I’ve finally started a long-planned retrospective of the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, accompanying my reading of Richard Brody’s Everything Is Cinema (a very welcome birthday gift from a few years ago — I didn’t want to start it until I’d accumulated a critical mass of DVDs, and now that I’ve got fifteen, I figure it’s time). After watching his early shorts on YouTube (god bless the internet!), I popped Breathless into the player and loved it as much as I did the first time I saw it all those decades ago (my wife and I are currently enjoying the many extra features included in the package — god bless Criterion!). I’ll doubtless be making a number of posts out of the retrospective, Godard being perhaps the most language-oriented of directors (see this 2003 post about 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle and this one about Le Mépris, both still among my favorite movies), and this is the first of them.
I called it Breathless, but its French title is À bout de souffle, which literally means ‘out of breath’; I used to be mildly annoyed by the slightly-off translation, but I’ve come to realize that Breathless makes a far better movie title, so good for whoever made the change. (In one of the extras, we see the original letter of agreement from the producer, where the title is in fact translated ‘out of breath.’) That’s not what I’m posting about, though. Like all of Godard’s movies, this one is a tissue of quotations and references, and Godard ascribes two of them to Lenin: “We are all dead men on leave” and “Ethics are the esthetics of the future.” Obviously the idea that Lenin, the most practical and materialist of men, could have said either of those is ludicrous, but my question was: who did? The first was easy enough — it turns out to be by Eugen Leviné (and one can see how the similar-sounding name helped with the misattribution). But who the devil came up with that pretentious quote about “the esthetics of the future,” which both Laurie Anderson and James Monaco have trustingly followed Godard in putting in the mouth of the Great Mushroom?
Another minor linguistic mystery is Michel Poiccard (Belmondo) ordering a coffee as “un direct.” The French noun direct has several meanings, but none involve coffee; this very question was asked at the WordReference.com Language Forums, but nobody seems to know (one person says “I’ve since found a few references to ‘un direct’ in online articles about Tunisia […] explaining it as a local name for un café au lait,” but in the first place Poiccard isn’t in Tunisia and in the second place he takes it black). I’m guessing it’s a very local term from Godard’s youth in Geneva — there are a number of such references in the film (e.g., Poiccard says huitante and nonante for 80 and 90) — but if anyone knows, do share.
As an adjective ‘direct’ can mean ‘straight’ and straight coffee is black coffee.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/direct
“We are all dead men on leave”
leviné’s line is pretty transparently an adaptation of the opening of sergei nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism: “The revolutionary is a doomed man.” and that actually makes it much closer to lenin, whose exaltation of the “professional revolutionary” owes everything to that specific passage by nechaev*, than anything else in leviné’s politics (which as far as i know were aligned with luxemburg rather than lenin).
* practically every aspect of lenin’s political practice, and much of his stated ideology, come quite unaltered from nechaev, to my eye. to be clear: this is not a compliment in either direction: the two are basically tied for Worst Russian Revolutionary Ever, in my book.
Sure, but “The revolutionary is a doomed man” is a good, practical pronouncement, whereas “We are all dead men on leave” is poetickal and repugnant to the straightforward mind of Lenin’s kind of professional revolutionary.
for sure! fartaytsht un farbesert (literally, for once)!
and that’s a contrast that hadn’t been in my mind, and fits all the players perfectly – thanks for pointing it out!
Note that after Poiccard asks for un direct in the film, what he is served is not coffee but a demi (250 ml glass) of beer, from which he takes a sip before making off without paying. A demi direct is a demi pression, a glass of draught beer from a pressurized keg. Here is the entry (which I hope Google will let LH readers see in snippet view) for demi direct in L’argot du bistrot (1989) by Robert Giraud. And here is the entry in Bob (the online dictionary of argot) based on that entry.
The scene where un direct is used in the film is around the 6:00 mark here.
The closest quote I’ve been able to find, “ethics are the esthetics of life”, is from Thomas Sturge Moore’s book about Albrecht Dürer from 1905. Here’s the paragraph, I’ve bolded the relevant bit.
