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End of a Century
Jawni Han on Film socialisme

In the “Purgatory” section of Notre musique (2004), Jean-Luc Godard delivers a lecture on the topic of “text and image” in front of a group of young people. After the master shares his typically aphoristic insights about the boundary between fiction and documentary and the politics of shot-reverse shot technique, one of the attendees asks, “Will the little digital cameras save cinema?” Godard remains silent, but his next project Film socialisme (2010), the director’s first feature-length film to be shot entirely on digital cameras, provided an answer. Harnessing the imperfections in the digital cameras’ image-rendering capabilities and rudimentary audio fidelity, Godard confronts the crisis in neoliberalism, the ascendence of digital cinema, and the extinguished dreams of socialism and celluloid from the previous century.

Like its predecessor, Film Socialism is also divided into three parts: “Such Things,” “Our Europe,” and “Our Humanities.” The first, set on a cruise ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea, boasts some of the most visually eclectic sequences and head-spinning sound mixes of Godard’s career. In an interview with MUBI Notebook, Fabrice Aragno, one of its cinematographers, who went on to shoot Goodbye to Language (2013), shares a detailed list of camera gear used: Sony PMW-EX1, Canon EOS 5D Mark II with Summicron lenses, Samsung NV24HD, and Panasonic D-snap SV-AV100 Camcorder. It was not the “definition” of these cameras that enticed the filmmakers, according to Aragno, but their defects and more specifically, how these digital sensors struggle to “capture light properly.” Tinkering with the frame rate and exposure settings yielded uniquely digital cinematography in all its distorted glory—a departure from the Fauvist imagery of the digitally shot second half of In Praise of Love (2001).

When asked about the film’s sound in the same interview, Aragno reveals that the crew on the ship worked without a sound engineer and that the audio from the first section is “direct sound”—because it is “the truth.” Paul Grivas’s Film Catastrophe (2018), an invaluable document about the making of Film socialisme, shows Godard and his skeletal crew working with a boom mic. This technical set-up partly explains the two distinct kinds of sound heard throughout “Such Things”: the highly audible voiceover narrations pitted against the pure white noise created by the wind relentlessly assaulting the microphone. The juxtaposition of harsh, degraded audio that probably comes from the cameras’ built-in mics and clean, “professional-grade” sound recorded on the boom is as disorienting and exhilarating as the dynamic visual it accompanies. The grimy images of the on-cruise dancefloor, although striking on their own, are made indelible by the amorphous soundscape—likely sourced from the same device—that registers like an atomic explosion that no woofers can seemingly withstand. Meanwhile, various characters—if we can call them that—seen in “Such Things” take turns pontificating about the missing gold reserves of the Spanish Republic from the Spanish Civil War and the Soviet Union, both diegetically and via voiceover. For Godard, what “the end of history” gave us are the unsettled legacies of what Eric Hobsbawm calls the “short twentieth century,” marked by countless wars and the eclipse of communism, and the saturation of digitally captured images and sound, a far cry from the celluloid imaginations of his youth. The ruins of history call for marred images and bruised audio fragments.

Of course, Godard had consistently been at the vanguard of radical sonic experimentation well before Film socialisme. For him, cinema was always image and sound, hence the name of the production company he cofounded with Anne-Marie Mieville, Son image. In a 1984 interview with Gideon Bachmann collected in Jean-Luc Godard Interviews, the director explains his idiosyncratic approach to sound, wherein he limits himself to using two mixing tracks: “two hands to manipulate [the tracks] … if I had only one arm, maybe I’d have only a single sound track.” The clean voices recorded in the boom and dizzying clusters of white noise captured by the cameras’ built-in mics from Film socialisme continue this tradition. And the digital audio recording technology itself replicates his two-handed methodology: sound waves converted into zeros and ones.

