Spielberg and Associates

Godard’s In Praise of Love, Eloge de l’amour is an elliptical film, fragmented, we hardly see the actors, they speak from outside the frame, they are half glimpsed in hotel interiors. What are their motivations? What do they want?

Watching, rewatching the film is to find the plot slowly emerging. Part one – black and white. Auditions for a film about the four stages of love. The young woman with whom the protagonist, a director, is fascinated, has killed herself. She had tuberculosis; she spared herself suffering. The director, Edgar, had been working with her for a film on Simone Weil.

Part two, in supersaturated colour: two years earlier – Edgar’s trip to Brittany, where he first met her. We meet her grandparents, too – French Resistance fighters. Edgar admires the way the young woman, ‘Elle’ resists Spielberg and associates, who are trying to buy the rights to make a film about the Resistance. The old couple embody the project Edgar was working on when we met him at the start of the film: the four stages of love.

I will have to watch it again (and again). It is still not alive for me in the way Tarkovsky’s films are alive; it will be (how many times have I watched Pierrot le Fou?) Still – how to write this? Memory, loss, chance, fascination … what is given to me when I watch the film? It is as if my entire life has been lived again, as if I have been caught in the wave of a great repetition. – But also as though that life were not mine, or that I have been opened to what was not mine about my life. Not my life, but a life which I live again. In this way, the future opens amidst everything else that is about to open.

Tomorrow, I know what I will do … teach, mark essays, fill out forms. But tomorrow is as it were infused with the future. This is what the film gives me and continues to give me because it does not press a story upon me. Lost in Translation is, in the end, another Hollywood film. Listen to the music – trace the story’s arc. The film has no space for you. Why complain? Because there is no air left in film – it’s suffocating. The work does not allow us to breathe, to draw breath. To be inspired.

Bland conclusion: this is an age of the worst classicism. There is no work, nothing indeterminable in the work of art. Nothing escapes – nothing permits us to escape. The culture industry, Spielberg and associates, make films which buy our memories and our lives.