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October 17, 2006

Love after Death

In Praise of Jean Vigo

By Andrew

BETWEEN TWO WARS
Remember the breakfast one November —
Cold black grapes smelling faintly
Of the cork they were packed in,
Hard rolls with hot, white flesh,
And thick, honey sweetened chocolate?
And the parties at night; the gin and the tangos?
The torn hair nets, the lost cuff links?
Where have they all gone to,
The beautiful girls, the abandoned hours?
They said we were lost, mad and immoral,
And interfered with the plans of the management.
And today, millions and millions, shut alive
In the coffins of circumstance,
Beat on the buried lids,
Huddle in the cellars of ruins, and quarrel
Over their own fragmented flesh.
- Kenneth Rexroth

In his short poem "Between Two Wars," Kenneth Rexroth wields nostalgia like a weapon. In the context of war, it suddenly becomes all to clear how supposed "immoral" transgressions are in fact celebrations of life, and "the plans of management" are the architecture of death. The murderous quarrels of nation States are belittled as the ultimate immorality. The poem recalls the words of Walter Benjamin, "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins."¹

And yet nostalgia is no silver bullet — more a double-edged sword.² Rexroth recalls the past to assault the present, but he remains stuck in sadness at a lack for a path to better futures. He doesn't stand outside the moment, crassly waving a finger at the folly of the catastrophe; rather, the poem is firmly in the moment, unable to escape save for the memory of better times. By leaving us with the graven image of "the coffins of circumstance," "the cellars of ruin," the poem's final words become less of a last laugh and more of a last lament.

The longing after life, the anger at authority and death — something about Rexroth's poem elicits the spirit of the French filmmaker Jean Vigo. Both were born the same year, 1905, and both traveled so widely in the same European revolutionary anarchist art circles that it only remains for some enterprising anarchist historian to connect the dots and determine how their paths (nearly) crossed. Lacking such a historian, however, it is remarkable how the poem itself evokes Vigo in its very details. Dead before thirty, Jean Vigo's short adult life bloomed "between two wars." Vigo's transgressions too, the films he produced, were said to be "lost, mad, immoral." His first feature, Zero de Conduit (or Zero for Conduct), a tale of school-boy rebellion drawing heavily on his own boyhood memories, was banned by authorities. His second and final feature, L'Atalante, a portrait of life and love on a barge, was butchered for the market by its timid financiers while he lay on his deathbed.

Of Vigo's two features, it is interesting that L'Atalante is most often considered the stronger of the two, despite its being the film least in Vigo's control. After Zero de Conduit was banned by French censors, Vigo's producers felt they might rein in the controversy on his next film by supplying a politically innocent script, the story of young newly-weds, Jean (Jean Daste) and Juliette (Dita Parlo), whose marriage matures on a cargo barge floating down the Seine. Given Vigo's sensibilities, however, the final cut of the film could not but be rife with subversion. The simple story arc, seeing Jean and Juliette separate for a time only to be reunited, suggests a paean to the conservative commitments of marriage; hand it to Vigo to interpret the theme of marital maturation as erotic awakening. Even more central to the story — and the subversion — is Pere Jules (Michel Simon), Jean's crotchety old assistant, whose body is tattooed over in crudely sexual caricatures and revolutionary epithets.³.

No legacy better illustrates the double-edged nature of nostalgia than that of Jean Vigo. Like "the breakfast one November" and "the parties at night" of Kenneth Rexroth's memory, Vigo was buried himself, dead of tuberculosis, only years before "millions and millions" more were buried at the hands of a Second World War. Because his output was so meddled with by censors and producers, no invocation of Vigo is complete without a sorrowful asking of "What could have been?" had Vigo lived, and had he enjoyed complete artistic freedom. For a man whose work is so full of delight, it is a legacy heavy with lamentations that both cloud and illuminate the insights of his work.

Take, for instance, Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge de l'amour (or In Praise of Love), a sigh so hard it's nearly utopian. Godard's film follows the efforts of an artist named Edgar to complete his "project" — a film, a cantata, a novella, it's never settled — and his pursuit of a politically abrasive, reluctant melancholic muse, Elle (which translates as the underwhelming She). Like Rexroth's "Between Two Wars," In Praise of Love utilizes a barbed nostalgia to critique the sorry state of global affairs. But rather than simply evoke Vigo, Godard explicitly draws on Vigo's legacy. As Maximilian Le Cain explains,

the ill-fated couple stand silhouetted in black and white beside the Seine. The man describes how a landscape can only be 'new' to one if one mentally compares it to a landscape already seen. As he explains this, Maurice Jaubert's L'Atalante theme plays on the soundtrack. This is an extraordinary literalisation of this idea, superimposing onto the sadness of Godard's new cinematic 'landscape' (a place suffused with mournful remembering and broken loves) the wistful memory of Vigo's joyful eloge de l'amour, L'Atalante, a 'landscape' we have previously experienced. In a film about the importance of memory, this means more than simply contrasting the despair that will engulf this couple with the ultimate happiness of Vigo's lovers. It is also the remembrance of a moment in film history. A moment in film history that will not be repeated.⁴