Where Film socialisme deviates from his usual sound design is the use of direct sound, a cornerstone of Godard’s artistic philosophy. He believed that on-location audio is as integral to the medium’s epistemic commitment to truth as the image; as his maxim from Le petite soldat (1960) goes, “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” In the same interview with Bachmann, Godard reasserts his conviction in the importance of direct sound: “I stopped going to Italian films, in fact, when I found out … that nobody there recorded the sound at all and they make it all up later.” It naturally follows that in his cinema, what we hear should contain as much truth as what we see: be it metaphysical, political, or technological. Interestingly, in the case of Film socialisme, the image and sound point toward the technological truths of the same device—the digital camera and the epoch that produced it.

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Historically, image and sound recording technologies developed independently of one another, which necessitated the retroactive synchronization of the visual and audio during postproduction. While Super 8mm cameras that record sync audio directly onto film were introduced to the market as early as the early 1970s, this technology stayed predominantly in the realm of news footage and never dominated feature filmmaking. By its nature, the decision to incorporate in-camera audio would necessarily impact the placement of the camera; questions concerning how the camera picked up sound would have to figure prominently into framing, blocking, and camera movements. Actors would also have to project their voices differently, depending on their proximity to the camera. In other words, it is a technology that could have garnered a distinct filmmaking tradition, but it never received a chance.

Evenin the current digital era, the in-camera audio often serves as a mere reference, and images captured by the camera are artificially synchronized in an editing suite with the higher-quality audio captured separately on a dedicated sound-recording device. In his essay “Fiction and the ‘Unrepresentable’: All Movies Are but Variants on the Silent Film,” critic Shiguéhiko Hasumi reflects on the bifurcated developmental histories of audiovisual technologies and their implications in how films are made. He notes that sound engineers and boom operators on set are usually subordinate to the camera department and lighting technicians, who dictate where to place the microphone so that it remains invisible in the frame. Sound engineers suffer further “humiliation,” according to Hasumi, when a film is dubbed in foreign markets; all their hard work, however sophisticated and accomplished it may be, is treated as replaceable in the way that images are not. Even after the advent of the talkie, image has continued to take precedence over sound. It is for this reason that Hasumi rejects the term “audiovisual” as it pertains to the medium. But with the prevalence of digital cameras that can record sound directly, he hopes, there are more aesthetic possibilities for the true talkie, and new formalism for our current century.

Hasumi’s provocative claims about the persistent supremacy of the image in cinema seem broadly true and rhetorically powerful, but his thesis that “all movies are but variants on the silent film” is not without counterexamples. In the breathtaking jailbreak sequence of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), for instance, sound becomes equal to image. Earlier in their escape attempt, two prisoners find themselves having to cross a passage filled with gravel, which crunches under their feet, potentially revealing them. It is the sound of a train passing nearby that comes to their rescue. Bresson does not show the vehicle, but its noise is the organizing principle for his decoupage. The train, the symbol of both modernity and the birth of cinema by way of the Lumières, haunts the image aurally. In this way, Bresson hits at the possibility of a new kind of cinema with the sound of the train. However, Bresson always recreated the soundscapes of his films in postproduction, so Hasumi’s assertion that the processes of cinematography and sound recording are not integrated enough to warrant the term “audiovisual” still stands.

Pointedly, Hasumi’s essay brings up Breathless (1960) to reinforce its argument. The soundtrack to Godard’s feature debut was created in a studio during postproduction, and the director was often shouting instructions to the actors during filming, similar to what Griffith and Murnau did in the 1910s and 1920s. In Film Catastrophe, we see the same method deployed for Film socialisme. Godard is frequently seen verbally directing his actors mid-take, making it clear that much of the sound heard in “Such Things” was dubbed in post. Were it not for the abrasive audio sourced directly from the camera that disrupts and punctuates the well-tempered boom audio, Film socialisme would just be another “variant” on the silent cinema. To apply Hasumi’s logic, the film has one foot firmly in the tradition of silent film and the 20th century and another suspended in mid-air, about to land on the “audiovisual” and the 21st century.

