The Death of Godard

Patricide

2009-12-19T18:18:00.001Z

An invitation to submit work for the first edition of patricide

Patricide is a new print journal devoted to documentary surrealism.

All interested writers and artists are invited to submit work for publication in this new journal with a first edition to be published in the first half of 2010 as a limited edition A5 perfect bound book.

Work should engage with the interface between documentary practice and surrealism. Written work should be within the range of 1 to 1000 words, images may take any form suitable for reproduction in monochrome (drawing, photograph, print, collage etc.).

Please submit work with the author’s/artist's name, brief biography and contact details to the following address.
➽ editor@patricide.co.uk

Please could you pass this invitation on to any interested artists, writers or groups? No payment will be made for contributions but the copyright will remain with the author who will be clearly credited (unless anonymity is requested).

Thank you

editor@patricide.co.uk
www.patricide.co.uk

The Crowd

2009-11-15T23:14:00.000Z

Abstentions, overwhelming, saying

"fill me with Vladimir Putin

to talk some ribs"

jumped on the civilized world.

Veterans happen

The question stops

I drank water

2009-11-15T23:13:00.001Z

the rusting deportees

the history of words

when he reminded

wounded survivors

The Bland Corporation

2009-01-13T22:25:00.001Z

The Lecture

2008-12-19T12:09:00.001Z

“Monsieur Went – how lovely to see you. I was beginning to think that something had happened to you. Everything’s ready for you – we have a projector… you will find the audience most appreciative.”

“Could I get something to eat first? I’ve been feeling…”
“There will be refreshments afterwards – come along Monsieur Went…”

Larry entered the bar, it had been rearranged slightly with a projector fixed to the ceiling and trained on a screen in front of the fireplace. A small group of strangers sat in the dark half of the bar – eyes peering out from amongst the stuffed owls and antiques. The only familiar faces were Mike War - smiling in the midst of the audience - and Georges Brassey, who was fussing around Larry, urging him to sit at the table adjacent to the screen. Georges opened the proceedings…
“Mesdames et messieurs – tonight’s lecture will be conducted through the medium of English. I have much pleasure in introducing Monsieur Larry Went from across the water…”

Larry had not prepared a lecture but he was accustomed to public speaking and having classes dropped on him at the last minute. It seemed uncomfortably natural to walk into a room full of strangers and start talking - that was the lot of the lecturer. He considered this a test, an initiation rite that might bring him closer to the secret of Godard’s death. He had nothing to lose now and could easily improvise a lecture – improvisation was his default mode. His lectures always pitted the idle ramblings of a man who knew half of nothing against an audience who were half-listening. Tonight’s audience applauded politely as Georges took his seat, all eyes were fixed on Larry. He noted the familiar self-conscious awareness his own body, his hair, his posture, his clothes. He could feel the audience summing him up and dismissing him before he had even opened his mouth. He straightened himself, walked into the blank blue light of the data projector, cleared his throat and began…

Hôtel Gai-Remuez

2008-12-19T12:06:00.001Z

Larry was beginning to be confused by this over-familiarity and the mention of this ‘English friend’. He sensed that, beneath the surface of Georges’ friendly banter, there was an ulterior motive – that, despite the room’s homely atmosphere, there was a darker, more oppressive side to the Hôtel Gai-Remuez. He turned his back to the fire and looked behind – into the dimly lit other half of the bar and realised from whence this subliminal oppressive atmosphere had originated. While one side of the large ground floor room was sparse and barren, neatly and efficiently organised; the other side of the room was cluttered with a mess of furniture and artefacts. The other side of the bar was like the dark side of the moon, the right side of the brain, the view through Alice’s looking glass. Old glass display cases covered the walls, filled with the most incongruous bric-a-brac imaginable. Most prominent were a cohort of stuffed owls dressed in miniature lederhosen who were distributed throughout the curious cabinets that also contained an array of totems, idols and sacrificial objects: Pickled snakes, jars of rusty nails, gas masks, wartime red cross parcels, eggs, seed pods, plastic toys, musical instruments, wood carvings, wire sculptures, bottles, bones, feathers and medical implements. It was as though the contents of a dishevelled, nomadic memory had been extracted, displayed and categorised – it was a vision of the twentieth century that emphasised the fetishistic nature of human civilisation: Objects, objects, objects. Larry turned back to Georges and acknowledged the sight with an exhalation.

