In Praise of Love

01/02/2025

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We can start with a couple of references: one to Simone Weil; another to Robert Bresson. A fifth of the way through Eloge de l’amour, the central character Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) says he is looking for someone he wants to cast who is like Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt. Later in the film, but earlier in time, Edgar says “I’m writing a cantata for Simone Weil”, and halfway through the film Edgar and another character are looking at a crumbling, disused Renault factory. This was a central location in the protests of May 1968, and Godard’s career was transformed by the events of that month: he retreated from commercial filmmaking, becoming much more politically focused, making films during what has been called his Maoist phase. But Weil was no less political, a thirties thinker fascinated by suffering and taking upon herself difficulties that as a middle-class teacher she needn’t endure: including working in a Renault factory. 

    At one moment we see a poster for Pickpocket, and watch people queuing for the film when an older man says to his partner: “Jeanne, what a strange path led me to you.” It is a line from Pickpocket, a film directed by Bresson, and whose prior work, A Man Escaped, was on the subject that Eloge de lamour's second section is preoccupied with: a tale about a resistance fighter who will escape from prison. 

    We could call these knowing references, part of a film that demands a hyper-cultured audience to get all the associations. It is a take offered by Hamish Ford when he comments on many of Godard's later works, albeit a criticism he feels In Praise of Love (Eloge de L’amour) generally escapes: “The scattered references to canonical books, but also historical details, significant French and European locations, and of course films, can easily have the effect of an elitist address effectively shutting out all but those who have soaked up a similar cultural heritage as the author (thereby often also loose generational and cultural – so, European – history and experience).” (Senses of Cinema) But to view any of Godard's work in this way seems to be making a category error: in failing to see that Godard’s work is far removed from Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino - directors who in very different ways rely on the viewer knowing anything from Casablanca to Kierkegaard, Marshall McLuhan to Dostoevsky, in Allen’s case, to The Searchers and The Graduate, Kiss me Deadly and Psycho in Tarantino’s. Allen and Tarantino pay homage; Godard insists on seeing a tissue of histories and stories, musing over the complexity of our lives that aren’t separated from history and culture but are embedded within it. In watching Eloge de l’amour the point isn’t to be self-impressed by how many of the references we can spot, but how everybody is contained by historical and cultural forces and how we negotiate our relationship with them. 

    Late in the film, the cultural minister in Brittany and Edgar discuss existence versus life, with the minister saying people treat life like a whore, using it for their immediate ends. Edgar says that they use the extraordinary to improve the ordinary. The discussion comes after Hollywood representatives have been in town to purchase the rights to a story (and Godard constantly plays on the fact the French words for history and story are the same). It is about a couple of resistance fighters, now in old age and in need of money to save their restaurant. It would be an example of the extraordinary there to improve the ordinary, and the couple’s granddaughter Berthe (Cecile Camp) is resistant to the idea just as the grandparents when young were resistant to the much greater idea of the Nazis overrunning France. Spielberg Associates wants to make the film and Berthe notes that the US doesn’t have enough history of its own and must co-opt other people’s as it makes a pointed reference to Schindler’s List. It isn’t that the film is saying there is no difference between Nazi atrocities and Hollywood appropriation, but it is asking us to wonder about appropriation by degrees. It might have been the French who resisted the Nazis in France, but it was Hollywood who turned the Nazis into a trope of evil, one that Spielberg’s film didn’t quite escape and that Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds would later go on gleefully to exploit. In this very provocative sense, it is an example of the extraordinary and hugely complex reduced to the ordinary and simplified: a banality of evil Arendt didn’t quite have in mind when coining the famous phrase. 

     If Godard is resistant to the homage it might partly rest on the ambivalent: that when filmmakers usually reference another film, a painting, a book, we can assume with some confidence it is positive. Godard is more interested in the suggestive. When he references Charles Peguy, Godard would be aware that Peguy was a writer quoted by those in the Resistance and those who supported the Vichy government set up to accept the Occupation. When he mentions that the Americans want Juliette Binoche to play the Resistance heroine, with Binoche having just won an Oscar, Godard will hardly have forgotten that he cast her in a small role in Hail Mary. When Berthe says in all films now girl must undress, Godard expected Binoche to do exactly that when he cast her in his film. He doesn’t want us to comprehend the references and make moral judgements, but to feel the density of history that we are in; its implications and its contradictions - ones that include Godard’s own. 

