The soundtrack of the latter advertisement also uses a typical multi-layered audio montage, and when de-constructed with a simple Caulostomy, reveals Pierre Reverdy's text overlaid with a passage from chapter 8 of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, written in Sweden in 1904.
Lui: " L'Image est une création pure de l'esprit. Elle ne peut naître d'une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées [...] Une image n'est pas forte parce qu'elle est brutale ou fantastique — mais parce que l'association des idées est lointaine et juste."
Him: "The image is a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. [...] An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant, and true."
Elle: "Tous les dragons de notre vie sont peut-être les princesses qui attendent de nous voir beaux et courageux. Toutes les choses terrifiantes ne sont peut-être que des choses sans secours, et attendent que nous les secourions." NB Which is not the most accurate translation of:
"...vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen. Vielleicht ist alles Schreckliche im tiefsten Grunde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will." (Rilke 1929, p. 14), thus:
Her: "Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting for us, to see us handsome and courageous once again. Perhaps everything terrifying is at the deepest level a helpless thing, that wants help from us."
Young Woman Looking Down, (Study for the Head of Saint Apollonia), early 1628. Artnet.com. Retrieved January 18, 2017.
biblegateway.com
Like the music (Beethoven, Op. 135), and other paintings in this film, (Goya, van Gogh) this was one of the artist's last works. The parable, from Luke 15:11-32 is often read as a lesson in church services on the third Sunday of Lent (leading up to Easter). There are several other allusions to Easter, death and resurrection in King Lear.§
Diniz 2002, p. 201. Diniz, Thaïs Flores Nogueira (2002). "Godard: A Contemporary King Lear". In Resende, Aimara da Cunha; Burns, Thomas LaBorie (eds.). Foreign Accents: Brazilian Readings of Shakespeare. University of Delaware Press. ISBN9780874137538.
Chiesi 2004, pp. 6. Chiesi, Roberto (2004). Jean-Luc Godard. Grands cinéastes de notre temps (in French). Translated by Martine Capdevielle (Italian original). Rome: Gremese Editore. ISBN9788873015840.
Chiesi 2004, p. 112. Chiesi, Roberto (2004). Jean-Luc Godard. Grands cinéastes de notre temps (in French). Translated by Martine Capdevielle (Italian original). Rome: Gremese Editore. ISBN9788873015840.
Chiesi 2004, p. 111. Chiesi, Roberto (2004). Jean-Luc Godard. Grands cinéastes de notre temps (in French). Translated by Martine Capdevielle (Italian original). Rome: Gremese Editore. ISBN9788873015840.
This concept is almost as old as film itself. For the pioneering special effects cameraman Guido Seeber writing in 1927, montage shots constituted one of the principal “trick techniques of tomorrow,” because they were capable of rendering abstract thought. By juxtaposing different picture components in the same shot, they can articulate ideas not contained in each source image separately.[54]
Treating separate shots as individual hieroglyphs, Sergei Eisenstein explains in 1929 what happens when you combine them: "The point is that the copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused—the ideogram. By the combination of two 'depictables' is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable."[55]
Both sources cited in Loew, Katharina (2021). Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. (online edition). Amsterdam University Press. pp. 82–83. doi:10.1017/9789048551712.003. ISBN9789048551712. S2CID241702536. According to Richard Suchenski, Godard felt that neither Welles nor Eisenstein had mastered montage, although the latter had mastered its mechanism, "but not its ultimate goal: the use of separate images/pictures to generate a generate a synthetic Image, the one thing that montage alone can do." [56]
"Six sculptures by Alberto Giacometti last seen together 60 years ago will be reunited for a London exhibition [at the Tate Modern] focused on the work of the Swiss artist." Pickford, James (January 24, 2017). "Rare reunion: Giacomettis come to Tate". Financial Times. p. 2e. Retrieved January 25, 2017.
