Godard, Pontecorvo, Daney: Morals of Style

<strong>School of Arts and Aesthetics Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> a Talk By <strong>Daniel Morgan</strong> Associate Professor Department of Cinema and Media Studies University of Chicago Author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema 2012 <strong>Godard, Pontecorvo, Daney: Morals of Style</strong> <strong>Abstract :</strong> The familiar account of the history of politically committed film and film criticism centres on montage, emphasizing topics such as dialectical juxtaposition, the production of new meanings out of disparate fragments, and the creation of critical viewpoints. This talk explores a different tradition, one that emerges explicitly in debates in post-war French film culture around the use of camera movements in contemporary films—from Orson Welles to Kenji Mizoguchi to Gillo Pontecorvo to Alain Resnais. I argue that rather than a politics of form, these filmmakers and critics were articulating a relation between style and ethics. One part of the paper, then, examines this relation, showing how camera movements were understood to establish a complex interaction between filmmaker, film world, and film viewer; these are matters, I argue, that pertain directly to a theory of style. The second part of the paper works through the reasons for the centrality of camera movements in this context, arguing that they imbricate the film viewer in the film world in a way that runs counter to our own intuitions—and counter to theories of montage. Drawing on models of point of view, I argue that the moral stakes of cinematic style is a matter at once of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. I conclude by reconsidering the work of montage, especially in Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, in light of this alternate genealogy of style. <strong>Thursday, September 3, 2015</strong>