Godard’s signifiers

I want to start with a quotation from the text “Godard, Cinema, (Hi)stories” ;
“History is a mode of shared experience where all experiences are equivalent and where the signs of any one experience are capable of expressing all the others. Novalis succinctly summed up the poetics of the age of history in his famous dictum:”everything speaks”.

What does “everything speaks” mean though? And what are its connections to the cinema are main questions of following paragraphs.

First of all we can remember the Saussure’s semiology and its definitions of sing, signifier and the signified. We all read his text so I do not want to rediscover America, instead, I want to point out my ideas about what is this speaking of everything in Saussure’s terminology.

The “everything” in the motto-like sentence is, although it seems like it is commuting with “the sign”, this every thing in actually “the signifier” in cinema. I believe that the sentence can be reread as “signifiers are constantly creating each other”.

As an example lets consider any single image in Godard’s documentary. Every single shot signifies something in our mind, because of our personal experiences and the social conditions of ours(actually Hall explains in his encoding/decoding how complicated is this ‘because of’). And the sign lets say the table becomes a signifier which creates its meaning through the movie again and again.

My first claim is that: there exist no sign in a movie like Godard’s. Every single image perceived in our brain with its whole bunch of connections in our mind. I know this sentence seems a bit provocative, but lets focus more. In a movie with continuous narrative the images can be signs, which become(or not) a signifier later on. And again the process works; the thing finds its meaning again and again through the movie. Lets consider the ear in one of the very first scene of Blue Velvet. First it is pure ear but than, our mind tries to find the signifier. And this signifier change again and again till the end of the movie. If we think of the ear at the end of the move, it doesnt have the same signifier in our brain as it had in the beginning. Therefore, what a the time in the move makes is to lead us to change the signifier of images that it is showing to us.

For Lynch, I believe this process works in a very obvious way. I do not remember the source(maybe one of our readings), it was talking about a exposition in France, in which different objects from Lynch movies are gathered together. It is meaningful and possible to do such a exposition for Lynch because it plays with the signifiers of certain object through all the movie.

So what is going on is “everything” which is firstly a sign that immediately a signifier, talks, changes its connections, through the movie.

Now, lets turn back to Godard and my pretentious claim. There is no sign but a constant and powerfull change of signifiers in Godards documentery. Only sign is maybe the written words, or sentences in the documentary.

What Godard is trying to do is let the signifiers to change. He shows images one after the other, even sometimes we can not find the time to “understand” the image, but to see it. Sign become the signifier, and he plays with its meanings.

The narration in Godards documentary is this “talk” of signifiers and their fabulous dance of changing the meanings of the ones before.

In the Godards documentary every scene falls on the others. You can not think of any single image without the others; it includes all the images before and after. Therefore I am feeling something magnificent in this process. The scene in the 3th minute of the documentary is actually carries the one in the end. Some kind of future in the moment. Because Godard plays with the signifiers. You can not talk about his documentary in a time line like first this happened and than this and that. But what you can talk about is the movie whole. There is no separate image than the others, no lines no borders but kind of loops, and flows of meanings.
In the documentary of Godard everything speaks with us and with eachother.

Ozan Kamiloğlu