See Wilt 1993 for a perceptive discussion of Woolf's 'onto-theology' and some parallels with King Lear. Wilt explains the complex concept of 'God's spies' thus:
"Shakespeare's haunting and enigmatic phrase points surely to a way and type of knowing which is both transcendent and some how illicit, invasive. As God's spies, God's eyes, the father and daughter will "criminally" see the things the world hides, the mystery of things, the Mystery, the space occupied (perhaps) by God. To "take on" the Mystery is both to shoulder it, to disguise oneself in/as it, and to confront or even fight it. The intent is both to critique an aspect of religious thought and organization (they will wear out not only "packs" but also "sects" of great ones) and to embark on the religious quest oneself, somehow bearing the Mystery one hopes to spy out. The goal or grail of this quest, for these spies, is to see "through" the world (in both senses of the phrase) to the Mystery that lies below or behind the ebb and flow, and to do this by wearing (wearing out?) the world." (Wilt 1993, p. 180)
This concept is almost as old as film itself. For the pioneering special effects cameraman Guido Seeber writing in 1927, montage shots constituted one of the principal “trick techniques of tomorrow,” because they were capable of rendering abstract thought. By juxtaposing different picture components in the same shot, they can articulate ideas not contained in each source image separately.[54]
Treating separate shots as individual hieroglyphs, Sergei Eisenstein explains in 1929 what happens when you combine them: "The point is that the copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as value of another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused—the ideogram. By the combination of two 'depictables' is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable."[55]
Both sources cited in Loew, Katharina (2021). Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema. (online edition). Amsterdam University Press. pp. 82–83. doi:10.1017/9789048551712.003. ISBN9789048551712. S2CID241702536. According to Richard Suchenski, Godard felt that neither Welles nor Eisenstein had mastered montage, although the latter had mastered its mechanism, "but not its ultimate goal: the use of separate images/pictures to generate a generate a synthetic Image, the one thing that montage alone can do." [56]
"Wo ich schaffe, bin ich wahr, und ich möchte die Kraft finden, mein Leben ganz auf diese Wahrheit zu gründen, auf diese unendliche Einfachheit und Freude, die mir manchmal gegeben ist." ("Where I create, there I am true, and I wish to find the power to base my whole life on this truth, upon this endless simplicity and joy, which is sometimes given to me.") Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 8 August 1903. "Lyric Theory". University of Duisburg-Essen. Retrieved December 21, 2017.
Howe, Desson (June 17, 1988). "King Lear". Washington Post. Retrieved August 13, 2008.
Hinson, Hal (June 18, 1988). "King Lear". Washington Post. Retrieved August 13, 2008.
web.archive.org
The soundtrack of the latter advertisement also uses a typical multi-layered audio montage, and when de-constructed with a simple Caulostomy, reveals Pierre Reverdy's text overlaid with a passage from chapter 8 of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, written in Sweden in 1904.
Lui: " L'Image est une création pure de l'esprit. Elle ne peut naître d'une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux réalités plus ou moins éloignées [...] Une image n'est pas forte parce qu'elle est brutale ou fantastique — mais parce que l'association des idées est lointaine et juste."
Him: "The image is a pure creation of the soul. It cannot be born of a comparison, but of a reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart. [...] An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant, and true."
Elle: "Tous les dragons de notre vie sont peut-être les princesses qui attendent de nous voir beaux et courageux. Toutes les choses terrifiantes ne sont peut-être que des choses sans secours, et attendent que nous les secourions." NB Which is not the most accurate translation of:
"...vielleicht sind alle Drachen unseres Lebens Prinzessinnen, die nur darauf warten, uns einmal schön und mutig zu sehen. Vielleicht ist alles Schreckliche im tiefsten Grunde das Hilflose, das von uns Hilfe will." (Rilke 1929, p. 14), thus:
Her: "Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting for us, to see us handsome and courageous once again. Perhaps everything terrifying is at the deepest level a helpless thing, that wants help from us."
"All speech is violence, a violence all more the formidable for being secret and the secret centre of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it - a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open but secret, agrees to forgo spending iteslf in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation."[43]
"All speech is a word of command, of terror, of seduction, of resentment, flattery, or aggression; all speech is violence - and to pretend to ignore this in claiming to dialogue is to add liberal hypocrisy to the dialectical optimism according to which war is no more than another form of dialogue."[44]
In Godard and Miéville's The Old Place [fr], Godard expounds on Walter Benjamin's idea of linking past and present by a poetic 'constellation', a fleeting resurrection of the past in an image:
"It is not that what is past casts its light on what is past; rather, the image is the place wherein that which has been, comes together in a flash in the now, to form a constellation."[62]
Godard visualised this flash, together with the concept of the successful creation of an image (a rapprochement or closeness), as fireworks (e.g. from Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, later used in Histoire(s) 4A),[bk] or as the hand-held version:
What's her name?
-Cordelia.
Is that her real name, or you just invented it?
-Well, I...
You're the sparkler, my friend, you're the sparkler.
See Wilt 1993 for a perceptive discussion of Woolf's 'onto-theology' and some parallels with King Lear. Wilt explains the complex concept of 'God's spies' thus:
"Shakespeare's haunting and enigmatic phrase points surely to a way and type of knowing which is both transcendent and some how illicit, invasive. As God's spies, God's eyes, the father and daughter will "criminally" see the things the world hides, the mystery of things, the Mystery, the space occupied (perhaps) by God. To "take on" the Mystery is both to shoulder it, to disguise oneself in/as it, and to confront or even fight it. The intent is both to critique an aspect of religious thought and organization (they will wear out not only "packs" but also "sects" of great ones) and to embark on the religious quest oneself, somehow bearing the Mystery one hopes to spy out. The goal or grail of this quest, for these spies, is to see "through" the world (in both senses of the phrase) to the Mystery that lies below or behind the ebb and flow, and to do this by wearing (wearing out?) the world." (Wilt 1993, p. 180)