“When we speak of the sense of proportion displayed in the design of a building, many will think that the word is used in quite a different sense, and one totally unrelated to those which I have been discussing. But no; life and art are parallel and correspond throughout; ethics are the Esthetics of life, religion the art of living. Taste and conscience only differ in their provinces, not in their procedure. Both are based on instinctive preferences; the canon of either is merely so many of those preferences as, by their constant recurrence to individuals gifted with the power of drawing others after them, are widely accepted.”
Thanks, that’s got to be the ultimate source!
– Maman, qu’est-ce que c’est le language?
– Le language c’est la maison, dans la quelle l’homme habite.
From 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle
‘Dead men on leave’ sounds like a variation on the thing with the bird dashing through the brightly lit room and into the darkness again.
The shift from “of life” to “of the future” seems a significant and non-trivial one to me, but I can’t find anything in the google books corpus for “[a]esthetics of the future” even vaguely similar that pre-dates the Godard movie.
The shift from “of life” to “of the future” seems a significant and non-trivial one to me
In French “la vie” and “l’avenir” are much closer phonetically.
Good point. (Like Lenin and Leviné.)
Lénine, c’est le Leviné de l’avenir!
Some Googling suggests the ethics quote is from not Breathless but Le Petit Soldat, spoken not by omniscient Godard but by the character Bruno:
ethics are the Esthetics of life, religion the art of living. Taste and conscience only differ in their provinces, not in their procedure. Both are based on instinctive preferences
This is a sort of fin de siècle GE Moore sentiment, “sentiment” being exactly the right word.
It is indeed an irony that Lenin (of all people) might echo this quintessentially bourgeois mush. “Always do the pretty thing.”
Some Googling suggests the ethics quote is from not Breathless but Le Petit Soldat
Ah, I must have been googling [Godard Lenin quote] or the like and run across that one, and forgot that it wasn’t from Breathless. Well, I’ll be watching Le Petit Soldat next, so I’ve got this question answered in advance!
– Le language c’est la maison, dans laquelle l’homme habite
Heidegger. Another lapin de siècle thinker, along with G.E. Moore. Fiver and Hazel, both in Watership Down now.
Note that after Poiccard asks for un direct in the film, what he is served is not coffee but a demi (250 ml glass) of beer
Damn, I knew I should have rewatched the scene before posting, and not just taken the word of some online commenter! Thanks very much for that, and the other information in your comment (which I didn’t notice in moderation until just now).
Lenin, the most practical and materialist of men
It would be more accurate to day he was an intellectual who wore a cape of practicality and materialism, like Superman. How else to explain the 40 volumes of his collected works ?
Lenin, W. I. : Lenin Werke in 42 Bänden Band 1- 40 Werke und 2 Registerbände. Insgesamt 42 Bände Mit 19 Portraits auf Kunstdrucktafeln, 151 Faksimiles, und viele andere Beilagen. Hrsg. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkomitee der SED. Mischauflage.
The bookseller describes the set they’re selling as “very decorative”:
# Durchweg schöne Exemplare. Optisch sehr dekorativ und gut erhalten. #
That would be the case if it had never been touched or opened.
I will just note that the English Wipe article on Lenin gives no hint of his scribble, scribble, scribble. For this information you must consult the German WiPe, which in general is less superficial than the English one.
Writing was, for Lenin, just another tool in the struggle. I defy you to find anything in those 40 volumes that was written purely for pleasure or art. He wrote the way he talked: harshly and to the point. Trotsky was a different matter — he was a genuine intellectual who genuinely liked literature.
I defy you to find anything in those 40 volumes that was written purely for pleasure or art.
I’m not gonna fall for the Tarbaby Gambit ! In any case I said nothing about “pleasure or art”.
Does “intellectual” for you necessarily imply “writing for pleasure or art” ? Even for Trump, writing is just another tool in the struggle. Though “ghost-writing” is perhaps more precise.
Does “intellectual” for you necessarily imply “writing for pleasure or art” ?
