The Twit and the Wisdom: July 2019

ジャン=リュック・ゴダールの数2 Numéro deux - Jean-Luc Godard (1975) - “Au départ” on Vimeo

Numero Deux begins with the French pronouns lineated, in equal lengths, like
a concrete poem : My/ Your/ His [Film], with the word 'Image
Sound' left flashing next to 'His,' then scaled back to just 'Image'
juxtaposed with the image of a young woman. From here, and
throughout, Godard produces a virtuosic performance of video
techniques, especially the scenes of May Day in Paris, with its
multiplayers of juxtaposed citations from different worlds (on just
two video screens) – many clearly interruptive, such as the kung-fu
over the explanation of the socio-economic crisis at the time – ,
made one world, made critical by the metamorphosis of
(key)words on video, e.g. the letter so for the French word for
'work' neatly turned into 'shit'. In some ways it's a continuation
of the frenetic pace established in La Chinoise, where the
viewer simply cannot keep up and 'take things in' in a single
viewing, betraying a fidelity to modernist narrative techniques
(think Joyce), resisting consumption while keeping to a Brechtian
principle of showing how this effect is performed. Whether it was
his intention or not (probably not), the effect can best be described
as 'sublime'.

There have always been child soldiers. Older boys who played the drums and fifes in the armies of the French Republic often fell on the front lines. The Marie-Louises of the Napoleonic armies and the older boys in the retreat of the Wehrmacht were sacrificed to delay the advance of the opposing army for a few hours. This is not counting the 14,000 little boys blown up during the Iran-Iraq War so that the adult soldiers could then attack on a battlefields free of land mines.

[. . .]

Imminent danger leads to problems of attention, which it focuses on the aggressor, shutting out the rest of the world so that, paradoxically, intellectual performance improves.

All on-site observations made today of children at war, be it in Croatia, Kosovo, Israel, Palestine, or Timor, confirm the surprise of educators [including those in the U.S. military] who, since the 1950s, have noted “the excellent scholastic results” of children traumatized by war.

- Boris Cyrulnik, The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience (2003), trans. Susan Fairfield, NY: Other Press, 2005), p. 123, 125.