I Said I Love. That is the Promise
It's never been easy to be a fan of Jean-Luc Godard, not least because his films and videos from the last 25 years - which fall into starkly contrasting groups - are hard to find. Recent work, like Forever Mozart (1997) might be shuffled into a festival or curated by an intrepid museum programmer, but the general absence of Godard's work tells us more about the incapacity of the cultural moment than it tells us about the filmmaker or his work. Nevertheless, his projects are a litmus test of media culture - a new film is anticipated like a force of nature which fewer and fewer people notice. A lavish event at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1994 was both exceptional and indicative of the lengths it takes just to run a decent print of a new film. Asked after the screening what he was working on, Godard mentioned an image he was pursuing: the 'enemy alien' stamp placed in the passport of Sigmund Freud when he emigrated to war-time London. This micro-image of the state branding of Freud, whom Godard described as humanity's greatest advocate, could not be a better emblem for the current state of his own films.
This Autumn, the consistently effervescent Swiss Institute in New York, staged another sort of tribute to Godard with the show: 'I Said I Love. That is the Promise.' It was an event in stark contrast to MoMA's five years earlier, which made much of its seamless, high-tech presentation of both the film and video works. The Swiss Institute show, however, looked like a recasting of Godard as a contemporary video artist who used to work in 35mm film.
The installation arranged standard televisions, VCRs and headphones among elaborately strewn, stacked and balanced folding plastic chairs. The first impression upon entering the large gallery - and expecting some kind of serviceable cinematheque - was that the installation was audacious: not simply a setting in which to gratefully catch up on a dozen or so very hard-to-see tapes, it was a survey of Godard's works within the terms and conventions of contemporary video installation.
The ingeniously frozen cascade of chairs begged the question of to whom this history of Godard's work was being directed. On the one hand, the installation accounted for the unavailability of some of these tapes other than as low resolution dubs. On the other hand, it made the films available for the re-education of contemporary video artists. The overall effect invoked one of Godard's favourite locations: the class room run amok.
The curators, Gareth James and Swiss Institute director Annette Schindler, who designed the installation with Florian Zeyfang, used Godard as a pedagogical guide, presenting the evolution of his philosophies through films, television and video-tapes. Clearly, video has served Godard as a palette free from the constraints of film financing and distribution, while continuing to be his medium of choice for cinematic essays that will forever be associated with the more radical legacies of 60s French cinema. But the curators were not satisfied with this sort of normalising take on Godard's oeuvre. Rather, the exhibition proposed to deconstruct the last 25 years of his output through video, thereby redefining video itself. The most obvious manifestation of Godard's elusive philosophy is the frequency with which he has directed it towards a politics of the image - the sort of nostalgic gesture this exhibition took pains to invigorate.
You could assume that the exhibition was addressing itself to some other issue and my guess is that it was aiming Godard's camcorder at contemporary video art. If you're interested enough in Godard to have read this far, you are probably less interested in the ubiquity of recent multi-channel installations that have reduced content and meaning to the drone of projector cooling fans. In fact, the obliteration of explicit content makes apparent a distinction between current multi-channel installations and the previous, second generation of single-channel video art. 'I Said I Love. That is the Promise' was a multi-channel installation piece which consisted of the greatest single-channel works from the history of video.