But what if that is precisely what Godard was after? In Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), he tells Serge Daney that cinema is a 19th-century enterprise that was resolved in the 20th century. For him, perhaps, sound film is a 20th-century invention that he had hoped to resolve in the 21st. But before making a bold leap forward into the new form and the new century, he decides to first reflect on how we ended up here. “Film” and “socialism,” seemingly the obsolete artifacts of the previous century, combine to create a Rosetta Stone for the new millennium. Not a jump cut that severs our contemporary world and its cinema from the previous epoch, but a kind of montage that grapples with the distance between the Lumières and YouTube, and between the Spanish Civil War and the 2008 financial crisis. The soundtrack to Film socialisme situates itself precisely in that transient state in film history and material history, where the old world (celluloid and the 20th century) is dying and the new world (digital and the 21st century) struggles to be born.

In the last stretch of Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard declares that he tries “in [his] compositions to show an ear that listens to time and try to make it heard and to surge into the future.” Against the tyranny of capitalism that holds history hostage at a standstill, Godard dreams of a cinema that not only illuminates but also “listens” to time. Although the act of listening and the deep integration of sound into his formal language are constants in Godard’s oeuvre, Film socialisme takes it to another level with radical literalness. The camera itself listens to raindrops, wind, the din of an on-cruise nightclub and cafeteria, etc. None of these is a faithful replica of how human ears would actually hear them, but Godard seems to tell us that these are indeed the music of our time: brash, distorted, and hardly discernible. How the digital cameras’ sensors and built-in microphones struggle to process light and the hissing of the wind, in Godard’s estimation, is exactly theartistic means to capture the zeitgeist of the millennia that has just begun: in which the history of the 20th century—the collapse of the socialist block, the Holocaust, the diminishing of cinema as a popular art form, the ongoing Nakba—continues to shape our ethical and political life, yet is made obsolete amid the ubiquity of “audiovisual” content, both online and offline, that suspends us in the state of passive consumption.

The truths embedded in these auditory bombardments are reflective more of the technology used to capture them than of the ontological reality of what was happening on the cruise liner. Here, Godard assumes the role of a poet, instead of a historian. He trades the faithful documentation of the world for a lyrical form that encapsulates what is in the air. Lucien Goldmann, a disciple of György Lukács, remarks in Towards a Sociology of the Novel that the protagonist of the modern novel is preoccupied with “a degraded search, a search for authentic values in a world itself degraded.” Similarly, the “degraded” image and sound of Film socialisme rummages through the rubble of film and socialism in search of a new form that can articulate the first decade of the 21st century. In Notre musique, Godard defines the principle of cinema as follows: “Go towards the light, and shine it back on our night. Our music.” In Film socialisme, he finds himself afflicted with the predicament that also plagues Jerzy Radziwiłowicz’s director character in Passion (1982), who refuses to work on his film unless he finds a way to replicate Rembrandt’s light on celluloid. In the absence of light to illuminate the darkness of our present moment, Godard instead sketches its mirror image, using technologies that are ill-equipped to handle light and soundwaves.

Perhaps, it was inevitable that Godard’s experiment with “direct sound” would end up being a brief flirtation. In his subsequent film, Goodbye to Language, he invents his own Rembrandt’s light out of 3D technology: superimposition as a form of montage that frees cinema from the shadows of the 20th century. Indeed, what he does with 3D goes way deeper than his exploration of the in-camera audio. Although Film socialisme may not be a “leap forward,” to repurpose Anne Wiazemsky’s concluding voiceover narration from La Chinoise (1967), it is still “the first timid step of a long march” into what cinema could be in the current century. But creating the conditions for such possibilities to emerge would constitute a life’s work for most—and Godard did this time and again. To clumsily imitate how Godard himself might have put it: if Film socialisme reckons with the zero of digital filmmaking, Goodbye to Language searches for the one.