Research Statement

Jean-Luc Godard’s political documentaries emerge from experimental exchanges between media, foregrounding creative and political investigations of mediation, remediation, “retro-mediation,” and “reverse (re)mediation” (Arrivé 2019, 11). Alongside an appreciation for the indexical quality of the image — 'even scratched to death a simple thirty-five millimetre rectangle saves the honour of reality’ — Godard (1998) underscores the heterogeneity and indeterminacy of recomposed images, which are understood as images of images, representations of representations, rather than strictly factual documents. Building on this premises, Remediations positions Godard’s documentary practice as both a motif and a methodological catalyst for a new form of videographic criticism that reflects on the following interrelated themes:

1. The Politics and Poetics of Remediation: Drawing on Bolter and Grusin (1999), I examine remediation as a series of operations through which cinema’s processual and conceptual categories are transcribed into video. Video is conceived as a counter-practice, a meta-medium (Rancière 2003; Bellour 1990; Aumont 1999) that both transforms and reflects upon the traditional uses and functions of cinema, enabling a series of passages between cinema, video, photography, and writing.

2. Spectral Re-figuration and Narrative Displacement: Remediations explores the re-use, relocation, and dis-functioning of cinema’s dominant narrative forms by invoking the orphic and “ghostly lineage” of Godardian cinema (Sterritt 2023). Through gestures of retrospective longing towards someone who is no longer accessible to us, I investigate the re-mediated presence of Godard as a spectral figure and the impulse to remedy (i.e. to reverse, or to conjure up) his absence through the medium of video.

3. Performativity and Embodied Mediation: Remediations explores how performative strategies such as staged actions, voice-over, and other embodied gestures introduce tactility and (auto)reflexivity to the screen. These strategies intersect the tactile and embodied dimensions of media (Marks 2002) with visual experience, foregrounding the sensory and processual nature of videographic practice.

Context / Significance

Remediations is part of a broader body of work that includes two earlier videographic essays published in [in]Transition: “Grammatology of the Nymph: Godard and Warburg” (Duarte 2021), and “Three Short Letters to Godard” (Duarte 2024). The former explores imaginal and conceptual resonances between Godard and Warburg, while the latter offers a personal, affective response to the announcement of Godard’s death, articulated through a letter-writing exercise in which I address Godard after his death. Remediations serves as the concluding piece in this triptych dedicated to studying Godard through audiovisual research forms. It seeks to experiment with and reconceptualize the essayistic potential of videographic criticism, not only as a shift in format, but as a transformation in the conceptual and imaginative scope of traditional videographic critique.

The scarcity of videographic works on Jean-Luc Godard becomes apparent when consulting journals such as Screenworks and [in]Transition, where only a few entries are dedicated to Godard’s oeuvre. This limited presence reinforces the notion that videographic reflections on Godard remain relatively rare. Some exceptions include David Verdeure’s Ray/Godard (2016), Caroline Rumley's 'Give Me a Smile´ (2016), and Kogonada’s Godard in Fragments (2017). Verdeure’s piece examines the visual affinities between Jean-Luc Godard and Nicholas Ray, constructing a spatial montage through the layering and juxtaposition of multiple screens. Caroline Rumley's 'Give Me a Smile´ centers on the disjunctive relationship between gaze and voice by Dadaistically combining Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) and Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Kogonada re-edits some of the most iconic sequences from Godard’s Nouvelle Vague period, employing image, subtitles, and the repetition of motifs, themes, forms, and gestures to create a meditative, pastiche-like homage.

Remediations extends Godardian videographic criticism by focusing specifically on his political documentary cinema. Moreover, by positioning the videographic essay as a direct heir to the essay film, Remediations intersects the performative exploration of self and other with the critical activity of historical reflection through re-readings and transformations of images and words, offering a new way to experiment with Godardian conceptual imagery and videographic essayistic methodologies.

Methods 

Remediations illuminates the essayistic methodologies of Godard’s political documentary films and creatively extends them through the dramatization of an impossible encounter with Godard himself.

The introspective and meticulously paced voiceover serves as a counterpoint to the visual image, offering a new legibility and enabling images to reflect upon one another, just as mediums re-mediate other mediums. Videographic experimentation and deliberation are central to Remediations’ essayistic approach, blending Godard’s radical vision with a conceptual drive that stresses the interpenetration of images and texts. This dialectical, constellatory process follows the movement of thought and embraces the ambivalences, discontinuities, and lacunae of both images and voice-over — what Pascal Bonitzer (1982, 31) describes as the “voice-off-off” as a facilitator of deeper cognitive engagement with the image; and what Bazin (2017) referred to as the “ear-to-eye” montage, a technique that disrupts the linear relationship between images and between image and voice-over narration.

In this piece, video appears as an analytical instrument capable of promoting passages between old and new media, between Godard’s appropriated and original images and their reinterpretation and remediation through additional archive footage and lo-fi imagery. Video also facilitates dynamic exchanges between voice-over narration and Godard’s most provocative juxtapositions of seemingly irreconcilable historical elements (Jews and Muslims; Palestine and Israel; pornography and the Holocaust), highlighting their radical dialectical nature where some have seen only un-dialectics (cf. Didi-Huberman 2015; Duarte 2024).

In Remediations, video also serves to remediate Godard’s presence through a passage from the immediacy and transparency of film to the hypermediacy of multiple acts of remediation marked by “fragmentation, indeterminacy, heterogeneity” (Mitchell 1992, quoted in Bolter and Grusin, 327). Drawing on the remediation of the Orphic myth via reproduced and reappropriated iconography, as well as through the use of screens, windows, reframing and masks, Remediations enacts a translation of Godard’s presence “from the crisp materiality of film to the pliant inexactitude of video” (Sterritt 2023). This shift moves from sharp, directly extracted images from Godard’s films to the disintegrating textures of reappropriated and remediated imagery.

