By LEDA TENÓRIO DA MOTTA*
Incomprehension covers the very speech of the guerrillas, not always translated, so that the words do not jump out in front of what is seen.
Suddenly, in the 1980s of the last century, the widespread denunciation that images falsify and cancel our experience of the world — see The perfect crime by Jean Baudrillard — and the insistent lecture that it is necessary to distance them from dealing with real things found cinema. Focused on the ethical question of the representation of catastrophe in the post-Holocaust situation, an intellectual of the word — so much so that he was linked to Sartre's group and the magazine Modern Times and a particularly close interlocutor of Simonede Beauvoir —, then came out publicly to re-establish our prejudices against icons and idols on new bases. All the more forcefully as he began to involve them in the ethical, rather than aesthetic, question of the discourse of testimony. If we already lack the conceptual apparatus to fulfill the task of naming the absolute trauma — he conjectured —, what chance could our imaginary void have, in the face of the extreme?
It had all started unexpectedly, about ten years earlier, when equally influential colleagues from the top echelons of the Israeli government made him an irrefutable request. That he take advantage of the opportunity afforded by his position in the internationally influential philosophical circle to which he belonged to, as a French Jew, to come to the defense of the Jewish state that was emerging, at that time, from the Six-Day War. It was in response to this demand and without having had any involvement with cinema until then — unlike Sartre's well-known collaboration with the script for Freud beyond the soul by John Huston —, in response to Tel Aviv, he immediately sets out to film a short documentary, to be called, in strict observance of the political meaning of the project: Why Israel?
The film was released in 1973. It features never-before-seen scenes of the life of the Diaspora Jew returning to his ancestral land, 25 years after the events that led to the great return. Notably, the movement of the early immigrant intellectuals, who were responsible for the spiritual guidance of the process, and the situation of the last Jews to arrive.
It is after this that the aforementioned sorcerer's apprentice has to do something much bigger. Something not only much longer, but in reverse order to that of Why Israel. A 10-hour panel to focus not on what was currently happening in the Middle East, but on the immediate cause of what was happening, the return of the Jews to their first land. What was required, more than an overview of the current conditions of a problematic state structure that was triggering a geopolitical crisis in the contemporary world, was an in-depth look at the past history of the Jews who had now been returned by the Nazi war machine. With all that this implied in the search for survivors of the concentration camps, who were still in large numbers at the time and still present throughout Europe.
We are talking about Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann. A filmic libel that would not only place the improvised director at the center of auteur cinema and cinephile attention, all over the world, but in Brazil, it would be in the disturbing documentary style of Eduardo Coutinho. A Babel-like chorus of voices of those rescued from the Lager, in these circumstances located and called by the editorial secretary of Modern times opening up to the man with the camera in his hand what he had become the wound of their lives.
Memorial restoration driven by a sense of duty to say, by the strength of a director-regent who works, as coldly as possible, see his firmness in front of the barber of Treblinka, when he asks him to stop explaining what exactly he was doing, at the foot of the gas chambers, in the position of preparing the toilet for those who were going to die. Not only rigorous in relation to what to take from the participants, that is, their terrible memories, but in relation to modus operandi, entirely oriented towards testimony, all affection discarded. In 1985, at the time of its launch, in Paris, the new generations gathered in groups to listen, rather than watch, to these hours and hours of deposition, in reverent listening.
Et pour cause: Shoah emerged as a cinematic turning point. Suddenly, it replaced American war films, which were trivializing Nazi barbarity in the cultural industry circuit — where the sacrificial term “holocaust” was coined — with the extremely serious documentary. It replaced the Greek word with a religious background that was evoking the death camps with the Hebrew word “Shoah,” referring only to the disaster, the calamity, the collapse. It replaced the perspective of the tangible evidence of the image archives obtained by the cinematographers embarked with the Allied troops with the voice line. The idolatrous presentability of the unstoppable horror with the verbal mosaic tablet.
Since then, considering the Nazi genocide as something bordering on unintegrable — in practice, as infigurable, judging by the use of the word —, a current called the catastrophe-and-representation, at the origin of another current called the testimonial literature, which will add to the arguments of the philosophers of the spectacle and the simulacrum, according to which everything in the ruined contemporary world is for the eyes, the decorous possibilities of a cinema without cinema.
If at all talking heads de Shoah they do not make an image, despite everything. Along with this, he will associate the idea of historical ruin, with which the philosophers of social criticism had negated the Marxist dialectic, with the Jewish catastrophe, starting to commensurate this catastrophic incidence with the entire catastrophe or — as a new iconologist like Georges Didi-Huberman would say —, with the entire catastrophe.
At a time when conflicts between Arabs and Jews are escalating in the Middle East, it is perhaps worth noting that, just as the trauma of Nazism, however extreme, is not the whole trauma — or the entire trauma —, neither does the cinema of traumatic History need to be reduced to Shoah. There would be other collapses. So much so that, as soon as it enters the post-new wave called Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard begins to consider, from his side, another painful march of events. The catastrophic events that also tore the Palestinians from their land. An exodus not on the agenda of the American blockbuster. Nakba.
In fact, it is within the scope of his post-May 68 aesthetic revolts, in the lesser-known Vertovian intermedia of his production, that perpetrations such as East Wind — a kind of left-wing western in which Glauber Rocha appears asking if anyone knows what the path of the Revolution is —, which to the filmmaker of harassed it is necessary to record another political testimony, equal and different from that which makes the reputation of Shoah.
