Totally, Tenderly , Tragically

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1979 film Every Man for Himself a scrawl on a blackboard in the background reads "Cain + Abel = Cinema + Video." Even at the time of the film's release, the logic of this statement probably appeared strange; it was in 1956, upon the invention of videotape, that Variety announced "Film is Dead," and ever since video has supposedly superseded film.

The question is all important in Godard's new film In Praise of Love, which Manhattan Pictures International is releasing today, shot in both luminous 35mm black and white and saturated digital video transferred to celluloid. If Godard is one of the greatest working film directors, he is without doubt the world's greatest video artist--most notably in his magnum opus Histoire(s) du CinÈma. He is also one of the few artists, along with Alexander Sokurov and Chris Marker, to understand the fundamental difference between video and film. Even though a digital tide promises to submerge all cinema in ones and zeroes, the distinction between the material ghost of celluloid and the immaterial, hypnotic light of video still seems crucial, and Godard assaults it head-on here, weaving the themes of memory and resistance into the formal refraction of the two media.

Fragmented and shot over the span of a couple years, In Praise of Love ostensibly tells the story of a movie director--or more accurately an artist stuck between forms--trying to make a film about three pairs of lovers, one young, one adult, and one elderly, who go through four stages of love: meeting, sexual passion, separation, rediscovery. Played by Bruno Putzulu, this would-be-artist, Edgar, is first seen thumbing through the pages of a blank book. While detractors might take this as a symbol of the film itself, I think it is a multi-pronged metaphor, not for the absence of thought but for the possibilities of the virgin art form, not the least of which is cinema.

What gives this segment of the film such power is the fact that Godard photographs Paris in the century-old medium of black and white celluloid. As J. Hoberman writes this week in the Village Voice, "Studied as they are, these unprepossessing images of the city and its inhabitants (many of them dispossessed) feel as newly minted as the earliest LumiËre brothers' views; they evoke the thrill of light becoming emulsion." Even if the soundtrack is overwhelmed by mournful statements about the rights of man and of memory, watching the black-and-white section is like watching Godard fall in love with Paris and with cinema all over again--which gains added poignancy since this is the first time in three decades that Godard has shot in the streets of this city.

Edgar's project ends in shambles, and with a cut from a letter to a rolling ocean the film shifts back two years in time to the Brittany coast and to saturated, blurred-out digital video. Edgar, composing a cantata to Simone Weil, visits a couple of resistance heroes, whose life story is in the process of being converted into a film by Steven Spielberg Associates. While the video section rarely uses the overlays so common in Godard's previous video work, the segment possesses its own beauty, as Godard paints the autumn light in the digital smear of the new medium.

Reviewing the film during last year's New York Film Festival, I wrote that "Godard's central idea here is that Americans have both no history and no sense of history, so they must buy other countries' history wholesale. I think this is an essentially bogus conceit, so, despite the surface beauty of the black-and-white section, the film is intellectually flimsy at best." Seeing the film a year later, without the events of September 11th fresh in my head, I realize that for Godard, America is a stand-in for Hollywood. On this ground, I'm willing to take Godard's point, especially since the mainstream American cinema is so blind to the formal possibilities of the medium (or media) it uses. Additionally, the most severe anti-American comments in the film seem to be slapstick jibes, a tactic Godard has used frequently in his prolific career.

I've barely touched on the intricate argument that the film makes about history, remembrance and resistance: most important, I think, is the fact that Godard shoots the past in the medium of the future, reversing not only the standard past as black and white trope of photography, but the entire progress myth itself. Cain does not slay Abel, nor vice versa, but they instead exist side by side.

Godard recently stated that only the early and last films of a director are interesting; In Praise of Love feels like both at once. Repeatedly insisting that it is impossible to represent an adult, Godard's presentation of four stages of love feels less like an idea for human relations than a relation with cinema itself, whether film or video, where all the stages of love exist at once. In his 1987 King Lear Godard has Woody Allen say that editing is holding the past, the present, and the future in your hands at once; here it feels as though all three are here on screen at once.

In Praise of Love is one of Godard's most complicated, intellectually demanding pictures, but it is also diaphanous, on the verge of disappearing into itself, which gives it a tragic yet hopeful beauty. Godard's recent melancholy and pessimism, if not absent, seem to have ebbed. All that is solid melts into the air: Godard once announced that he was awaiting the end of cinema with optimism, and In Praise of Love feels both like the end of cinema as well as its beginning.

In Praise of Love opens at Lincoln Plaza today.