A painter with letters - Godards Kunstgeschichte(n)

Perhaps no other director's work relates more intensely to the history of art than that of Jean-Luc Godard's, whose films span more than half a decade. These relations occur both in the use of individual works that rarely, in the early short films and the productions of the sixties, come into view in the original, but rather in the form of reproducible media such as the postcard or the print, and as reflected in aesthetic practices such as collage. The intersection of art and film history, which takes place in the form of appropriation and processes of medial transposition, also plays a central role in the late work and reaches its provisional apex at the end of 90’s with ‘Histoire(s) du cinéma’. By understanding cinema as a descendent not of photography, but of painting, Godard’s specific concept of the image emerges, which oscillates between the singular image of a painted canvas and the technically reproducible material of film.

In view of Godard, the discourse concerning painting and cinema becomes of immense importance: consider Jacques Aumont’s recently reissued book ‘L’oeil interminable’, notably expanded with the chapter ‘Godard peintre’, and Luc Vancherí’s seminal study ‘Cinéma et peinture’, both of which attribute a key role to Godard. That important derives first and foremost from the many different media through which Godard engages with painting. The spectrum reaches from the already mentioned postcards to his videos, up to the recent films in 3-D. The fluctuation of image motifs through different visual media generates the potential of the filmic image or the ‘possibilities of cinema’, as Daniel Morgan writes.

Each and every potential that emerges from the displacements between art and film history, the analog and the digital image, cinematic projections and opaque, painted canvas, composes the framework of our workshop ‘A painter with letters - Godards Kunstgeschichte(n)’. Questions arise concerning film as the seventh art, the interdependence of film and painting and, not least, the genealogy of the cinema.

Program:

Thursday, 12/10/2015

18:15 - Sauve qui peut (le cinéma): reflections on the little known montage film Sauve la vie (qui peut) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1981) (Michael Witt, University of Roehampton)

Friday, 12/11/2015

10:15 - Le ciel métaphorique - Kunst, Mode und Historizität in On s’est tous défilé (Simon Vagts, NCCR eikones, Basel)

11:15 - SchreibMaschinenSzenen: Schrift-Bilder in Godards Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Thomas Helbig, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)

12:15 - Break

13:15 - Zur Ästhetik der Oberflächen bei JLG (Ute Holl, Universität Basel)

14:15 - Konstellationen gemalter Bilder in Filmen Jean-Luc Godards (Joachim Paech, Universität Konstanz)