In this case, too, everything is triggered from outside. In 1970, two years before the contacts between the Israeli Knesset and the existentialist headquarters, the Palestine Liberation Organization also sent the filmmaker harassed a request. To show the world what is happening in Jordan, where the exiles of the 1967 war have flown back to. Like Lanzmann, Jean-Luc Godard accepts the challenge. He leaves Paris with the collective he now surrounds himself with, heading for the fedayeen camps established in Hussein's kingdom.
At this point, he sets in motion a first attempt at a feature film to be titled Until Victory. In Jordan, his team, which includes activist Jean-Pierre Gorin, takes stock of the situation, interviews the guerrillas, films the civilians, and searches the rubble. But that’s all there is to it. In the meantime, the fedayeen and the Jordanian government fall out, the Palestinians are expelled from the country, and the material is archived.
It would be reused later on in a second and even more aesthetically daring project, of pure assembly. We are talking about Here and elsewhere, which was successful years later, in 1976. As a political document, it is an artistic coup that takes the false raccord or disarming the narrative linearity that is Jean-Luc Godard's trademark. The film opens, parabolically, with a parade of extras showing photos of people to a camera set up on a tripod.
While Jean-Luc Godard’s voice, speaking from off-screen, ponders that time and space are not the same in the frames we are seeing as they are in real life out there. He continues with sequences captured in the Jordanian setting, applying the same relativization to this other photographable reality. He oscillates between moving forward and backward, saying something and not saying it at all. The title of the documentary, in fact, speaks of this. How can we overcome the distance between here and there? The language that inevitably separates those who enter into communication? In this other staging, we see, at some point, a little girl reciting a poem, loudly, amidst the ruins, similar to those of today’s Gaza Strip, in a language we do not understand. This incomprehension covers the very speech of the guerrillas, not always translated, so that the words do not jump out in front of what is seen.
In passing, what was supposed to be a reconnaissance operation of the camps fedayeen redoubles in recognition of the operator's visibility conditions. Well summarized in the famous slogan which expresses the dialectical tension between seeing and being, and with it the impossible realism to which Godard never stopped referring, but to which he refers more and more insistently, as time goes by, not only to continue to accuse the arbitrariness of representations, but to demand a montage capable of removing it poetically: “this is not just an image, it is just an image".
This is not the only replica of the designer of images that is Jean-Luc Godard to the proverbial verbality of Lanzmann. Considered the masterpiece of the artist's maturity, History(s) of cinema, from 1986, would promptly replicate the Shoah with another ten hours of incursion into the sensitive landscape of the 20th century, via a collage of films, photograms, paintings, poetry. In this multimedia mosaic, together with the inscription on the screen of a lapidary phrase to the effect that “four faded photograms save the honor of reality”, we have an astonishing visual connection.
The opening sequences show overlapping photographs, then very little known, that had been taken in Auschwitz, months before the fall of the camps, with a device smuggled in by the Polish resistance, and none other than shots of Elisabeth Taylor in A place in the sun by George Stevens. Which explains it: before becoming a sacred monster of Hollywood, the latter, who is none other than the director of Shane (The brutes also love), had passed through the concentration camps, as a cameraman incorporated into the D-Day, in 1945. It is with this baggage that he returns home and turns to fiction.
Jean-Luc Godard takes advantage of this fact to bring together two dark backgrounds. He plays with the idea that what Stevens' actress encounters, in the role of the protagonist of one of his saddest stories, when faced with another death scenario, in this case also hidden by the verdant landscape that sprouts at the scene of a crime, cannot help but be confused with the horror encountered by the filmmaker from Buchenwald.
By doing so, it not only gives affective value to the images it Shoah discards, but considers its resurgence as a symptom, its formulation of pathos, their unconscious. It saves them from being merely impressive and, even because the century of Nazism is the century of cinema, it makes them participate in understanding the march of history.
At a time when the resurgence of conflicts in the Middle East puts Lebanon back on the scene, it is perhaps important to remember that the same entourage Sartrean who bequeathed us the voices of Lanzamnn leaves us an Arab saga of the bandit, homosexual and prostitute poet on the fringes of French society that Sartre, for this very reason, called a saint: Jean Genet. For it turns out that, in his eternal pilgrimage of outside sider, after standing up for the American Black Panthers, Genet joined the Palestinians.
He was in Lebanon in 1982, when the Chatilla and Sabra massacres took place, on the outskirts of Beirut. He witnessed the bombings that are now once again lighting up the city's sky. In the brilliantly intimate style of his writings, so contrasting with Lanzmann's directive manner, he recorded the immense desolation that he had to witness at that time, in A captive in lovex, his last diary, from 1986. Before being buried in Morocco in 1987, he made it known that he wanted to be the Homer of this other war. About this, he wrote, movingly, that: “not being an archivist, historian or anything like that, I will only have told my life story to recite a history of the Palestinians”.
And it should be considered that, because it is about the losers, it is Troy that we speak of. In Genet's line, not out of a desire for territory nor the dream of a new order, but out of shame and anger.
*Leda Tenório da Motta She is a professor at the Postgraduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of One hundred years of Modern Art Week: The São Paulo cabinet and the conjuration of the avant-gardes (Perspective). [https://amzn.to/4eRXrur]
References
DICHY, Albert. Jean Genet's suitcases... Paris: Gallimard, 2020.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Pictures after all. Translated by Vanessa Brito and João Pedro Caxopo. Lisbon: Imago, 2012.
GODARD, Jean-Luc. History(s) of cinema. Paris: Galllimard, 1998.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
