“Mystifications” is a bi-weekly column by Diego Del Aguila. Lingering on often overlooked questions hidden in everyday life, it seeks to re-mystify what has become naturalized.
Almost a year ago, I followed a friend to the Yale Film Archive to watch a film that, according to her, “would do justice to its name.” It was Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard. Although I lacked the theoretical and historical background to really understand the film’s formal achievement, I could feel myself being exposed to something unlike anything I had ever seen. Thus, when I learned last week that Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague—a tribute to the making of Breathless—was being screened at Yale, the resurfacing trace of this now-blurry memory suggested I would, once again, not regret visiting the film archive. Neither a French New Wave connoisseur nor a prolific film critic, I went to the screening with an open mind, aligning my actions with a recent revelation: so much of our lives rests on unexpected encounters.
Over the last couple of years, I watched and rewatched Linklater’s Before trilogy. I found in it what I deem an ambivalent romanticism. In the first movie, Jesse and Celine meet on a train in Europe, and after “hitting it off” with a brief interaction, they spontaneously decide to disembark in Vienna to spend the night together. As they walk aimlessly through the city, among places and faces they have never met before, they reflect on youth, identity, and spirituality in a long-winding conversation, with no topic privileged over others, and no reflection attaining much cathartic value. Reflections on the nature of God, for instance—like Celine’s famous quote: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between”—are followed by awkward silences, non-verbal cues, and less-abstract revelations that nevertheless constitute the natural duration of their walks. At the same time that the plot unfolds from a very romantic premise (the spontaneous love encounter in a train far from home), it is filled with anticlimactic, mundane sequences, which, perhaps through their realistic charm, elevate the trilogy’s romanticism to an anti-idealistic height.
When I first watched the trilogy, I was drawn to this ambivalence, which I had also found in Linklater’s film Waking Life. Thus, if I expected something from Nouvelle Vague, it was being nudged into a state of mental wandering and reflection. I was expecting a film that was romantic and grand, an exhilarating mirror, and that, at the same time, was capable of dismantling its own romanticism. It is hard to tell, however, the extent to which these expectations and my admiration for Linklater’s ambivalence influenced my experience of Nouvelle Vague. The reader is the ultimate judge here.
In any case, Nouvelle Vague proved to be an interesting encounter. In the film (or perhaps with it, or through it), I found crystallized some of the unresolved thoughts I have recently and ceaselessly entertained. Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of the French New Wave hit Breathless, Godard’s very first film, in which a young, impulsive fugitive in Paris meets a hopelessly romantic American immigrant with whom he hides from the police. In Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, we thus find a Godard who is self-conscious about his unsuccessful film career, yet at the same time obsessed with immediately transforming that situation—and Breathless is his vehicle for that transformation. Strictly speaking, however, his obsession is not as much with “success” as with authenticity and spontaneity in his filmmaking. He wants a film that is raw and real—this is the man who said: “The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.”
The film’s conceptual premise grants it, from the outset, a hyperreflexive stance toward film as a medium. Nouvelle Vague is a representation of a representation, or more accurately, a representation of how a representation came to be. I believe this has various implications. For one, it unmasks the artifice of Godard’s film. When I watched Breathless in the basement of HQ several months ago, I was completely absorbed by its narrative that, if I had any thought beyond the artifice, it was about the genius behind its creation. While the artificiality of a film remains a tacit understanding among audiences of all sorts, the explicit expression of such artificiality has a very specific effect on some, including me. Nouvelle Vague, in that sense, exercises a sort of unmasking: not only is it a reminder of the artificiality (the mask) of Breathless—the fact that, just as any other film, its story is a fiction: a staged spectacle with real people behind it—but it also demystifies the genius one would suspect to have been behind the film. The ‘Godardian’ methods of filmmaking are depicted in the film as rather spontaneous and unplanned, often presented in a comedic fashion, and the film shows a Godard who always arrived on set without a script. His claim was that not having a script would allow the actors to operate freely, without the director’s constraints.
More generally, Nouvelle Vague demystifies the experience of making a film (a demystification that is probably well known to those who belong to the “world” of cinema: writers, directors, editors, makeup artists, etc.), showing that, despite its glory, it is not all fun and games. The making of Breathless, in particular, as depicted in Nouvelle Vague, was marked by financial struggles and by the peculiar character of Godard. Godard is obnoxious, quiet, stubborn, and mysterious—an interesting person to some, and an irritable one to others.
By representing the journey to a remarkable achievement such as Godard’s first film, and generally of the French New Wave as a whole, Nouvelle Vague is, even if it doesn’t pretend to, aestheticizing the behind-the-scenes, the unseen, the great expanse of labor and trivial experience that leads to the ultimate aesthetic product and then, without much remedy, is left forgotten behind it. It aesthetizes the making of the film-object. A tribute to the life of a filmmaker, who for the most part always lived behind the scenes, Nouvelle Vague says: this which remained unseen, this which had to remain unseen for something else to come through, must now be revealed; it is worth seeing; it is a story worth sharing. Nouvelle Vague is not only an aestheticization of Godard as a filmmaker, but also of the entire process and the interactions between real people that brought the film to life. I believe it is in this sense that Nouvelle Vague has the capacity to touch the wound of those invested in storytelling—the wound of some representationists. Not all, but some—including me.
