flashes are more than enough for an intact shiver, rendered sensible by the grace of memory, to pass throughout our bodies. A shot from a Godard is never just that: it comes together with the entirety of history, cloaked in references of a dubious paternity. His transgressive art, of which much eludes us, is akin to bathing into a cold stream of water, from which we emerge with pristine eyes.

Éloge de l’amour will screen at the Eforie Cinematheque on the 9th of February and will be followed by a discussion between film critic Andrei Rus and director Radu Jude.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.