Renewal of Perspective: La difficulté d’être

Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. (Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author)

Narrative contains the mobility that could threaten the clarity of vision in a constant renewal of perspective; space becomes place – narrative as the taking place of film – in a movement which is no more than the fulfilment of the Renaissance impetus, an impetus that De Kooning can describe as follows: “It was up to the artist to measure out the exact space for a person to die in or to be dead already. The exactness of the space was determined or rather inspired by whatever reason the person was dying or being killed for. The space thus measured out on the original plane of the canvas surface became a “place” somewhere on the floor. (Stephen Heath, Narrative Space)

A paraphrase of and on a shot of the character Nana, embodied by Anna Karina, in Godard’s film Vivre sa vie.

LA DIFFICULTE D’ETRE is a series of 24 photographs. In a number of ways, the project refers to the excerpt quoted above from Stephen Heaths seminal essay Narrative Space of the year 1976. The author juxtaposes the characteristics of film as narrative, time-based medium versus the notion of a „clarity of vision“, i.e. a monocular, distinct, unambiguous perspective. Stephen Heath suggests that this is the ultimate fulfillment of a Renaissance dream, of an impulse which the painter Willem de Kooning describes as follows: „It was the task of the artist to measure the space within which a character was going to die or had died already. The exactitude of this space was always defined by the specific reason for the character’s death. The space originally laid out and measured on the canvas thus became a „place“ somewhere, anywhere, on the floor.“ Countless times, the medium of photography has been connected to the subject of death. This project as well touches upon this lineage.

A director must believe in the truth of his subject. He must believe in vampires and miracles. (Dreyer)

The work LA DIFFICULTE D’ETRE incorporates Heath’s line of thoughts by on the one hand, harking back to the narrative space of a film (Vivre sa vie), in order to put it in relation to the photographic image as still frame; on the other hand, it deals with the conditions of a movie character’s „death“ (Nana), in an attempt to measure the space which this „dead“ body takes up on a Paris street in spring of 1962. Further on, it investigates and re-stages the possibility for its symbolic resurrection as contemporary revenant by juxtaposing the original Godardian cadrage with the “countershot” from the perspective of the character. Thus, we are able to see what the film never showed: Nana’s point of view, transgressing the limitations of Godard’s original frame. 

The photographic still image distinguishes itself from a film still insofar as it shows a perspective, a frame, which in the film itself might be similar, but never identical. Whereas a film still is identical with the respective film frame, a still image is an always-new construction, a staging done for the photographer, not for the cameraperson: for a different way of perception. This is another distinction, which the project LA DIFFICULTE D’ETRE attempts to fathom by introducing the character’s perspective as a “new”, contemporary still.

At the same time, the work is meant to be a sort of photographic footnote to the overall project series X Characters (ongoing since 2001), which focuses on the attempt to rescript iconic female identities of modernist films as contemporary new versions; and in particular to the episode X NaNa / Subroutine of the year 2004.

/ INSERT1 /

ACTRESS (curious): How did they write your death?

SCRIPT GIRL (matter-of-factly): Shot in Paris... Spring 1962... Bullet right in the heart... left to die on the streets.

ACTRESS (interested like comparing gossip stories, in "awe" at first): Really..! And Paris streets are so beautiful in spring...Tsk. That sounds just... criminal.

SCRIPT GIRL (nodding like agreement): "Cinema directors"…

ACTRESS (nods as well): …

SCRIPT GIRL: ...and you don't know the half of what was going on behind the scenes.

ACTRESS: (shaking head, knowledgably) Hmm…

SCRIPT GIRL: But eventually I reworked that whole ending in my terms... You know? Found a... "loophole". (looking knowingly to the ACTRESS, half smiling, as if remembering fondly)

SCRIPT GIRL: Each of us finds our way out.

ACTRESS: Our way out? ... (thinking about those words, then continuing)

SCRIPT GIRL: And your scene?

ACTRESS: Mine was to be suicide.

SCRIPT GIRL (also politely showing surprise, like "Really?") That didn't work?

ACTRESS: (matter-of-factly) Oh, it worked all the time... at different times. ... (frustrated a bit) But it meant nothing, because I just kept returning.

SCRIPT GIRL: (interested) That must be an amazing sensation, just to know you will keep returning from your own death.

ACTRESS: (shaking her head emphatically) Oh no... it’s cold.... it means you were never alive... just a projection. Some characters should just finally die.