   It is as though this ambivalence must manifest itself in the very project Edgar seeks to create. Will it be a film, a play, an opera? And what are we to make of Edgar’s gloomy superiority, this figure who may partly be named after the Shakespeare character in King Lear, as the English playwright is name-checked, and a play Godard adapted in his own manner in the late eighties. And what of Edgar’s surely arrogant way with actors and those to whom he apparently shows concern, the homeless? When interviewing one person for a role, Edgar chastises her for reading badly; moments after, when asking her to listen to someone singing, and she looks at the singer, he says he has asked her to listen, not look. Yet he also calls her madam, as if showing respect for the woman but disrespect for the actress who doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the role. When he gets a homeless person to appear in his project, he taps the man’s feet as he lies in bed and tells him to get up. Yet the film seems as hypersensitive as Edgar can often seem insensitive, as if Godard wanted to make a work that wouldn’t force us to identify with Edgar, but would expect us to find our own relationship with the world and with the image.

   This has been a Godard constant, with characterisation always secondary to a question character contains. It is partly why we cannot expect in a Godard film what passes for continuity in another. When we see for example Edgar getting out of a car and crossing the road, we might assume the next shot will be of him; instead, it is someone almost tripping over a homeless person, followed by images of people waiting next to the cinema, before picking Edgar up again as we follow another character in a hurry to make the screening. (The one who offers the line from Pickpocket.) It isn’t just the complex continuity that makes the film difficult; Godard often films in silhouette or from unexpected angles so that we may wonder if we are correct in assuming a character is who we think they are. When we see Edgar crossing the road we know it is him chiefly because of his compact gait and the raincoat he is carrying. He is shot from behind and we see him in the semi-darkness as Godard refuses to augment the streetlights with artificial lighting. If most films are narratively locked in; Godard risks leaving a viewer locked out. It isn’t just in the quotations and historical references that can have someone struggling to keep up, it is also in the constant questioning of the form so that we can never sink into the story. Godard reckons “it’s strange but there’s always been a blank in my films, about an hour into the screening. I find that lots of films slump around this point and since the script is a life buoy, the director pulls out of it by filming the script, but in the process he loses cinema.” (Enthusiasm) 

    Godard, who doesn’t usually work with a script, always keeps in mind that film is an audio-visual medium; telling a story has just become the most common way to use the medium, though far from a necessary condition of it. The director sees it instead as one of enquiry. When a film gets caught in its story it limits that possibility as we start to think of characters and situations over ideas and forms. There are more than enough great narrative films that manage to generate thought (usually through theme) and possess a rigorous form (though allied to content), for Godard’s claim to appear untenable. After all, both Pickpocket and A Man Escaped are narrative films exploring belief while remaining very exact in the form they take. But what matters is that they are viable claims for Godard. Rather than making a film about characters in the Resistance, Godard instead offers a film that plays on the word rather than develops it as a specific story. When his financial backer, gallerist Mr Rosenthal says he wants Edgar to make more than money, then it is in contrast to the film that will probably be made out of the Resistance story Berthe’s grandparents are selling. While, according to Richard Brody, Godard “believes that France is enduring an American cultural occupation as significant as the German occupation during the Second World War, and equally hard to resist” (New Yorker) this isn’t quite what the film is stating, if for no other reason than such a statement has first to pass through the form the film takes. Usually, if a filmmaker wants to make a statement it comes through the drama, with characters at odds making a decent case for their claim but the audience being left well aware which position is the correct one. Jack Nicholson might make in his eyes a good case for protecting his country in A Few Good Men, but that doesn’t mean the audience is supposed to agree with him; we are supposed to side with Tom's Cruise's prosecutor. It gives the film the look of balance while it is clear who is right. 