No, but since you were entering “the 40 volumes of his collected works” into evidence, I felt obliged to point out that they had nothing to do with what we normally consider the impulse to be a writer. If he could have bellowed his message into everyone’s ear at once, he would never have bothered setting pen to paper.
Nowadays, of course, he would tweet.
If he could have bellowed his message into everyone’s ear at once, he would never have bothered setting pen to paper.
That doesn’t work because there are always people interrupting you. I write a lot – not for pleasure, but so that I can start and finish what I have to say [feast of reason and flow of soul] without some clown putting his oar in. That’s a great advantage of writing – there’s nobody present except little old me.
I myself interrupt other people a lot, so I know whereof I speak. It’s a prerogative of live conversation.
no one’s shared the word “diretto,” which describes a variety of morning coffee in Italian restaurants in Florence.
writing for pleasure or art
i’m inclined to think (partly following james scott, which will surprise exactly nobody) that lenin’s writings are largely an effort to revise actual events to fit the narrative he thought they should have followed: a slow march of carefully planned and rigorously strategized actions by a disciplined party guided by precise and scientific analysis (provided by one vladimir ilyich). which, once you look at any independent account (even some quite sympathetic to him) falls apart almost immediately into two decades of largely ineffectual and uncoordinated flailing* and intense attacks on other revolutionaries, followed by 9 months of lucky guesses at who to back for how long, easy choices at whose popular slogans to swipe in which arenas, and thoroughly opportunistic changes of strategy.
personally, i’d call that a certain kind of commitment to art, and claim lenin as a great writer of fiction (or perhaps autofiction). i don’t think much of his style (at least in english translation; i’ve got no russian to speak of), or the kind of rigid linear narrative he’s committed to in his plotting – but i’d say the same of plenty of other 20thC fabulists.
.
* there’s a reason why the bolsheviks’ only path to power was through a coup: they were nothing and nowhere as organizers and on-the-ground activists. the only reason they had any credibility at all in 1917 was trotsky, who had been opposing lenin for the entire previous history of the RSDLP’s factions.
Pedantic point – they use septante and nonante in Geneva, but not usually huitante (at least, not the locals). It’s huitante in Vaud and the French-speaking parts of Fribourg, the Valais and (if I remember it right) Bern, and quatre-vingts in Geneva, Neuchâtel and the Jura. According to this page there is, wonderfully, a form huiptante in Jersey and Nova Scotia, due to contamination from septante.
Thanks for that — the more pedantry, the better!
I almost invariably see the “aesthetics of the future” line attributed to Lenin and it makes me wonder if that’s entirely down to Godard, or if it was already commonly misattributed when he did it.
This connection is somewhat tenuous, but Godard is also responsible for the line “CinemaScope is only good for snakes and funerals” being almost universally attributed to Fritz Lang, who delivers it in Contempt; in fact Godard gave him the line and took it himself from Orson Welles. Samuel Fuller is also endlessly credited for his spiel from Pierrot le fou (“A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word, ’emotions'”) that was written for him by Godard, except possibly the tag at the end—admittedly an important addition, though it’s the first sentence that most people remember.
Godard once claimed that he isn’t that much of a reader, in that his habit was to pick books off the shelf at a friend’s home or somewhere, read the first and last few pages, and then put it back. I can’t find it now, but someone once did a study of quotations in Godard’s films in which they traced them back to their probable origins and found that they did indeed disproportionately come from near the beginnings and ends of the books.
Always do the pretty thing.
Unless you can be Batman.
To the point? I remember when my sister couldn’t sleep and I read to her from Lenin’s collected works. (And no, it wasn’t the edition in 40 volumes.)
What – do they pronounce the p? There’s no [p] in septante in Vaud.
I can’t find it now, but someone once did a study of quotations in Godard’s films in which they traced them back to their probable origins and found that they did indeed disproportionately come from near the beginnings and ends of the books.
That’s great!
“Espresso” means also “diretto”, “direct” in French. It’s a joke (about the coffee).