Dialogue between Giuliana (The Actress) and Nana (The Script girl).

WAKING

Benjamin and Frampton, both concerned with pulling images out of ‚historic time’, articulate that action as awakening. Benjamin writes: „Just as Proust begins his life story with waking, so must every representation of history begin with waking; in fact, it should deal with nothing else.“ In turn, thinking of Joyce, Frampton writes: „Even James Joyce, the most ardent of newsreel devotees, said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. (Rachel Harris, Nostalgia)

Still frame of Vivre sa vie Anna Karina as Nana lying dead in the street, in front of the Restaurant des Studios, 17 Rue Esquirol

The title RENEWAL OF PERSPECTIVE suggests in which way this symbolic act of „re-awakening“ could take place: by answering Godard’s intention with the perspective of Nana upon re-awakening (another reference comes to mind here: the character Hari’s reawakening after her suicide in Solaris). The series of 24 shots, each pair belonging to one “tableau” of Vivre sa vie (as Godard himself had claimed, that Vivre sa vie is a film in twelve tableaux, thus telling a passion history) ends with an identical re-staging of the Godardian cadrage, on the very location in Paris, in front of a house and a restaurant called „Restaurant des Studios“. This restaurant still exists as of today, although now in a process of renovation, and is located in 17 rue esquirol, around the corner from the Rue Jenner, where Jean-Pierre Melville used to have his studio (hence the name of the restaurant), as well as being near the rue Jeanne d'Arc, suggesting a link to the earlier sequence with Dreyer's film.

At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. (Gilles Deleuze)

Still of Vivre sa vie (1962) Nana’s dead body has been digitally erased.

The character’s death is screened as a „reversible operation“: by way of employing a technical “turn”. This might be the cause for the fact that „the space which has been measured on the canvas“ becomes, at first, an area somewhere on the ground, and later on, turns into a perspective, a point of view which changes the course of the narrative and allows for the character to develop her own perspective, which moves beyond her own „death“. The Godardian „shot“ (camera and weapon alike) is returned by the character: a promise, which Nana has made long ago. in the film X NaNa / Subroutine (2004)  – but not yet fulfilled.

Here, the basic inventory of the photographic medium, as stated by Walter Benjamin (portrait, city view, world of things) is framed from an otherworldly perspective, or from the underworld of modernist film history: as if Nana was Eurydike, a border crosser and border liner as well, between the realms of the living and dead. Now, she creates her own view of the city, a subjective location shot, on the means of production of this shot, on herself as a dead body resurrected, therefore also: a portrait of the artist as a dead woman. 

Cinema’s sole specificity is that of collecting images that are no longer made for it. (Serge Daney)

/ INSERT 2 /

NaNa: The only big problem is ... when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.

Chou: NaNa… everyone just knows that there needs to be an ending at some point. And so, in the end it does not matter which shot is doing that…

NaNa: (pensively, turning to the photo) Well…I kind of recall… how my shot ended…

Chou: This shot you remember…  it was a shot to seal the construction.  It’s about the economy, not about sentiment… (pauses, staring at her interrogatingly) What will you do now?

NaNa: (Meaning it..) Return the gift… Some endings should be denied. Maybe... connect the shots - make a loop… (deciding to herself) ... I will get in touch with him.
(NaNa turns around and  pins the photo on the wall above the bed…Then she gets up and leaves the frame, the camera stays focused on the image on the wall, zooms in closer, stops)

From: X NaNa / Subroutine (2004)

Still from X NaNa / Subroutine (2004) Annika Kuhl as NaNa, Anna Karina’s new Nana-Version.

A totally deceiving impression of Jeanne d’Arc was accomplished by the Paris Cinémathèque’s insistence, during the 1950s and ’60s, of projecting Jeanne d’Arc in very slow motion – at 16 frames per second, rather than 24. This experience is immortalized in Godard’s Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962) when Nana (Anna Karina) cries watching Jeanne d’Arc in slow motion. But this experience has little to do with the one Dreyer intended, and all the more so in that, in Vivre sa vie as at the Cinémathèque, the movie transpires in deathly silence, whereas when Jeanne d’Arc was shown in Copenhagen and Paris in 1928 it was with a score commissioned from two French composers of musical comedies, Léo Pouget and Victor Alix, “a vast symphonic poem in thirteen sections for orchestra, chorus and soloists, which very closely follows the film’s sequences and is synchronized with their intertitles”. And printed on the conductor’s score is the notice: “Performance of this score is OBLIGATORY during presentation of the film.” The obligation has been ignored for seventy years. (From: Senses of Cinema)

/ INSERT 3 /

NANA: Like… if a scene calls for their death?