In subtle — and not so subtle — tension with Hollywood films like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Godard's film struggles with the memory of historical events, their simplified portrayal in cinema as opposed to the complex, frustrating enigmas they actually are. This is no easy task for Godard, whose early films were heavily indebted to American genres like gangster pics and Westerns, and it requires him to struggle with nostalgia and moments in film history, like L'Atalante, "that will not be repeated." Appropriately, a character in In Praise of Love recalls a line from a seminal American Western, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

What goes for Hollywood, it seems, goes for film history as well. Because his death was a young one, Vigo's short life span provides little in terms of biographical detail. Of the five chapters in P.E. Salles Gomes' biography of Jean Vigo, for instance, one is devoted to Vigo's father, another to "Vigo's Death."⁵ Confronted with little in the way of detail, film history more often than not goes the way of Liberty Vance, printing the legend that Vigo was the son of a militant anarchist murdered in prison. Gomes' biography, however, indicates that the political affiliations of Vigo's firebrand father, Miguel Almereyda, were messy and shifting through his life. While Almereyda was an anarchist of the — literal, rather than cliché — bomb-throwing variety as a young man, the ideological allegiances of his later life were about as cloudy as the circumstances surrounding his death in prison, where he was held accused of treason (a domestic casualty, perhaps, of the French political environment following World War I — a war, ironically, Almereyda supported).

Anarchism has always had its martyrs; some cynics would say that's all it has ever had. Haymarket, Durutti, Sacco & Vanzetti — to the list, cinema hastily adds Vigo. Because he was alive at a time when film was still developing its elementary grammar — and with sound, still learning to speak — Vigo's biography inevitably reads like a portrait of both the artist and the Art as a young man. Every discovery, every excitement for Vigo, this early in the medium's history, was almost inevitably an excitement for cinema itself. And because he died young, film history laments not only what he could have achieved, but what cinema could have achieved. One critic in post-Liberation France, writing of Vigo's first film, inadvertently defines martyrdom: "the most moving thing about Zero de Conduite, perhaps better than the film itself, better than this discovery of a past, is precisely this image of a future which would never be realized."⁶

At another moment in Godard's In Praise of Love, Elle drives Edgar to the railway station. "It's strange, in fact, how things take on meaning when the story ends," Edgar remarks to Elle, telling her of his recently ended ten-year relationship. "It's because History is creeping in," she replies. "With a big H." For this reason, death has, in fact, not been unkind to Vigo: History — with a big H — always loves a martyr much more than it does a living, breathing, died-in-the-wool idealist, because living idealists have faults and failures. Death makes one's faults endearing, an untimely death most of all. Death at a young age creates a void almost inevitably filled by longing after unfulfilled potential; one's life becomes a promise hanging in mid-air. The story goes that a much more American cinematic martyr, James Dean, in anger over not having his way, peed on stage at rehearsal; and yet today, his bad temper is recounted as passion, his image sustaining the economy of his hometown of Marion, Indiana to this day, where banners for a September James Dean Festival hang in early July. No wonder Jesus died young; no wonder people still ask what he would do 2000 years later.

Yet, were he alive — a dangerous phrase if there ever was one — it's certain Vigo would have none of this icon worship. While the political affiliations of Jean Vigo's life remained artistic ones — he belonged to a group called the Association of Revolutionary Writers & Artists, full of anarchists and communists alike — and his sympathies were broadly leftist, the spirit of his films remains unmistakably anti-authoritarian. Take, for instance, the words of his early manifesto, "Towards a Social Cinema," in which Vigo incites his fellow filmmakers to "awaken other echoes than those created by the belches of ladies and gentlemen who come to see a film to help their digestion."⁷ He continued, "To direct ourselves towards a social cinema is quite simply to comment, to make a statement and to evoke some sort of response, other than that of digesting the roast one has just eaten."⁸. His message is clear: if done right, film-making could be a weapon.