   Godard provokes us with his arguments and baffles us by his form. Most of the assertive claims are made by a character we never properly see: Berthe, a woman whose parents have taken their lives and where she will do so as well. When she attacks the Americans, this is two years before she will kill herself but because we are now in the past after Godard gives us the first two-thirds in the present, when she makes these claims we know she will take her own life. We might be sympathetic to this woman who works in minimum wage jobs because she can’t tolerate the trivial demands of TV acting, doesn’t wish to practise law and always speaks her mind. But nothing suggests she is a happy person just as little indicates Edgar is a considerate person. These are people Godard expresses his ideas through, and there are many easier ways to put a message across than through a haughty figure from money and a woman inclined to view things despairingly. Though we discover in the past section that Edgar recently broke up with his girlfriend after ten years, this isn’t presented as an emotional moment; more as an exemplification of theme in human terms. It comes when it seems Berthe drives Edgar to the station and he talks about how strange it is that things take on meaning when the story ends, and Berthe says “its because history is coming in.” Godard doesn’t offer this exchange as a typical shot/counter shot of two people getting in a car and travelling to the station. It starts with a superimposition: the lapping Brittany waves and Edgar and Berthe getting ready to leave the house. The film then cuts to the rain on the windscreen wipers as Berthe and Edgar remain unseen (except briefly Berthe in the rearview mirror) as they talk, with the film proposing that any feelings expressed are contained by a problem far greater than the characters’ expression. 

   This has always been vital to Godard’s cinema: to contain characters within a problem greater than an individual’s need to solve it, partly because the problem isn’t an individual’s to solve, but also because the director wishes to view events through a societal, historical and cultural cosmos the characters pass through and that it would be hopelessly anthropocentric, even solipsistic, if they thought they could change it. It might seem despairing to see that out of this confusion Edgar can’t seem to decide on the project he wishes to make, and the tubercular Berthe will take her life, but that would be to fall into character specifics that Godard wishes us to resist. The music throughout indicates a melancholy that transcends character and situation, and the images ask us to contemplate the intricate histories of which the characters are merely a part. The best one can do is resist. As Godard says, "...the artistic act is an act of resistance against something. I wouldn't call it an act of freedom but an act of resistance.' (Enthusiasm) The film's complex approach to referencing isn't to succumb to a story bolstered by others (as often in Tarantino's work) but to offer manifold perspectives on one. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

In Praise of Love

We can start with a couple of references: one to Simone Weil; another to Robert Bresson. A fifth of the way through Eloge de l’amour, the central character Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) says he is looking for someone he wants to cast who is like Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt. Later in the film, but earlier in time, Edgar says “I’m writing a cantata for Simone Weil”, and halfway through the film Edgar and another character are looking at a crumbling, disused Renault factory. This was a central location in the protests of May 1968, and Godard’s career was transformed by the events of that month: he retreated from commercial filmmaking, becoming much more politically focused, making films during what has been called his Maoist phase. But Weil was no less political, a thirties thinker fascinated by suffering and taking upon herself difficulties that as a middle-class teacher she needn’t endure: including working in a Renault factory. 

    At one moment we see a poster for Pickpocket, and watch people queuing for the film when an older man says to his partner: “Jeanne, what a strange path led me to you.” It is a line from Pickpocket, a film directed by Bresson, and whose prior work, A Man Escaped, was on the subject that Eloge de lamour's second section is preoccupied with: a tale about a resistance fighter who will escape from prison. 

    We could call these knowing references, part of a film that demands a hyper-cultured audience to get all the associations. It is a take offered by Hamish Ford when he comments on many of Godard's later works, albeit a criticism he feels In Praise of Love (Eloge de L’amour) generally escapes: “The scattered references to canonical books, but also historical details, significant French and European locations, and of course films, can easily have the effect of an elitist address effectively shutting out all but those who have soaked up a similar cultural heritage as the author (thereby often also loose generational and cultural – so, European – history and experience).” (Senses of Cinema) But to view any of Godard's work in this way seems to be making a category error: in failing to see that Godard’s work is far removed from Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino - directors who in very different ways rely on the viewer knowing anything from Casablanca to Kierkegaard, Marshall McLuhan to Dostoevsky, in Allen’s case, to The Searchers and The Graduate, Kiss me Deadly and Psycho in Tarantino’s. Allen and Tarantino pay homage; Godard insists on seeing a tissue of histories and stories, musing over the complexity of our lives that aren’t separated from history and culture but are embedded within it. In watching Eloge de l’amour the point isn’t to be self-impressed by how many of the references we can spot, but how everybody is contained by historical and cultural forces and how we negotiate our relationship with them. 