An investment in storytelling means that, in some regard, the notion of narrative is privileged over others. Our engagement with the world is built up by the stories we learn, the stories we share with others, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Narratives percolate through the everyday. They are seen in gossip circles, in history courses, and in the shifting of character and animosity throughout the seasons. They can be observed from engagement with the Bible to the apprehension of recent political campaigns. Narrative is how we give form to the brute facticity of existence—or how the brute facticity of existence attains, through us, an intelligible form. This places the storyteller—perhaps the “morally aware one,” to borrow a phrase from the film—in an interesting entanglement: they are able to recognize the power in their capacity to create meaning, to give a meaningful form to reality, for themselves and for others; but also, by the same token, they are able to recognize the fragility and malleability of their own and everyone else’s existence. The great possibility of meaning-making comes with the immense risk of its destruction.
In its capacity as a mirror (a literal projection onto which the ego can identify itself), an encounter with Nouvelle Vague can raise a very profound question, confronted, either consciously or unconsciously, by storytellers—by those who cannot do without investing their energy and desire in the telling of a narrative. By seeing a narrativized fragment of the life of one of the most influential storytellers to ever live, I couldn’t help but ask: what role does storytelling play in the storyteller’s understanding of themselves as storytellers? To someone whose sensibility is so attuned to the bliss of storytelling (as that which grants pleasure both through its affirmation and through its fragility and possibility of dissolution), then how could the temptation to narrativize one’s own life not touch a core nerve? Aren’t storytellers tempted to tell themselves a narrative about their own investments with narrative, about the kinds of stories they tell and the reasons why they tell them? Aren’t they tempted (just like anybody else) to explain to themselves, in terms of narrative, the way their outlook on life has changed through time? Isn’t storytelling, in this sense, a “career,” an activity undertaken throughout a period of time with the possibility of progress or transformation?
These questions touch on the fibers of the motivations for telling stories, which, as in any medium, are always plural and multidiverse. Yet, if I am allowed some speculative power, I would be inclined to argue that, independent of their specific character, every motivation for storytelling is usually inseparable from the desire for redemption. I believe redemption is implied in the very intention of artistic transfiguration, in the attempt to turn something raw into something meaningful, to turn something absurd into something justifiable, and to make something painful valuable in hindsight. It is also implied in the ‘democratic’ attempt to turn something private into something shared and accessible, and in bringing something from the depths of obscurity into the light: into the colorful projection of a movie screen.
This is the wound that Linklater’s film touches on (my wound, at least): it reminds me that storytelling is intimately entangled with the idea of redemption, and yet, at the same time, that the promise offered by redemption can never be absolutely fulfilled. In other words, the desire to create something meaningful—the hope that meaning can be discovered, encoded, and offered to another—coexists with the recognition that meaning, whenever captured, is always an artifice. A reduction. It is a deliberate and fictitious congealment. Beyond the reduction, beyond the artifice, beyond the packaging of life into a “meaningful whole” on a film screen, there is silence, and the continuation of the brute, raw, and mundane facticity of existence. The anticlimactic, the inarticulable, the unnarrativizable—everything that remains excluded from narrative—is also part of life. The storyteller invents continuity, causality, and purpose, and yet life, outside of narrative, cannot promise any of these things. Where redemption seeks an absolute fulfilment, narrative can only ever provide a partial one.
Storytelling is not done to sanctify or to justify life, but is done, perhaps, only perhaps, to fulfill an unmeasurable and irrationalizable obsession. And here lies the innermost limit of this wound: it is not only that every narrative is an artifice, and therefore every attempt at meaning-making remains incomplete; it is that even the narrative storytellers tell themselves about their own vocation falls prey to the same logic. To attempt to legitimize one’s desire to tell stories—to articulate it in a coherent narrative—is already to set oneself up for a gentle deception. No narrative can fully justify that desire, and thus redeem the mysterious portion of life held by irrationalizable and unconscious existence.
None of this, however, means that the unmeasurable and irrationalizable obsession with stories cannot be honest. Quite the opposite: it is the naming of the wound that grants an approach towards healing, even if such healing can never be absolutely fulfilled. Never was it more appropriate to say that, as with many other phenomena in this contradictory life, healing is rather a process than a destination. If redemption were fully realizable, there would be no need to continue telling stories.
An antidote to these tensions can be found in Linklater’s ambivalence: his capacity to elevate the romanticism of a narrative by appealing to mundane, trivial, unromantic moments. Life, if it is to be narrativized, cannot do without its anticlimactic, unromantic, even antinarrative elements. It must exist in contradiction.
If, in my encounter with Nouvelle Vague, I asked “What does it mean to be a storyteller?” then the encounter (and not particularly the film itself, since the film can facilitate different encounters) answers: it can mean everything and nothing at the same time. There is no proper way of being a storyteller; there is perhaps no exact way of discovering what it means. If it is to mean something, this is only to be discovered by embodying—by performing—what it means to have that obsession. And by waiting, patiently, although immersed in action, for an unexpected encounter.
Nouvelle Vague, with its retro elements, its comedy, its ambivalence, and the perpetual mystery of Godard’s character—which is never resolved (he never takes off his sunglasses)—is perhaps Linklater’s unintentional way of coping with the storyteller’s wound.
