Merely War
I see several reasons for the commercial failure of Godard’s latest: no doubt the provocation, the absence of stars in the credits, the release too close to that Little Soldier[1] who had already “annoyed”… but the main reason for the divorce with the public seems to me to be, in truth, the abundance of content along with too much purity of expression. If the mind is constantly full, it’s never excited. All the reflections being included, the film becomes obligatory passage and refuses escape.
What the spectator demands at the cinema, is to make him believe, on returning from the “voyage into the blue”, that it has made everything up for him. However, not only is Les carabiniers only made of observations and actual findings but also, at the same time discordant and melodic like the best Bartok, the whole thing is never reassuring. A spectator rarely accepts a universe in which he cannot recognize himself in anyone and that, at the end of the day, does not reassure him.
Impassioned and dazzled by this new equilibrium achieved by Godard, surprised to find in this oeuvre, not the opposite, but the complement of Le petit soldat, I was preparing to make this article a series of scathing jokes more directly (and hypocritically) addressed to two or three of my friends who I am tempted to despise for having, this time, refused dialogue; when I realized that this would disservice Godard and his film and, what’s more, would be to fall into the trap, a bit later, but in the same way as the film’s detractors. For, if it [the article] first has to go beyond the provocation, pure reflex of timidity, it still has to go beyond the premise, pretext to variations, to lead to a very personal morality of which Godard finally lays the foundations.
I have talked of the provocation as if it was just modesty. It is certainly also a reaction to a certain cinema called leftist, where the courage of expression consists in removing the weeds in the way of the brave socialist non-violent and inexperienced (Le combat dans l’île)[2], or to ennoble the cinéma-vérité without depriving itself however of an honorable contempt towards idiots, since ultimately poetry gains the victory (Le joli mai)[3].
What discomforts in Les carabiniers, is that people speak of the war, without proposing any solution for neutralizing it, neither general or particular, long or short term. Yes, what must discomfort, is that here people speak of the war as if one could not prevent it, as if it were inevitable, but finding it atrocious all the same. And one finds it atrocious because it’s a source of ugliness and injustice; because the blood gets in the mud and it has a dirty color when it dries; because there’s nothing more despicable than obligatory hatred (albeit addressed to the stranglehold of the capitalist world); because it’s constantly the occasion of an excess of feelings and such overflows are useless; precisely, because it’s useless like death.
But no doubt, to reassure, it has to make of the war a spectacle with the good guys who fight against the bad guys for the Noble Humanitarian Cause… If the former win, we explain why they necessarily had to win; otherwise we will demonstrate how these are the martyrs. In this universe then, a death is revolting or just. For Godard, I repeat, it is simply useless.
I know everything that one can think of the “encore”s which distill Michel-Ange when the director completes the young Leninophile. In the third[4], we are revolted by this taste apparently free of the atrocious; furthermore, we smile in asking ourselves when he will have the courage to go too far and, at the whispering of the last “encore”, the emotion will have gripped us. It arises from the atrocious, perhaps, but mainly due to the fact that we were able to smile, just like we laughed in Lubitsch’s work when the German pilots would throw themselves through the hatch on the order of the fake Führer.[5] With the difference that, for Lubitsch, everything would still seem reassuring since we would still be able to choose our side.
Here, the exploiters and the exploited, the vanquishers and the vanquished, the living and the dead all have the same face, and this face is not sympathetic.
The objective sympathy than an author can grant to his characters is very quickly transformed into subjective sympathy by the spectator who, recognizing his own, then accuses the author of demagoguery towards others… The only honest way would be to make them equal in antipathy. But, and we’ll see later why, Godard has not emphasized this antipathy as did Autant-Lara in La traversée de Paris[6], or even, with more honesty, Mocky in Les vierges[7]. Rather he compensates it, he attenuates it by the scenes of admirable repose where the heroes discover unattainable beauty and discover themselves in it (deeply moving sequences of postcards, or the caresses of the screen that Michel-Ange-Juross finishes by tearing without altering the image.)