    Late in the film, the cultural minister in Brittany and Edgar discuss existence versus life, with the minister saying people treat life like a whore, using it for their immediate ends. Edgar says that they use the extraordinary to improve the ordinary. The discussion comes after Hollywood representatives have been in town to purchase the rights to a story (and Godard constantly plays on the fact the French words for history and story are the same). It is about a couple of resistance fighters, now in old age and in need of money to save their restaurant. It would be an example of the extraordinary there to improve the ordinary, and the couple’s granddaughter Berthe (Cecile Camp) is resistant to the idea just as the grandparents when young were resistant to the much greater idea of the Nazis overrunning France. Spielberg Associates wants to make the film and Berthe notes that the US doesn’t have enough history of its own and must co-opt other people’s as it makes a pointed reference to Schindler’s List. It isn’t that the film is saying there is no difference between Nazi atrocities and Hollywood appropriation, but it is asking us to wonder about appropriation by degrees. It might have been the French who resisted the Nazis in France, but it was Hollywood who turned the Nazis into a trope of evil, one that Spielberg’s film didn’t quite escape and that Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds would later go on gleefully to exploit. In this very provocative sense, it is an example of the extraordinary and hugely complex reduced to the ordinary and simplified: a banality of evil Arendt didn’t quite have in mind when coining the famous phrase. 

     If Godard is resistant to the homage it might partly rest on the ambivalent: that when filmmakers usually reference another film, a painting, a book, we can assume with some confidence it is positive. Godard is more interested in the suggestive. When he references Charles Peguy, Godard would be aware that Peguy was a writer quoted by those in the Resistance and those who supported the Vichy government set up to accept the Occupation. When he mentions that the Americans want Juliette Binoche to play the Resistance heroine, with Binoche having just won an Oscar, Godard will hardly have forgotten that he cast her in a small role in Hail Mary. When Berthe says in all films now girl must undress, Godard expected Binoche to do exactly that when he cast her in his film. He doesn’t want us to comprehend the references and make moral judgements, but to feel the density of history that we are in; its implications and its contradictions - ones that include Godard’s own. 

   It is as though this ambivalence must manifest itself in the very project Edgar seeks to create. Will it be a film, a play, an opera? And what are we to make of Edgar’s gloomy superiority, this figure who may partly be named after the Shakespeare character in King Lear, as the English playwright is name-checked, and a play Godard adapted in his own manner in the late eighties. And what of Edgar’s surely arrogant way with actors and those to whom he apparently shows concern, the homeless? When interviewing one person for a role, Edgar chastises her for reading badly; moments after, when asking her to listen to someone singing, and she looks at the singer, he says he has asked her to listen, not look. Yet he also calls her madam, as if showing respect for the woman but disrespect for the actress who doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to the role. When he gets a homeless person to appear in his project, he taps the man’s feet as he lies in bed and tells him to get up. Yet the film seems as hypersensitive as Edgar can often seem insensitive, as if Godard wanted to make a work that wouldn’t force us to identify with Edgar, but would expect us to find our own relationship with the world and with the image.

   This has been a Godard constant, with characterisation always secondary to a question character contains. It is partly why we cannot expect in a Godard film what passes for continuity in another. When we see for example Edgar getting out of a car and crossing the road, we might assume the next shot will be of him; instead, it is someone almost tripping over a homeless person, followed by images of people waiting next to the cinema, before picking Edgar up again as we follow another character in a hurry to make the screening. (The one who offers the line from Pickpocket.) It isn’t just the complex continuity that makes the film difficult; Godard often films in silhouette or from unexpected angles so that we may wonder if we are correct in assuming a character is who we think they are. When we see Edgar crossing the road we know it is him chiefly because of his compact gait and the raincoat he is carrying. He is shot from behind and we see him in the semi-darkness as Godard refuses to augment the streetlights with artificial lighting. If most films are narratively locked in; Godard risks leaving a viewer locked out. It isn’t just in the quotations and historical references that can have someone struggling to keep up, it is also in the constant questioning of the form so that we can never sink into the story. Godard reckons “it’s strange but there’s always been a blank in my films, about an hour into the screening. I find that lots of films slump around this point and since the script is a life buoy, the director pulls out of it by filming the script, but in the process he loses cinema.” (Enthusiasm) 

