JLG/ECM

Written for the conference “For ever Godard”, London(Tate Modern), june 2001. Published in august 2004 : For ever Godard, Blackdog Publishing, London, M. Temple, J. Williams & M. Witt eds.

Abstract. The “marriage” between Swiss director JLG and German label ECM raises certain aesthetic questions, which can be grouped under three headings. 1. In an analytic way, we can draw how the ECM tracks are chosen, cutted up and then related to the images. 2. On the stylistic side, we can think about the postmodern properties of the final audiovisual work. Does Godard’s collaboration with ECM signify that a champion of Modernism has defected to the postmodern ‘enemy’ ? Theoretical tools borrowed from cognitive acoustics are used here, including Ray Jackendoff’s structure of reduction. 3. In a comparative way, now, we can focus on the CDs. Does bringing out a film soundtrack on its own constitute the creation of a new work, comparable to a piece of concrete music, or is it a mutilation, in which the image is experienced as missing from both the CD and the minds of the frustrated audience?

From images of the world to the world of images

Written with Lucy Mazdon for The French Cinema Book, Michael Temple & Michael Witt ed., British Film Institute, London 2004.

Abstract. This essay explores the major changes in film technique in France in the period from 1960 to 2004, in particular the redirection of the focus of research and development from hardware to software. Techniques for the mechanical and chemical recording recording of traces of the world have been progressively replaced by technologies for the arithmetic generation of images. Main descriptions: the Coutant camera used by la Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Pierre Beauviala and Aäton’s RealTime recording system, Lavalou & Masseron’s Louma crane, Löchen & Chédeville’s LC Concept digital sound system, and French CGI companies like Buf and Mac Guff Ligne.

The cinematic apparatus in the digital era

Written for the symposium « What convergence for which medias ? », Torino (Italy), December 1998. Published in What convergence for which media ?, University of the West England/Centre for european studies, Bristol 1999. This is the short version of the french article « Derrière et devant le traitement numérique des images », published in Cinéma, audiovisuel, nouveaux médias/La convergence : un enjeu européen ?, S.-M. Peten, Fr. Sojcher & Y. Thiec eds., L’Harmattan, Paris 2001.

Abstract. The digital revolution, as far as the cinematic apparatus is concerned, exists more in the mind than on the screen. Cognitive schemes and mental images, on both sides of the production and reception process, are quite different in the computer-world and in the world of prints. The former is governed by fantasm of eternity, immateriality, symbolic links between images and the world ; the latter by the idea of death, the ephemeral essence of things, analogical links between images and the world. Today, cinephiles try to combine both – and it is here, in their minds, that one finds the point of convergence of the « pixel culture » and the « old cinema ».

Forthcoming :

The Sinking of the Self

Freudian hydraulic patterns in Le Grand bleu

To be published in Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie (eds), The Films of Luc Besson: Master of the Spectacular, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.

Abstract. « There is nothing in the depths; everything is black », says Joanna in Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu. Is this a version of punk’s ‘no future’ tailored for a wide public twelve years after it had been proclaimed? If dolphins, medical experiments and sporting competition are value-free pretexts, then we might be inclined to say yes. Or is it rather an appeal for the return of the Father, one of these reactionary themes modernist critics often accuse postmodernism of harbouring? This essay studies the persistence in this film of what Freud calls Hilflosigkeit, the feeling of being forsaken, originally present in the baby who cannot fulfil his desires without grown-up help. Freudian, cognitive and sociological tools are used.

To cut or let live

Jean-Luc Godard and the soundtrack

To be published in Graeme Harper (ed.) The Continuum Companion to Sound in Film and the Visual Media, 2006.

Abstract. Godard uses of sound in a way which can be seen as textualist. According to Joseph Carroll, textualism is « the idea that language or culture constitutes or constructs the world according to its own internal principles ». So , Godard’s basic procedures are musical cut-up and multiple frustrations of the expectations of tonal pleasure. Since neo-romantic music is « sold to the culture industry », he slaughters Ruby’s arms, the sad-and-beautiful song by Tom Waits, in Prénom Carmen, clearly following a Brechtian way of thinking. But ghosts are haunting him : the question of sound-traces functioning as immanent proof, and the « pure beauty » of perfect chords.