“Phew… quite a collection of… quite a collection. I’m sorry but I am travelling alone - tout seul – I do not have an English friend waiting for me. My brother – I travelled with my brother, but he has gone… Je suis tout seul et mon frère a voyagé à Davos…”
“Ah oui – you are all alone in Rolle. This man from Liverpool – I was believing that you may be friends, Je suis désolé - we have so few English guests here monsieur. But for eating – for eating you should go to Manigley’s place; the Restaurant Vaudois on Grand’ Rue”

Larry’s bag was taken to his room, he checked in, freshened up and decided that he would take George’s advice and head for the Restaurant Vaudois – maybe he’d even try the sausage – and, after a late lunch, he would start to look for Godard – start to search for the truth. Before he left, he caught Georges serving another cold beer to the silent Swiss sailor with the stained beard.

“Excusez-moi Georges?”
“Oui?”
“Savez-vous Godard, Jean-Luc Godard?”
“Oui, tout le monde connaît Godard monsieur…”
“Have you seen him here in Rolle recently?”
“Mais oui, of course I have seen him in the town – he was at the fleuriste – he was buying Impatiente, a tray of them on Friday – what is it that you call them… busy… busy?”
“Err – do you mean Busy Lizzies? Do you know his address – could you introduce me?”
Georges shrugs his shoulders and taps the side of his beak. “Monsieur Godard doesn’t like – how should I say? He doesn’t like busybodies – you may meet him but… he is a private man, he is Vaudois.”

The Funeral

2008-12-09T12:06:00.002Z

Larry hesitated in the doorway of the chapel of rest – he could see a heavy wooden coffin resting on a metal trolley at the front of the aisle. There were pews on both sides of the artificially lit, windowless room. Eric Satie music was crackling out of concealed speakers. A silent, shadowy attendant was standing outside the door – he was the only other living person about – Larry felt that he had better check that he’d got the right dead man.

“Can you tell me – who’s the?”
“Fellow called Monod”

That was the name that Williams had mentioned, Larry’s instinct about the time was right. Uncertain of what to do next, he progressed down the aisle, towards the open coffin.

The body was covered except for the bloodless head that rested on a plain white linen cushion. Larry stared in fascination at the waxy Monod’s face for several minutes when he suddenly sensed that he was no longer alone in the room. He turned and saw Sergeant Williams sitting in the back row, his head bent in thoughtful reverie – a slight clipping sound coming from his general direction. Larry turned and sat on one of the front pews – the mournful Satie music seeming to increase in volume.

It’s not a very large turn-out is it? – didn’t Monod have any friends? – If he’d have died in bed, he wouldn’t even have me – if I hadn’t gone to the police he wouldn’t even have had Williams – at least he knows how to behave at funerals…

Arrival

2008-12-09T12:02:00.001Z

Mist swept through Larry’s waking mind, the voice of Godard repeating in an endless loop…
"It will be a new language, it cannot be imagined."

He slowly came back to consciousness in his own bedroom, his tired old mattress in Colwyn Bay. The room seemed bright; sunlight diffused through the cream roller blind. He looked at his piles of unread books stacked by the bed, the paintings and cheap prints on the walls. Catherine Deneuve looked down at him from a framed poster of Belle de Jour, a spider hung from the lampshade – a new lampshade. The room seemed slightly different: different proportions, lower ceiling, smaller window. The mixture of familiarity and difference confused him, his head was hurting and he couldn’t remember what had happened. There was the cigar, the smoke and before that… before that he struggled to recollect. It was as if his memory had been erased, veiled in a mist.