Godard will have none of the icon worship either, if only because the icon he is worshipped as is not the one he seems himself as being. It's interesting to note that Godard almost died young himself — and gauging from some critics reactions to In Praise of Love, who long for those supposed days of heaven when a Godard movie had rock music on the soundtrack, many wish that he had.⁹ As James S. Temple and Michael Williams write in Cinema Alone: Godard 1985-2000, a work on the filmmaker's most recent work, "Despite such manifest evidence of creative viability [evident in his later years]… Godard would probably have done better not to have survived his famous motorbike crash of 1971. This would surely have been a kinder fate than to see himself represented in the year 2000 as a radical sixties filmmaker who appears selfishly not yet to have died."¹⁰

Often it seems film History - or at least film critics - have embraced both Vigo and Godard's youthful film-making as a gift to the grown world, while their politics are thrown away like use-less wrapping paper. Against the image of movie posters advertising seemingly contradictory films, Robert Presson's Pickpocket and The Matrix, a character expresses one of the In Praise of Love's many laments. "The strangest thing is the living dead of this world are modeled on the world as it was. The way they think and feel comes from before." The worry here is that the cinema technique has been adopted at the expense of the idea. In his book Film and the Anarchist Imagination, critic Richard Porton remarks on some of the dubious uses Vigo's innovations have been put to.

(M)any critics have found it difficult to resist the temptation to praise Vigo's films as examples of supposedly transhistorical lyricism. The most grotesque outgrowth of this trivialization of Vigo's legacy is undoubtedly Leos Carax's recent Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991), a $28 million paean to ‘the homeless' that incorporates an explicit homage to L'Atalante. Carax's vacuous film transforms anarchist salvos into ‘art cinema,' and nothing becomes rancid faster than a bloated commercial film masquerading as radical art.

In L'Atalante, Juliette loves objects: on both the barge and on the boulevards of Paris, she's drawn to puppets and playthings. She leaves Jean in part because he refuses her the right to see the stores of Paris. She returns because the objects she finds in Paris are commodities behind glass, whereas the objects on the barge are at hand, not behind glass and not for sale — given meaning at last by the company of Jean and Pere Jules. But the meaning is not without its own complications; that Juliette and Jean's reconciliation would be so seamless is one of the great weaknesses of the film's severely romantic heart. Anyone schooled in cycles of domestic violence knows Jean's previous abuse of Juliette (he had assaulted her in anger) could not be so easily — or safely — forgiven. Anyone ready to scream "political correctness" at this observation needs their own political gut-check; Vigo's collected work, as any beautiful set of objects — and every film — is not without its contradictions either. (Kenneth Rexroth, it should be noted, was also infamously known for putting the MAN in Romantic, and Godard has an penchant for killing off his female characters).

If anything, Vigo would not have been content to remain the cinephile's obscure object of desire. He would ask from where our passions and desires emerge, and demand that — whatever we do — we do not leave them up on the screen, but bring them from the screen down to earth. "Shame on those who kill in youth what they themselves would have become," Vigo wrote, exalting the surrealist epic Un Chien Andalou, "[those] who seek, in the forests and along the beaches, where the sea casts up our memories and regrets the dried-up projection of their first blossoming."For all their love on the Seine, recall that Jean and Juliette never reached the sea — the question of their "memories and regrets" remains an open one. Godard, having grown old and not given up, reverses this trajectory: Edgar first reaches the sea, where he recites his description, stated again later at the Seine, of how a landscape can only be 'new' to one if one mentally compares it to a landscape already seen. Vigo's life presents one landscape for us to compare; his death, like that of all true martyrs, leaves potential for us to realize.

NOTES:
¹ "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
² As Wendy Brown has written, Benjamin understood as well as anyone the dangers of backward-looking melancholy. See Wendy Brown, "Resisting Left Melancholy," boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), 19-27.
³According to Richard Porton, "Death to Cows!," reads one, "cows" being the rough French anti-police to the term "pigs." See Porton's "A Second Look," Cineaste XVIII/2, 91, 54-55.
⁴See http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/vigo.html
⁵P.E. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo, London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
⁶Gomes, 221.
⁷Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination, New York and London: Verso, 1999.
⁸See Elizabeth Grottle Strebel, "French Social Cinema and the Popular Front," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 12, No. 3. (Jul., 1977), 499-519.
⁹See, for instance, Roger Ebert's clueless review, or Chris Taylor's false characterization of In Praise of Love as a "failed" comeback attempt.
¹⁰Quoted at http://www.film-philosophy.com/2006v10n1/loukopoulou.pdf
¹¹See http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~artfilm/1999-2000/week20.txt

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