Images against clichés: conflation and provocation in Jean-Luc Godard

It is well known since Eisenstein that montage is defined as being the soul of cinema, the whole of the film, or, like Deleuze put it, the Idea. The aim of the paper is to question the specific editing techniques of Jean-Luc Godard, who became the emblem of some crucial aspects of cinematic modernity: after the break of the sensory-motor scheme, his punctuation of pure visual and sound images had nothing to do with their assemblage anymore. When Godard says that one image connected to another creates a third one, so that an image can never exist alone, it is not merely a matter of adding images to one another but of classifying types of images and of circulating in these types. Henceforth, the renewed question Godard asks is not “how to assemble differentiated parts, relative dimensions, or convergent actions?”, but rather “what does an image show?”. And indeed, the basic principle at the root of Deleuze’s film aesthetics stems from this godardian problem: if images have become clichés, internally as well as externally, how can an image, “just an image”, be extracted from all these clichés? With what politics and what consequences? Yet, on the basis of his last films (Histoire(s) du cinema, Notre musique, Film socialisme, Adieu au langage), we would like to question Godard’s hesitation between, (1) the revelatory power of montage arising out of a constant hesitation, so that any image can criticize any other image within the film and, (2) the ability of montage to astonish and stupefy the viewer, giving him an order, and hence putting a final point to the circulation of images (as shown by his famous insert: “No comment”). But there is a price for this hesitation. While analyzing the evolution of Godard’s style and its ethical implications, we also ask, using deleuzian conceptual tools, whether the circulation within the type of images in his latest films didn’t end up creating clichés even stronger than before