He walked over to the window and slowly pulled up the blind. It was a bright summer’s morning and a beautiful rural vista. It was his bedroom window but a different view. The golf course and the college had gone; he could no longer see his former workplace. The new view was picturesque: An old ivy-clad telephone pole and a chapel with square twin towers, scattered bungalows in the foreground with grey slate roofs that gave way to a patchwork of blue green fields enclosed by hedgerows and stone walls. A low, distinctive ridge formed the horizon, antenna stood proudly on two distant peaks. He wandered down the stairs and through the empty house. His furniture and belongings were distributed neatly around the spacious, modern downstairs rooms. His old belongings; the books, ornaments and furniture, seemed at odds with the strange modern house. Large blank screens were fixed to the walls of each room. The walls were smooth and clean with modernist, minimal fixtures and fittings. It seemed as if he had arrived at some place in the future – carrying his 20th Century detritus with him. His memory was missing. He didn’t feel comfortable. He needed to escape.

He slipped into a pair of striped slippers, slid open the patio doors and stepped out into the large lawned garden that sloped down to a quiet road. He vaguely recognised the location, perhaps it was just the herring gulls and the smell of the sea that were familiar. He sat down at the edge of the lawn and tried to piece together his memory, tried to understand how he had got here and why he was alone. In the distance, chapel bells started to toll, Larry began to shake, his heart started to palpate, lights flashing before his eyes. He stood, staggered and ran to the road. He turned right and down the hill, a few hundred metres to the small, faintly familiar harbour village. The sun was hot but low in the sky – it was morning, Sunday morning. The village was quiet; the only sign of life was the waitress putting chairs out in the front of the village café. Larry approached the woman, a wild look in his eyes, sweat on his forehead, slightly out of breath. The waitress was in her mid thirties with shoulder length brown hair, a black blouse and patterned skirt. She was slim with long legs, a friendly attractive face and light blue eyes. Larry calmed down as she looked up at him and spoke…

Rompida Calanda

2008-12-08T18:36:00.000Z

Each year at midday on Good Friday, when the first bell of the church tower starts to toll, the Rompida commences – the streets of the ancient town reverberate with the continuous drumming of troupes of uniformed redoblantes – some dressed as Roman soldiers, others in fascist-style black-shirts and yet more dressed in the Klan-style pointed hoods of Torquemada and the Spanish inquisition. All of the groups beat their own improvised rhythms for two solid hours before forming a vast procession that slowly encircles the town, turning the streets into a sonic human particle accelerator. When one group encounters another on the streets, they start to duel – to jam against and with each other until their rhythms cease to collide and become one. For twenty-four hours, without pause or respite, the town drums and their rhythms penetrate every stone until the blood-soaked sticks and skins turn the whole place into a rhythmic symbol of a reality vibrating at one frequency. Communication, communion, rhythm – the drumming is etched into the culture of Calanda – the drumming and the drummers belong to the town, penetrate its fabric and bleed for an experience that lies beyond language. There is a carnal ecstasy in the pounding that liberates the performers from their human skins, their social conditioning and integrates them with the physical world that their mortal souls temporarily inhabit. Every year, Buñuel would join in with the drumming – its visceral imprint would stay with him throughout his life as a barrier that he could use, like the imaginary ‘brick wall’ in The Village of the Damned, in order to isolate himself from the surrounding culture and produce his own personal ideology of liberation. It enabled him to develop a vision of existence outside of the constraints of social conditioning – to tap into and de-tune the collective unconscious.

