Guy Debord - The Role of Godard.

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Situationist International
The Role of Godard
In Cinema Godard presently represents formal pseudofreedom and the pseudocritique
of manners and values--the two inseparable manifestations of all fake, coopted
modern art. Everyone does everything to present him as a misunderstood and
unappreciated artist, shockingly audacious and unjustly despised; and everyone
praises him, from Elle magazine to Aragon-the-Senile. Despite the absence of any
real critiques of Godard, we see developing a sort of analogy to the famous theory
of the increase of resistances in socialist regimes: the more Godard is hailed as a
brilliant leader of modern art, the more people rush to his defense against
incredible plots. Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are
automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at
explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard
produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a
subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge
educated by the mass media. Godard's "critiques" never go beyond the innocuous
humor typical of nightclub comics or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely
the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same
drugstore paperbacks. The two most famous lines from the most read poem of the most
overrated Spanish poet ("Terrible five o'clock in the afternoon--the blood, I don't
want to see it" in Pierrot-le-Fou--this is the key to Godard's method. The most
famous renegade of modern art, Aragon, in Les Lettres Françaises (9 September
1965), has rendered an homage to his younger colleague which, coming from such an
expert, is perfectly fitting: "Art today is Jean-Luc Godard . . . of a superhuman
beauty . . . of a constantly sublime beauty. . . . There is no precedent to Godard
except Lautréamont. . . . This child of genius." Even the most naïve can scarcely
be taken in after such a testimonial from such a source.

Godard is a Swiss from Lausanne who envied the chic of the Swiss of Geneva, and
then the chic of the Champs-Elysées, and his successful ascent up from the
provinces is most exemplary at a time when the system is striving to usher so many
"culturally deprived" people into a respectful consumption of culture--even
"avant-garde" culture if nothing else will do. We are not referring here to the
ultimately conformist exploitation of any art that professes to be innovative and
critical. We are pointing out Godard's directly conformist use of film.
To be sure, films, like songs, have intrinsic powers of conditioning the spectator:
beauties, if you will, that are at the disposition of those who presently have the
possibility of expressing themselves. Up to a point such people may make a
relatively clever use of those powers. But it is a sign of the general conditions
of our time that their cleverness is so limited, and that the extent of their ties
with the dominant ways of life quickly reveals the disappointing limits of their
enterprises. Godard is to film what Lefebvre or Morin is to social critique: each
possesses the appearance of a certain freedom in style or subject matter (in
Godard's case, a slightly free manner in comparison with the stale formulas of
cinematic narration). But they have taken this very freedom from elsewhere: from
what they have been able to grasp of the advanced experiences of the era. They are
the Club Med of modern thought (see in this issue "The Packaging of 'Free Time'").
They make use of a caricature of freedom, as marketable junk, in place of the
authentic. This is done on all terrains, including that of formal artistic freedom
of expression, which is merely one sector of the general problem of
pseudocommunication. Godard's "critical" art and his admiring art critics all work
to conceal the present problems of a critique of art--the real experience, in the
SI's phrase, of a "communication containing its own critique." In the final
analysis the present function of Godardism is to forestall a situationist use of
the cinema.
Aragon has been for some time developing his theory of the collage in all modern
art up to Godard. This is nothing other than an attempt to interpret détournement
in such a way as to bring about its cooption by the dominant culture. Laying the
foundations for a Togliattist variant of French Stalinism, Garaudy and Aragon are
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setting up a "completely open" artistic modernism, just as they are moving "from
anathema to dialogue" with the priests. Godard could become their artistic
Teilhardism. In fact the collage, made famous by cubism during the dissolution of
plastic art, is only a particular case (a destructive moment) of détournement: it
is displacement, the infidelity of the element. Détournement, originally formulated
by Lautréamont, is a return to a superior fidelity of the element. In all cases,
détournement is dominated by the dialectical devaluing-revaluing of the element
within the development of a unifying meaning. But the collage of the merely
devalued element has been widely used, well before being constituted as a Pop Art
doctrine, in the modernist snobbism of the displaced object (making a spice bottle
out of a chemistry flask, etc.).
This acceptance of devaluation is now being extended to a method of combining
neutral and indefinitely interchangeable elements. Godard is a particularly boring
example of such a use without negation, without affirmation, and without quality.

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