In Praise of Love.

It seems fitting that today, when we learned about Godard’s death (NYT; more links and appreciative comments at chavenet’s MetaFilter post), I watched his mysterious, glorious, gorgeous Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), which, as Richard Brody said, should have had the impact of Breathless and Every Man for Himself (a new “first film” every twenty years) except that nobody went to see it despite rave reviews. At one point the main character, Edgar (played by Bruno Putzulu), asks someone “Do you think about death? Your own death?” It’s clearly something Godard thought about a lot, and apparently he chose his own. Repose en paix.

I wanted to mention some amusingly vague quotes used in the movie and a couple of minor errors in Richard Brody’s discussion of it. Starting with the latter, Brody says the dialogue beginning “Jean wants money because the hotel is failing” is said by Berthe (the woman Edgar falls in love with, played by Cécile Camp); it is not, it is said by the grandfather (Jean Davy). And he translates the title of Robert Bresson’s 1975 book Notes sur le Cinématographe as Notes on Cinematography — a common and understandable mistake, but by cinématographe Bresson meant neither ‘cinematography’ nor ‘cinematographer,’ he meant cinema itself in its higher form: “movies as an art,” if you will.

As for the quotes (all Godard movies are full of quotations, acknowledged and otherwise), at one point Edgar responds to a mention of Tristan Bernard with “Ah, he’s the one who said « Quand on voit Le Havre, c’est qu’il va pleuvoir. Quand on ne le voit pas, c’est qu’il pleut déjà ».” (When you see Le Havre [from Deauville], that means it’s going to rain. When you don’t see it, that means it’s already raining.) I looked it up and discovered it’s been attributed to everyone from the Duc de Morny to Simone Simon to Jean Gabin to “un jardinier normand”; another source calls it “un vieux dicton,” which is probably the safest description. “The measure of love is to love without measure” is attributed to St. Augustine, but the internet attributes it also to Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis de Sales (frankly, it sounds like one of those “inspirational” sayings that might as well be attributed to Hallmark). Towards the end, Edgar says “Quand je pense à quelque chose, je pense à autre chose, toujours” (When I think of something, I always think of something else), which is a useful way of thinking; Google tells me it’s a quote from Marcelline Delbecq. And during another of Godard’s beloved nighttime drives lit by the reflections of headlights, Edgar says to Berthe “C’est étrange comme les choses prennent du sens quand elles finissent” (It’s strange how things acquire meaning when they’re finished). Now we must say that of Godard’s filmography.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    The measure of love is to love without measure

    This seems to be really and truly a thing from Bernard of Clairvaux, though ripped out of the only context in which Bernard would have asserted it, the more thoroughly to Hallmarkate it:

    Vultis ergo a me audire, quare et quomodo diligendus sit Deus? Et ego: Causa diligendi Deum, Deus est; modus, sine modo diligere.

    … from De Diligendo Deo (right at the very beginning, fitting Godard’s MO in such matters.)

  2. Good to know, thanks! And yes, Godard was an inveterate first-and-last-pager.

  3. Christopher Culver says

    I have not yet seen Éloge de l’amour, as I have been going through Godard’s work chronologically and For Ever Mozart was the last film I watched before my projector went into storage and I hit the road for a while. But I have been really keen on seeing it ever since I read Brody’s effusive praise, and I’m looking forward to the palate cleanser because I rank For Ever Mozart as Godard’s worst film – and I’ve seen every single one of them up to then. I’d even rate minor shorts like Letter to Jane more highly.

    Today on the Hacker News thread there was a poster blaming Anne Wiazemsky for Godard’s supposed lost years of leftist radicalism. I wonder how common a view that is, but it is surely an erroneous one. Godard was already showing an interest in revolutionary sentiment in Masculin-Feminin, which was filmed in winter 1965–1966 before he even met Wiazemsky.

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    Googling in a generally spiritual manner, i find that Thomas Aquinas credits B of C for the “measure of love” thing, and does seem to be risking generalising the notion a bit in the general Hallmark direction a little, for a few heart-stopping moments, but the event does no such thing.

    In Quaestiones Disputatae, De Caritate (Quaestio II, Articulus II) he sets up someone as arguing that “love is not a virtue” because (among sixteen other arguments – this is Aquinas)

    Praeterea, omnis virtus habet debitum modum; unde dicit Augustinus, quod peccatum, quod opponitur virtuti, est privatio modi, speciei et ordinis. Sed caritas non habet modum; quia, sicut dicit Bernardus, modus caritatis est sine modo diligere. Ergo caritas non est virtus.

    “Moreover, every virtue has its proper measure; whence Augustine says that sin, which is the opposite of virtue, is a privation of mode, species and order. But charity does not have a measure, because as Bernard says, the measure of charity is to love without measure. Therefore charity is not a virtue.”

    However, this is a mere feint, before he comes right back at you with Respondeo. Dicendum, quod caritas absque dubio virtus est and explains

    Ad decimumtertium dicendum, quod obiectum caritatis transcendit omnem facultatem humanam, scilicet Deus; unde quantumcumque voluntas humana conetur ad amandum Deum, non potest attingere ut amet eum quantum est amandus. Et ideo dicitur non habere modum caritas, quia non est aliquis terminus fixus divinae dilectionis ultra quem, si diligatur, sit contra rationem virtutis, sicut accidit in virtutibus moralibus, quae consistunt in medio; hoc enim ipsum quod est non habere sic modum, est caritatis modus. Ex hoc igitur non potest concludi quod caritas non sit virtus; sed quod non consistat in medio, sicut virtutes morales.

    “To the thirteenth [argument], it must be said that the object of charity, viz., God, transcends every human capability. Whence, however the human will tries to love God, it is unable to reach Him so that it might love Him as much as He ought to be loved. Therefore it is said that charity has no measure, because there is no fixed terminus of divine love which, if love would exceed, would go against the nature of the virtue. But this can happen with the moral virtues which are means between extremes. The measure of charity is this, that it has no such measure. It cannot be concluded from this that charity is not a virtue, but only that it does not stand as a mean like the moral virtues.”

    So he is with B after all.

    https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVirtutibus2.htm#2

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    Aquinas’ paraphrase “[sicut dicit Bernardus] modus caritatis est sine modo diligere” seems to be the version that went viral (the versio viralis, as the Schoolmen called it.)

  6. (When you see Le Havre [from Deauville], that means it’s going to rain. When you don’t see it, that means it’s already raining.) I looked it up and discovered it’s been attributed to everyone …; another source calls it “un vieux dicton,” which is probably the safest description.

    Yeah, I’ve heard it said of the Pennines from Leeds (a City in their rain-shadow); of Snowdon from pretty much anywhere on the coast of North Wales; all over Ireland; and even of mountains on the West Coast of New Zealand — which jut out into the prevailing Sou’Westers coming straight up from the Antarctic.

    I doubt they watch a lot of Godard (or read Le Duc de Morny) in those places.

    Repose en paix. Indeed. _He’s_ the one who deserves a State Funeral.

  7. and does seem to be risking generalising the notion a bit in the general Hallmark direction a little, for a few heart-stopping moments, but the event does no such thing.

    Such cliffhangers as be in the Fathers ! I admire your script-writing talent. I’m not being sarky here. Even my Latin has improved a teeny tiny bit as a result.

Speak Your Mind

*