Dead-heading

2008-12-02T12:51:00.002Z

Reaching the top of the drive, Godard shuffled around the edge of the garden, sticking to the raised path and flower borders that skirted the apparently deserted Victorian house. The house and its location resonated with a dead Europe – an enlightened utopian Europe where the patrician classes cared for the workers – it felt like his family’s summer house on the banks of Lac Léman – it smelt of his childhood. It reminded him of the mental institution that his father had sent him to for stealing his grandfather's first editions of Valéry… As he considered the stolen books, he took a book of his own – a slim black notebook, full of tightly written notes and carefully dropped it, kicking it underneath the bush that he was examining. The sleepy bees on the spring blossom brushed against his worn raincoat and headed off towards an uncertain summer. A hush descended on the enclosed garden, the silence of green lawns, high hedges and privacy. The wind tugged at the very tops of the tall trees. Where life touched the skies, a battle was raging and its faint rustling cast a blanket over this quaint British seaside scene. As he strolled along the border, he avoided Pugh and considered the flowers; dead-heading was one of the few pleasures he allowed himself and as he circled the periphery of the damp lawn, he carefully pinched the spring blooms from their succulent stalks. His pleasure derived from the feeling of his fingernails cutting into the soft flesh at the neck of the plant and removing its head – he was a god in this universe – decapitating with a remorseless pinch, restoring order and allowing new growth – he was at peace now and ready to meet his financier.

Not to be confused with...

2008-12-02T12:47:00.002Z

There are a number of other books titled Dark Windows - these should not be confused with the Death of Godard.

A Chill

2008-11-03T09:39:00.003Z

A chill washed his aging frame as he turned into the entrance of Plas Coch and parked discreetly at the foot of the long drive. The mountain breeze in the spring leaves masked the noise of the dual carriageway that cut the village off from the bright expanse of sand below and the Irish Sea glittering blue to the horizon. The fresh sea air cut lightly through Godard’s lungs as he exhaled the last of his stale cigar smoke. He still smoked the cigar of his cinematic heroes: Hitchcock, Welles, Ford, Hawkes but could never admit to it… perhaps it was the cigar of Belmondo – he made Belmondo – fuck Belmondo – he was Godard – he was the icon and he knew it.

He ambled up towards the aging garden where Huw Pugh was waiting at a white plastic table. As Godard ascended the drive and turned one corner, his doppelganger turned another – walking through the lower gates, sporting the same shabby intellectual air and smoking the same cigar. Godard’s identical twin opened the hire car door and sat calmly in the still warm driver’s seat, waiting.

Reaching the top of the drive, Godard shuffled around the edge of the garden, sticking to the raised path and flower borders that skirted the apparently deserted Victorian house. The house and its location resonated with a dead Europe – an enlightened utopian Europe where the patrician classes cared for the workers – it felt like his family’s summer house on the banks of Lac Léman – it smelt of his childhood. It reminded him of the mental institution that his father had sent him to for stealing his grandfather's first editions of Valéry… As he considered the stolen books, he took a book of his own – a slim black notebook, full of tightly written notes and carefully dropped it, kicking it underneath the bush that he was examining. The sleepy bees on the spring blossom brushed against his worn raincoat and headed off towards an uncertain summer. A hush descended on the enclosed garden, the silence of green lawns, high hedges and privacy. The wind tugged at the very tops of the tall trees. Where life touched the skies, a battle was raging and its faint rustling cast a blanket over this quaint British seaside scene. As he strolled along the border, he avoided Pugh and considered the flowers; dead-heading was one of the few pleasures he allowed himself and as he circled the periphery of the damp lawn, he carefully pinched the spring blooms from their succulent stalks. His pleasure derived from the feeling of his fingernails cutting into the soft flesh at the neck of the plant and removing its head – he was a god in this universe – decapitating with a remorseless pinch, restoring order and allowing new growth – he was at peace now and ready to meet his financier.

He walked over to Pugh and sat heavily on a plastic chair that gave slightly beneath him, the legs spreading out to distribute his mature weight – a weight that had always been measured in kilograms as one day all people would be measured. There was a moment of silence as the two men regarded each other.

“Mister Godard…” The reverie was disturbed by Pugh’s gratingly obsequious and parochial enthusiasm. His formal business attire appeared to come straight off the peg – laundered in such a way as to look brand new – he obviously had someone to iron his shirts and press his trousers. His aviator’s watch hung heavily on its thick bracelet as the scent that he wore hung on his portly frame. Hairs protruded from nose, ear and neck, the smile and firm handshake revealed a starched collar, cuffs and cufflinks that kept his hairy body framed and contextualised. He was a businessman and Godard was here to do business with him.

