A New Wave Cameo

So a friend of mine sent me this photo the other day: can you guess what it shows?

If you said, "The finest displays in the Fust Electronics store in Etoy, Switzerland" or even "the cashier in Fust electronics" you would not be wrong. But you also would not be right.

For that man in the deep recesses of Fust is none other than Jean-Luc Godard buying a printer cartridge on July 26, 2012, at 11:05am.The image captures something about which I previously had no curiosity: what does Jean-Luc Godard look like reaching? Godard is not a tall man. So he purchases batteries the way others might strain to pick an apple from a tree. This man who has done wonders to record the incidental gestures between people on film is here frozen in a bizarre moment of pricing. Cell phones do this to even the greatest figures, resizing them to fit our civic and commercial spaces, making everyone seem smaller and the atmosphere more attenuated. Cellphone photos make the world resemble the interior of an airplane: both spaces uglify people. Cellphone images scrunch everyone into the least glamorous corners of the visual field: it visualizes us (even great directors) as extras, supplements to the society of the spectacle.

That is why this photo is a bit ironic. Godard is the director who first welcomed the obscenity of the public into his films. He exorcised filmmaking from the studio system and allowed his actors to intermingle with passers-by in the street. In many scenes from A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), people on the sidewalk gawk at the camera. Such incidences would absolutely mar a standard Hollywood production by reminding us that we are watching a movie. Yet in Godard's film, these looks only help establish the indeterminate and elusive nature of what is unfolding. Like us, these extras seem to be asking what is going on between these two people? and why is the camera filming this? These questions are posed mutely, by the sidelong glance and over-the-shoulder profile of the extra:

Man passing by on left turns head toward  Belmondo/Seberg to ascertain what is happening...

...and the woman on left does the same.

Breathless constitutes a minor archive of such Epimethean looks. Pedestrians walking around the scene compulsively look back at it. This turning of the head suggests an undigested perception of events: "Am I missing something? What did I just see?" These are our questions too. We might say that the lightness of Godard's film is registered in the simple fact that no extra breaks her stride to stare at the production. Breathless doesn't impose on its spectators: peripheral figures are free to go.

Godard's film does away with the morality of Hollywood cinema and the hierarchy of its production. This is conveyed by comparing two images, First an image from the film of Belmondo and Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysees:

...and an image of cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Godard following the two with the camera hidden in mail cart:

This photo depicting the "making of" Breathless is indistinguishable from the first image, a still from the movie itself. That is, the director and cinematographer slip surreptitiously into their own film, posing as mail men. They look incidental, not essential. They capture these amazingly intimate and amorous images by inserting cinema's technology into the apparatus of the mail deliverer (and thereby presage the cellphone which can record and send images almost simultaneously). Alfred Hitchcock posits himself in his own movies as an extra who garners all our attention and lust for detection. By contrast, Godard (and Coutard) form an image that is consonant with the one they record. They do this by assuming the guise of the everyday (the mailman). The image they deliver to us (the film itself) has the initial look of something that deserves only negligible attention, like last week's food circular.