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Godard and the Essay Film Godard and the Essay Film A Form That Thinks Rick Warner northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Warner, Rick, 1977– author. Title: Godard and the essay film : a form that thinks / Rick Warner. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002309| ISBN 9780810137370 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137387 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137394 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Godard, Jean- Luc, 1930– — Criticism and interpretation. | Experimental films— History and criticism. | Subjectivity in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.G63 W37 2018 | DDC 791.4302/33092— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002309 For Gigi Contents Acknowledgments ix A Note on the Text xi Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Research in the Form of a Spectacle 19 Chapter 2 A Critical Poetics of Citation 65 Chapter 3 Refiguring the Couple: Love, Dialogue, and Gesture 111 Chapter 4 To Show and Show Oneself Showing: Essayistic Self- Portrayal 153 Coda Stereoscopic Essays for the New Century 195 Notes 223 Index 255 This content downloaded from This content downloaded from Acknowledgments My research on the cinematic essay began when I was a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, where I benefited greatly from the instruc- tion and support of Adam Lowenstein, Colin MacCabe, Marcia Landy, Lucy Fischer, Daniel Morgan, Randall Halle, Neepa Majumdar, and Mark Lynn Anderson. Adam and Dan deserve special mention for their careful guidance when this book was in its earliest stages. I am also very grateful to Colin for enabling a rare visit with Chris Marker in Paris in the summer of 2006. Some of this book’s ideas grew out of conversations with Karla Oeler (who formatively introduced me to Histoire(s) du cinéma), Matthew Bern- stein, Nina K. Martin, David A. Cook, Evan Lieberman, Alex Greenhough, David Fresko, Anne- Gaëlle Saliot, Michael Moses, Isaac Julien, Sam di Iorio, Andrew Utterson, Pavle Levi, Timothy Barnard, Kevin J. Hayes, Ken and Flo Jacobs, Scott Durham, Jennifer Cazenave, Mike Levine, Hassan Melehy, Sam Amago, Julia Haslett, Yaron Shemer, Gabriel Trop, Richard Langston, Chris- topher Pavsek, Karen Redrobe, Toni D’Angela, Steve Carter, Kyle Stevens, Murray Pomerance, and Clint Bergeson. I wish to thank Warren Breckman and James English, the conveners of the 2011– 12 Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, for the opportunity to present an early draft of material contained here. Timo- thy Corrigan was a warm host during my time at Penn and was generously supportive when we discussed my project. My thanks to him and to Nora M. Alter for inviting me back to Philadelphia to participate in a symposium in memory of Chris Marker at the Slought Foundation in 2013. I owe my gratitude to Jason Kuo and the other organizers of an essay film symposium at the University of Maryland in 2014. I was touched by their invitation to speak, and received valuable feedback there from Caroline Eades, Liz Papa- zian, Luka Arsenjuk, Jonathan Auerbach, and David Johnson. Special thanks to Trevor Perri, Maggie Grossman, Anne Gendler, and the full production team at Northwestern University Press, who have been a gen- uine pleasure to work with. Thanks as well to the manuscript’s anonymous readers, and to Alexander O. Trotter, who compiled the index. Alternate versions of some material included in this book appeared previ- ously in Critical Quarterly; The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, edited by Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades (Wallflower Press, 2016); and The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in the 21st Century, edited by ix