GODARD: Films are instruments to examine the inside of people, and that’s why people are so fond of movies and why they’ll never die. As the actors don’t, as well, neither the characters.

NANA: But some characters die before the movie ends.

NANA (cont’d): In that one movie of yours, remember, where the girl is shot by the pimps?  Why did you have to have her die?

GODARD: Oh you mean NaNa? But why do you look at it like that? Maybe it’s only there, that the history of Nana has begun…

NANA: A gun is not a camera.

GODARD: And a camera is not a gun. If it were, they wouldn’t still blindfold those that are about to be shot. The positive is in the projector, the negative in the camera. The positive of a film is like life, it just exists. And then, one has to create the negative, „fate“. And only after one has died, death transforms a life into „fate“. One has to produce the negative all life long.

NANA: When the character dies, the soul leaves the scene.

From: X NaNa / Subroutine (2004), Chat room dialogue between NaNa and Godard.

Notes

The format of the photographs refers to the original format of the legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma from the year 1962 (18,5 x 25 cm, double page 37 x 25 cm). The film Vivre sa vie was reviewed for the first time in issue 133 of July 1962. In issues 137 of November 1962, Jean-André Fieschi published an articel with the title „La difficulté d’être de Jean-Luc Godard“, which discussed the director’s oeuvre so far, including Vivre sa vie.

Café Rallye Villiers, 3 place de la Libération, Levallois-Perret

Côte à Côte, 25 avenue Wagram, Paris

8 rue Verneuil, Paris

Cinéma du Panthéon, 13 rue Victor Cousin

Café Bar Brasserie Les Patios, 5 place de la Sorbonne, Paris

10 rue de la Débarquadère, Paris

Le Bistro des Halles, 12 rue au pain, Versailles

Zimmer 603, Hotel Eiffel-Seine, 3 boulevard de Grenelle, Paris

Tour St. Jacques / rue de Rivoli, Paris

Café Zimmer, 1 place du Châtelet, Paris

10 rue Rambouillet, Paris

Restaurant des Studios, 17 rue Esquirol, Paris

List of original locations

1 – Café Rallye-Villiers, Place de la Libération 3, Levallois. Nana meets her ex-husband Paul (André Labarthe).

2 – Nana at work in a record store, Avenue de Wagram 24 (today a fashion store).

3 – Nana’s apartment building at Rue Verneuil 6.

4 – Interior of a cinema. Nana watches La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc by Theodor Dreyer. It is the Cinéma Panthéon in rue Victor-Cousin, still existing today. In 1962, it was owned by film producer Pierre Braunberger.

5 – A café, named  L’Escholier in 1962 (today Café Les Patios), where Nana meets a photographer. Place de la Sorbonne Nr. 5.

6 – Nana walks down the Rue de la débarcadère, passing by the Hotel Ô Saisons, which in 1962 was a brothel, today transformed into a Swinger Club.

7 – A café in Versailles, 20 rue au Pain. Nana meets an old friend who has become a prostitute.

8 – The hotel scenes were shot at the Hotel Eiffel Seine, Boulevard de Grenelle 3.

9 – A street scene close to the rue de rivoli, next to the Tour St. Jacques.

10 –Café Zimmer, Place du Châtelet 1. This is where Nana meets the philosopher Brice Parain.

11 – A car ride along rue de rambouillet, past a former factory then called “Enfer et ses fils”. The factory has turned into an apartment building.

12 – The car ride ends in rue esquirol, in front of the Restaurant des Studios, around the corner of the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, where Jean-Pierre Melville had his studio. The restaurant existed until summer 2008.

Credits

Research: Jean-Franois Lack
Photos: Jean-Luc Bertini
Organisation / Production: Elsa Okazaki

Thank you:Roland-François Lack who researched the exact locations of Vivre sa vie and was so generous as to put them to my disposal. Raymond Bellour and Christa Bluemlinger, Matthias Herrmann, Pierre Weiss for all their support.

William Abbou (Cote à Cote), Maïla Doukoure (Pantheon Cinéma), Jean-Luc Gintrand (Café Zimmer), Monsieur Prat (Café Bar Les Patios), Frederique Porchon (Hotel Eiffel-Seine), and Madame Sandrais (Café Rallye Villiers).