The aesthetic and political issues of the metamorphoses of Jean-Luc Godard's work ; Les enjeux esthétiques et politiques des métamorphoses de l'œuvre de Jean-Luc Godard
This research is at the intersection of aesthetics, arts, and information and communication sciences. My initial hypothesis was based on the contribution of Godard's work to multidisciplinary research. As a filmmaker, critic, theoretician, video producer, archivist and television director, Jean-Luc Godard is the author of a metamorphic work, which radically redefined the boundaries of cinema. Godard challenged the hegemonic ambition of current technologies and, at the same time, integrated them in an experimental film practice. Thus, he has developed a pensée en actes filmiques, without breaking with current times. The montage at the foundation of Godard's creation, and also expressed in his discourses, has created a space in which the contrary confluence of discursive, visual and acoustic signs – stemming as much from the vast field of literary, philosophical, musical, cinematographic, classical and modern artistic culture as from contemporary artefact production – and leads the viewer to break with his habits. Godard's montage has questioned the future of communication by image and word, and has offered an aesthetic concept to the domination of the visual. My thesis was based on discourse and image analysis, paying a close attention to the films produced by Godard during and following the conception of Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998). Since the 1990s, Godard's film practice has become that of an essayist and a writer of multimedia. The principle of re-use has been at the very foundation of Godard's films. By exploiting this, I analysed the filmmaker's fragments and quotes. I used a comparative and multidisciplinary approach which allowed me to embrace several picture, artwork and language theories, all of them being critical points of view to think about the potentials of communicating by audiovisual creation. Godard, as a paradoxical player of the end of cinema, redefined the film's devoir-être, i.e. an imperative short-circuiting of early film theory (Epstein, Faure), of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and ...