The message (if he has a message there; I mean if Godard has put it there, or if we want to cram it there at all costs) remains entirely in watermark. Therefore, the film presents itself as a parable, which isn’t novel, but on the other hand, the great, the admirable novelty is that it doesn’t contain some symbol, like in the world where we live, like in our human affairs, without this being completely our own, without them being completely ours… And what differentiates us from Michel-Ange, Cléopâtre, Ulysse, Vénus and the Carabiniers, is their total absence of lucidity.
This universe of deaf-mutes where no one’s problems really interest their fellow man, engenders a comic heaviness which saves the film from “weightlessness” and prevents it from becoming one of those fireballs such as Antonioni creates.
Thus it exposes itself, without formal vertigo, the non-communication, like a primary truth and not as an arrived-at conclusion. It only has force coming from itself; none can achieve this if it isn’t first embedded, swallowed and digested before being reflected.
In Les carabiniers, like in all the great works of inspiration, the cinema becomes atonal. It no longer indicates the events but the actions, no longer the feelings but the motives. Don’t look for who loves who, or who regrets what, but look at some characters live, suffer their charm, and taste all the riches of the world in a suitcase. The essential phases of the plot are located in the ellipses.
Was it possible to make an entire film with neither interior movement nor actual physical presence? Undoubtably not, since it retains here a few allusions to the body and the soul, such as the crunching of sugar and the salute of the artist. But, outside of these weak indications, nothing is tangible, nothing is rational, and nevertheless nothing is abstract because, if nothing is plausible, everything is true.
The time of four or five zooms in homage to Rossellini, the space of two or three “merdre” in a context à la Feuillade (but he also had to demonstrate that Jarry[8] + Feuillade equaled Vigo), and here we are brought back to earth by a pun very thick, very dense. The situation repeats itself enough to avoid the unnoticed and to overcome the lassitude. And I claim that, if Les carabiniers had not possessed this kind of weight, this visible heaviness, it would have been a film without humanity, thus a film contrary to its ambitions, instead of simply being what it is: a film contrary to its form. (And it’s why I prefer it to Papatakis’ beautiful film, Les abysses[9], too intelligent and measured to excess).
Everything that the film hides, with more or less opacity: that stupidity, envy, rapacity, and pride are the feelings engendered or increased by the war, is not the most important; nor even the absurdity of political parties; nor even that Communism and Christianity are obsolete, anachronistic things; nor even, still, that only the artist is entitled to respect; the important thing about this film, is the immense love of life, once again demonstrated by the absurd. The important thing, is that perspective of Venus, her quiet appetite for beauty, which makes us monstrosities appear less monstrous, the errors less serious, the criminals less responsible, the victims less innocent. The important thing about this film is thus to make us reach for a morality more just, more lucid, one of total benevolence: a morality of Mercy.
I would like to end on that serious note. I have described what I have felt at the sight of a closed nut… But when it’s open, as is approximately said by Trenet[10] in a song which must please Godard, when it’s open, one doesn’t have the time to see; we bite it and then good evening.
Paul VECCHIALI
Paul VECCHIALI
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[1] Godard’s Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier] (1963), here personified, had been filmed in 1960 but due to censors wasn’t released in France until 25 January 1963; Les carabiniers was released just four months later on 31 May 1963.
[2] Alain Cavalier’s Le combat dans l’île (1962).
[3] Chris Maker’s Le joli mai (1963).
[4] The third arrondissement of Paris.
[5] A reference to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).
[6] Claude Autant-Lara’s La traversée de Paris (1956), known in English as Four Bags Full.
[7] Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Les vierges [The Virgins] (1963).
[8] Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a French symbolist writer best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896) and for coining the term/concept pataphysics, which Wikipedia says “uses absurd irony to portray symbolic truths (and playfully vice versa).”
[9] Nikos Papatakis’ Les abysses (1963).
[10] Charles Trenet (1913-2001), a French singer-songwriter. The song referenced is “Une noix” [“A Nut”] (1951).
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