    Godard, who doesn’t usually work with a script, always keeps in mind that film is an audio-visual medium; telling a story has just become the most common way to use the medium, though far from a necessary condition of it. The director sees it instead as one of enquiry. When a film gets caught in its story it limits that possibility as we start to think of characters and situations over ideas and forms. There are more than enough great narrative films that manage to generate thought (usually through theme) and possess a rigorous form (though allied to content), for Godard’s claim to appear untenable. After all, both Pickpocket and A Man Escaped are narrative films exploring belief while remaining very exact in the form they take. But what matters is that they are viable claims for Godard. Rather than making a film about characters in the Resistance, Godard instead offers a film that plays on the word rather than develops it as a specific story. When his financial backer, gallerist Mr Rosenthal says he wants Edgar to make more than money, then it is in contrast to the film that will probably be made out of the Resistance story Berthe’s grandparents are selling. While, according to Richard Brody, Godard “believes that France is enduring an American cultural occupation as significant as the German occupation during the Second World War, and equally hard to resist” (New Yorker) this isn’t quite what the film is stating, if for no other reason than such a statement has first to pass through the form the film takes. Usually, if a filmmaker wants to make a statement it comes through the drama, with characters at odds making a decent case for their claim but the audience being left well aware which position is the correct one. Jack Nicholson might make in his eyes a good case for protecting his country in A Few Good Men, but that doesn’t mean the audience is supposed to agree with him; we are supposed to side with Tom's Cruise's prosecutor. It gives the film the look of balance while it is clear who is right. 

   Godard provokes us with his arguments and baffles us by his form. Most of the assertive claims are made by a character we never properly see: Berthe, a woman whose parents have taken their lives and where she will do so as well. When she attacks the Americans, this is two years before she will kill herself but because we are now in the past after Godard gives us the first two-thirds in the present, when she makes these claims we know she will take her own life. We might be sympathetic to this woman who works in minimum wage jobs because she can’t tolerate the trivial demands of TV acting, doesn’t wish to practise law and always speaks her mind. But nothing suggests she is a happy person just as little indicates Edgar is a considerate person. These are people Godard expresses his ideas through, and there are many easier ways to put a message across than through a haughty figure from money and a woman inclined to view things despairingly. Though we discover in the past section that Edgar recently broke up with his girlfriend after ten years, this isn’t presented as an emotional moment; more as an exemplification of theme in human terms. It comes when it seems Berthe drives Edgar to the station and he talks about how strange it is that things take on meaning when the story ends, and Berthe says “its because history is coming in.” Godard doesn’t offer this exchange as a typical shot/counter shot of two people getting in a car and travelling to the station. It starts with a superimposition: the lapping Brittany waves and Edgar and Berthe getting ready to leave the house. The film then cuts to the rain on the windscreen wipers as Berthe and Edgar remain unseen (except briefly Berthe in the rearview mirror) as they talk, with the film proposing that any feelings expressed are contained by a problem far greater than the characters’ expression. 

   This has always been vital to Godard’s cinema: to contain characters within a problem greater than an individual’s need to solve it, partly because the problem isn’t an individual’s to solve, but also because the director wishes to view events through a societal, historical and cultural cosmos the characters pass through and that it would be hopelessly anthropocentric, even solipsistic, if they thought they could change it. It might seem despairing to see that out of this confusion Edgar can’t seem to decide on the project he wishes to make, and the tubercular Berthe will take her life, but that would be to fall into character specifics that Godard wishes us to resist. The music throughout indicates a melancholy that transcends character and situation, and the images ask us to contemplate the intricate histories of which the characters are merely a part. The best one can do is resist. As Godard says, "...the artistic act is an act of resistance against something. I wouldn't call it an act of freedom but an act of resistance.' (Enthusiasm) The film's complex approach to referencing isn't to succumb to a story bolstered by others (as often in Tarantino's work) but to offer manifold perspectives on one. 


© Tony McKibbin