Strategie obrazu. O „adaptacjach” Jeana-Luc Godarda

Abstract

Strategies of the image: on Jean-Luc Godard’s “adaptations”

The article results from introductory research into the question of broadly defined pictorialness of film images in Jean-Luc Godard’s works. Strategies of the image inscribed by the director in his own films may be interpreted as a type of adaptations of paintings. Recollection of the most exemplary adaptations of paintings in the trilogy: Passion (1982), First Name: Carmen (1983) and Hail Mary (1984), and in the early film Pierrot le fou (Pete the Madman; 1965) evokes reflections upon the nature of the film image. It also testifies to the constant search for the nature of pictorialness and experiments with pictures stemming from various disciplines which meet in one work. The mode of existence of painted images in relation to the film, characteristic of Godard, is described by Jacques Aumont as “cinematization” (to be differentiated from the known kinetisation), that is the mechanism of the film image emerging from a painting. Thus characteristic and unique image strategies can be deciphered from Godard’s works. The strategies should not necessarily be seen as determinants of quotations, although they point to their origin, but as an element enriching the reflection on film-cinema. Research in the scope of lighting, composition of frame, colour (Godard-colourist), artistic shaping of frame, all lead the filmmaker directly from the film image to the painted image, and the other way round. Hence Godard seems to approach the substantiation of Andre Malraux’ Museum of Imagination understood as an archive of images, realizing the idea completely in “Histoire(s) du cinéma” (1988-1998) - a project broadly described and appreciated by its contemporaries.