Jean-Luc Godard knew water.
The still water of a lake, the water that runs in a stream, the water born bubbling from a spring, the water that rises to the sky, in a cloud in billowing bells.
He knew every movement of water — a hydraulic poet, as a nineteenth-century philosopher said.
A poet who puts himself at risk. Who places himself in danger.
The gleam of a rebellious wave: in the frames of his films a mystery opens, something extraordinary.
How can a body so repressed, so overtaken by civilization, still be swept away, run through from side to side, defenseless, by an aboriginal force?
A surviving force of long duration — remote, ancient, resistant as ever. Very well defined by the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.
A force that willfully incarnates its artifacts, so fully that it becomes a power of the body.
Is the new always Godard? The new that remains new: the classic.
Style arrives through an unknown matter within this contradictory, irresistible, ancestral force that seizes and draws in his frames.
For me, what impresses me most — and what impels — what I most feel in his spirit, is his archaic, pristine, prehistoric force.
Something far away that, across its long journey, reaches us.
This, too, is the idea of the dialectical image.
Something very distant... a very distant image... and this image, this sign, comes — and comes transforming itself — until it arrives here.
From there to here.
Across heterogeneous times.
Diverse times.
And with that, you have an entire idea of the object.
A vision that crosses all of that time.
It is like a constellation: if you look, you can see the whole nebula.
That is the idea of the dialectical image.
And that is what Godard, in his cinema, sets out to cross — to venture.
To place one foot in prehistory: a foot made by a blind force. A force that comes and imposes itself there.
Godard let himself be traversed by an aboriginal force.
All of Godard's difference is the entry of this aboriginal force — this uncontrollable force — present in his cinema.
And it allows... that is why, indeed, the framings, the way he narrates his sequences, are all foreign to cinema. Because of this aboriginal force that sets everything in motion.
In this sense, Godard's "normality" is this artistic property of placing himself in contact with that invisible artery, which distills the pathology of his cinema.
There is an old definition — and this is only one vision — between talent and genius.
Talent is a force that you master and control. Genius is something that masters you.
That is the aboriginal force. It is a force that passes through the inside of things. And in that crossing comes the creative thing, the necessary thing — the impetus in which consciousness reaches its extreme point.
When it reaches that extreme point... there this thing begins, and consciousness must pass through that extreme point.
Force is something you create and, at a certain moment, control and master. If you take a step, the force passes behind you.
A surviving force, of long duration — duration in the sense of Henri Bergson's durée. That duration of thought.
The duration that is the guiding thread of thought.
Finally, I thank you for your patience.
Thank you very much.
Júlio Bressane
2022.