Kate Gardiner

670 words

October 18, 2005

Speech story 2

Georges Didi-Huberman of l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences socials, Paris, spoke about his comparison of the montage-style works of Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard Monday afternoon at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge. The gathering, attended by about 40 people, was one of three university-sponsored seminars in film history and film theory this semester and was organized by David Rodowick, a co-chairman of the event and a professor of visual-environmental studies at Harvard.

The seminar, entitled “Memory and Montage: Lanzmann and Godard,” featured clips and in-depth comparisons of the historical documentaries about the Holocaust written, directed and produced by each filmmaker. Didi-Huberman used the seminar to discuss the historical nature of Godard and Lanzmann’s works, and to further investigate the use of film as a historical document.

Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour epic, Shoah (1985) and Godard’s History (Stories) of Cinema (6 episodes, 1997-1998) are examples of the mosaic structure of montage essays, and both attempt to discuss the Holocaust through unconventional means; in Shoah, Lanzmann uses no archive footage, but instead causes individuals to tell their own stories; in l’Historie(s) du cinema, Godard uses images that reflect his feelings about the Holocaust, and also as social commentary.

A central image to Didi-Huberman’s discussion was Godard’s superimposition of Elizabeth Taylor rising from the water in A Place in the Sun (1951) over a fresco of Mary Magdalene and Christ. Taylor’s sensual image is eternally between the reaching hands of the Christians and presents an obvious dichotomy. Didi-Huberman discusses this, “In Godard’s free-choice, his fiction, if you prefer, the artist gives himself here, according to western tradition, the sovereign freedom of reusing.” In his discussion of Lanzmann’s work, Didi-Huberman was entranced by his use of nearly endless tracking shots without focus or end.

Both directors interspersed photographs and drawings from the Holocaust, and Godard also exhibits his own fascination with the dichotomy of the work of the American director George Stevens. Stevens, prior to World War II was a Hollywood director. He was eventually assigned to the U.S. Army and documented the war effort in Europe, from D-Day to the concentration camps. Several sequences of Godard’s work are entirely of cinematography produced by Stevens’, including a scene of Taylor and Montgomery Clift, also from A Place in the Sun, wherein Godard draws a parallel between Clift, who’s head is resting on Taylor’s lap in a sumptuous pool and the corpse of a man who has been hanged; the positioning of the living and the dead bodies are the same.

Didi-Huberman’s thesis yielded several complex questions from the well-heeled public in attendance. Guiliana Bruno, another professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard, the author of several well-known books on film theory and a member of the audience, asked Didi-Huberman about montage as a new mnemonic device, “these films in many ways question the language of cinema, and cinema’s own ability to be able to be the image of memory and to become a new form of archive… one of the things that seemed intriguing was the focus (of Lanzmann’s work) on the train, and the train’s own tracks… I would love to hear a talk about the means of transport that was the machine of death that was parallel with the emergence of cinema,” to which Didi-Huberman replied,

“I think what you are saying shows very well how Lanzmann’s problem is to construct analogies. What is to go from Marseilles to Auschwitz? The train, the organization of traffic, it’s extremely important… in Lanzmann’s film. I think it’s very interesting how the geographic organization of the mechanics is linked to the construction of the narrative. There is a link between geography and the narrative.”

Other members of the public were less esoteric in their thoughts after the seminar. “This is a different type of memory… I’m also interested in… using images to construct ideas,” said Anna Grichting, a European graduate student at the Harvard School of Design.

The seminars will continue throughout the semester on Thursday afternoons, and are followed by a brief reception with the speaker.