Éloge de l’Amour: A Cinematic Meditation

Éloge de l’Amour: A Cinematic Meditation

Everyone has a film they've seen many times, a movie that resonates so deeply that each viewing brings new insights and emotions. For me, that film is Jean-Luc Godard's Éloge de l’Amour. I've watched it countless times, and with every viewing, I uncover layers of meaning that I hadn't noticed before. Godard, with his unparalleled ability to blend philosophical inquiry with visual poetry, has long been my favorite director. His films challenge the conventional boundaries of cinema, demanding active participation from the audience.

Around two-thirds into the film, a shot of a book marks the pivotal turning point in "Éloge de l'amour". Before this scene, the film is set against the urban landscape of contemporary Paris, where all classical beauties—the nighttime traffic, the banks of the Seine, rooms filled with paintings, the faces of young people—are captured and enhanced through elegant black-and-white cinematography, turning into pages of a dusty old photo album being flipped before our eyes, exuding a nostalgic aura of early film history. In a night in Paris, a young man is troubled by his inability to find a suitable female lead for his art project. He had someone in mind, but she refused him. Some time later, he hears of her suicide. Among various relics she left behind, he picks up a book titled "Le Voyage d'Edgar" by Édouard Peisson, a well-known children's novel in France. Edgar is the name of our protagonist, while the woman's name is Berthe. Godard's exploration of love is deeply philosophical. The film does not offer a conventional love story but rather fragments and reflections on what love means. By dividing the film into segments representing different stages of love, Godard invites the audience to contemplate how love evolves and how it is remembered.

Godard is undoubtedly a heavy book lover; in his films, if people have nothing to say, they pick up a book and read. In "Éloge de l'amour," various books appear, including Bresson's "Notes on Cinematography," the complete works of Simone Weil, and Peter Cheyney's crime novels. Edgar often flips through a completely blank book. Even the character played by Godard himself is a passerby reading a book. Among all the books, "Le Voyage d'Edgar" is the most special—it was Godard's favorite childhood reading. Given this, we are not surprised that the appearance of this book triggers a true Proustian moment: a vast orange sea, taking us back to the coast of Brittany two years ago, where Edgar and Berthe first met, the "first moment of love." Now, the coarse noise on the videotape replaces the restrained film grain, making these images from memory extraordinarily vivid. The present fades into the past in black and white, while the past becomes new. Although Godard grew up deeply influenced by film history, he does not see staying in place as "persistence"; he is always eager to embrace the latest technology: the videotape in "Numéro deux," the found footage in "Histoire(s) du cinéma," the DV in "Éloge de l'amour," the DSLR in "Film Socialisme," the 3D in "Adieu au langage," and the 7.1 sound in "Le Livre d'image"... But this does not equate to the kind of "innovation" that adds bricks to the existing technological edifice; what Godard pursues is a newness that is entirely disconnected from the past, starting from zero. Perhaps a better way to put it is that Godard repeatedly brings cinema back to its original state at birth, its childhood. Here, technology is immature, imprecise, fragile, and rough, but also possesses the greatest potential for fiction: whenever the camera points to landscapes and skies, the lack of color resolution in DV creates large patches of mottled pixels on the screen; lampshades in dark rooms, raindrops on windshields, the edges of all objects flicker with non-existent halos.

But behind these vibrant colors, we can feel a profound melancholy. Bittostan's album "Epigraphs" appears repeatedly in a non-linear fashion throughout the film, adding a strong lyrical quality to it. Once, Godard's films were filled with laughter and scolding, with various playful and game-like scenes unfolding one after another. So, when did the melancholy begin? As a staunch leftist with an exceptional understanding of Marxism and Maoism, Godard wrote "FIN" on the film after the May 1968 events and began to experiment with political practice in the realm of cinema. He formed the Dziga Vertov Group, a collective dedicated to collaborative creation, and tried to make some left-wing themed films. However, in the end, the ideal was shattered. With the end of the structuralist wave, Godard found that he could not exert his political influence through film as he had imagined. Thus, in the 1980s, Godard returned to commercial theaters, but the pessimism in his films became increasingly profound, occasionally revealing a strong sense of weariness. After making his monumental work "Histoire(s) du cinéma" in the 1990s, a unique melancholy belonging to the leftist intellectual enveloped Godard's films. Time, memory, history, love—all seemed to scatter and become irretrievable like a receding revolution. He still resisted, in his own way, even as he fell into unprecedented loneliness. In "Éloge de l'amour," despite the theme being love, Godard also emphasized that this is not just a story between lovers but rather a moment where lovers find themselves within the grand sweep of history. This film does not conceal its contempt for Americans: through the character Berthe, Godard claims that America is a country without history, only capable of buying history from other countries. But when history is bought by cultural colonizers, where is the way out? Godard perhaps does not have an answer either.

Éloge de l’Amour is not a film that offers easy answers or straightforward narratives. Instead, it is a cinematic essay that invites contemplation and introspection. Through its exploration of love and memory, Godard challenges viewers to consider how we perceive and value our experiences. For those willing to engage with its complexities, Éloge de l’Amour offers a rich and rewarding journey into the heart of human emotion and the art of filmmaking.

write by ANNI