The Covert

2008-11-02T22:56:00.002Z

The covert nature of Godard’s project ensured that he was travelling alone and would return alone to his reclusive and secure home in Rolle, in Switzerland – a void at the centre of the web. He was here, in Wales, to meet Huw Pugh of S4C: Film Commissioning Editor of the United Kingdom’s Welsh language television channel. He was here to secure the final piece of his financial jigsaw puzzle – the money that would allow the production and distribution of his populist rallying cry – a film that would not be esoteric like Notre Musique or obliquely deconstructive like Eloge De L’Amour. It would follow on from where Alphaville, Breathless and Le Mepris left off and its effect would shake the world as much as a fictional feature film can. His cultural capital and place in the history of the twentieth century was already ensured but no one expected Godard to change the twenty-first century. He felt ominously like John Lennon walking out of the lobby of his hotel in New York, knowing that he was back and about to say something to a world that was ready to listen. He had allowed the Dark Windows to restrain him for too long and now he had nothing to lose.

A Concept

2008-11-02T22:48:00.001Z

He had developed a concept – a high concept linked to a revolutionary intent. His next film would be the most important he had ever made – a rallying cry for dreamers and revolutionaries – entertainment for the masses, using the juggernaut of the motion picture industry to change the world, to foment revolution and alter the political landscape forever. Godard was not wrapped in such hyperbole – he just knew: He knew that his life was moving inescapably towards this subtly messianic goal, he knew that the corporate elite would not allow him to carry out his revolution easily and he knew that after the revolution no one would care.

For the past eighteen months, he had been visiting television executives around Europe. He was collecting money like the producers of Springtime for Hitler, seducing the little old ladies of the media world with his aging prestige and pocketing their money on a promise that would never be fulfilled.

He was returning to the United Kingdom to find finance for the first time since his British Sounds project was banned by ‘independent’ British television for being too radical. That was a time when England had at least a little credibility. Then, in that decade, he had made One Plus One – re-titled and re-edited it was released and disowned, he was naïve back then. Polanski, Antonioni, Truffaut – they had all made movies in England in the sixties. No one of note had any intention of associating themselves with this flabby isle nowadays – intellectual, artistic, political, culinary flab. The world did not like the United Kingdom and Godard represented the world.

The Body

2008-10-30T10:20:00.000Z

The body of Jean-Luc Godard sat hunched in a partially melted white plastic garden chair, his lifeless eyes regarding the partially tended garden of a rest home for the elderly in Penmaenmawr.

Shot / Reverse shot.

If he was watching from art-house heaven, he would be asking…

Why, of all places, have I ended my days here? What is the significance of this – that a famous European filmmaker should die in the anonymous garden of an anonymous Victorian manor house in an anonymous part of the United Kingdom?

Perhaps he would have known the significance of his death – only he knew what was left in him at the end – what unfulfilled plans faded with his ebbing consciousness.

Earlier

2008-10-30T10:15:00.000Z

One scant hour earlier, Godard’s rented Toyota Yaris had been heading west towards the edge of a new Europe that was joined as never before – a Europe that had never been as integrated or stretched as far as this, from the Bosporus to the North Atlantic - that had expanded without any apparent invasion or war. It was a Europe for the workers, it was a Europe for the capitalists, it was for the Socialists and Fascists, the nationalists and internationalists, the conservatives and radicals – it was a human endeavour that contained all of humanity and all of its future. It was a web spun by invisible spiders, Godard knew that the spiders would soon appear and he knew that it was imperative for him to be one of them.

He turned off the A55 expressway, the sea to his right, the mountains to his left and the fading sun illuminating it all through the fast moving clouds of the late March afternoon. He thought little now – he knew too much and one of the things that he knew was the reason for being here – incognito, in secret: Money – he needed money again, this time more was needed for a plan that had to remain hidden. He had been wooing easily flattered financiers with his cultural prestige – collecting small sums of money to fill the large pool of finance required to create his masterpiece. He knew that he was back, that he had a vision again – his muse had taken an interesting route to this point in time but the determination was there now – he had decided to open the windows and let the light of Godard illuminate the world.