Jacques Derrida (1994) said that the phantasm summons up a zone of undecidability and uncertainty, thereby calling into question the very possibility of constituting knowledge, as knowledge comes to refer to what lies outside perception and beyond the archive as a fixed repository. Remediations, in this sense, entails a hauntology that dismantles ontology as the guarantor of knowledge, essence and self-presence, establishing a relation to “something-yet-to-be-done” (Blanco and Peeren 2013). The ghost is simultaneously a revenant (something that once was and still endures) and an arrivant (a harbinger of what is to come), moving through overlapping temporalities and the shifting re-mediations of presence.

Thus, the experience of Godard in Remediations is a haunting one, marked by amazement, surprise, and perplexity. It involves a decentered subject alongside the disruption of traditional binaries such as being and non-being, presence and absence, immediacy and hypermediacy. Ultimately, by foregrounding the tactile gesture of creation through the embodied engagement with images and words, Remediations invite viewers to experiment remediation as the becoming-body of thought, echoing the Godardian aphorism of cinema as “a form that thinks and a thought that forms” (Rascaroli 2008, 25).

Outcomes

The piece builds upon the comprehension of the intersectional structure of the essay form to explore a videographic methodology that intersects videoart and the essay film.

By remediating Godard's moving and still images through lo-fi home-video aesthetics, reappropriated visual materials, adapted textual fragments, autobiographical and speculative readings of cinema and history, and marginal or overlooked footage sourced from the Internet, Remediations proposes an alternative mode of engaging with Godard’s work: one that extends videographic analysis into a more experimental, affective, and materially reflexive territory.

The voice-over in Remediations reorients the sensory and cognitive engagement with the image, while simultaneously disrupting narrative linearity by presenting images as fragments of thought, rather than as illustrations of a coherent, explanatory argument. In doing so, it challenges the often-complacent posture of videographic criticism, which tends to deploy film excerpts as transparent evidence in support of systematic interpretation. Here, the voice-over is not omniscient or authoritative; it is fractured, hesitant, and questioning. It relinquishes totalizing knowledge, revealing instead what cannot be seen, what resists articulation, and what hovers at the threshold of demediation (Stewart 2010) — silence, blackness, noisy grey, and the fragile, deteriorating archive.

In Remediations, auto-reflexivity is not merely a process of losing and remaking the self, but an affective and embodied engagement with a multiplicity of voices and images, destabilizing formulaic approaches to thought and criticism. It is not enough for images to direct the text in a video essay; rather, language itself must be transformed by the force of the images, becoming interrogative, speculative, even delirious, thus resisting confinement within the bounds of semantic or structuralist analysis in film criticism. Conversely, images too must be reconfigured by the emergence of words, revealing what lingers at the thresholds of visibility and comprehension (Blanchot 1955).

Impact

Thus, what Remediations achieves is something like a minor videographic practice emerging from a marginal area of technical, narrative, and artistic discreetness that continually tests and undoes subjective and performative thinking within the hypermediated public domain of the web.

Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) notion that minor literature is not defined by the use of a minor language, but by the production of literature by a minority within a major language, the videographic essay may be understood as a citational and transcriptional form capable of enacting deterritorializations within dominant methodologies and aesthetic conventions of cinema and textual criticism. In this context, minor videographic practice becomes inherently political. What is articulated through minor subjective practice is not only personal. It is a form of collective action, aiming to mark presence, disappearance, and transformation in the shared symbolic space. Here, subjectivity is no longer fixed or sovereign; it is distributed rhizomatically and graphematically, dispersed across networks and media, forming multiplicities and collective assemblages of enunciation that resist normative structures of meaning and authorship.

Impersonality in this context refers to the displacement of personality from an essential, autonomous core to a distributed, collective field, where subjectivity emerges through minor usages of cinema and philosophy as practical engagements rooted in everyday experience and affective processes of becoming-bodies. The author is no longer a sovereign genius or magisterial figure generating accurate meaning, but rather an operator of remediations and on-going counter-practices of texts, images, technologies, senses and non-senses.

References

Arrivé, M. (2019) ‘Remedying Remediation?’ Leaves 7: 1-15.

Aumont, J. (1999) Amnésies: Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard. Paris: P.O.L.

Bazin, A. (2017) ‘On Lettre de Sibérie’, in N. M. Alter and T. Corrigan (eds) Essays on the Essay Film. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 198–200.

Bellour, R. (1990) L’entre Images 1: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo. Paris: La Différence.

Blanchot, M. (1955) L’Espace Littéraire. Paris: Gallimard.

Blanco, M. P. and Peeren, E. (2013) ‘Introduction’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York and London: Bloomsbury.

Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Bonitzer, P. (1982) Le Regard et la Voix. Paris: UGE.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx. London and New York: Routledge.

Didi-Huberman, G. (2015) Passés Cités par JLG. L’œil de l’Histoire 5. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

Duarte, M. M. (2021) ‘Grammatology of the Nymph: Godard and Warburg’, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 8(1). Available at: https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11451/ [Accessed 20 June 2025].

Duarte, M. M. (2023) ‘Jean-Luc Godard and Walter Benjamin: Metahistory, Dialectical Images and Worldly Theology’, French Screen Studies 24(3): 263–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2022.2151195

Duarte, M. M. (2024) ‘Three Short Letters to Godard’, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.15793 [Accessed 20 June 2025].

Godard, J.-L. (1998) Histoire(s) du cinéma. Paris: Gallimard-Gaumont.

Kogonada (2016) Godard in Fragments. Criterion Collection. Available at: https://kogonada.com/portfolio/godard-in-fragments [Accessed 30 June 2025].

Marks, L. U. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mitchell, W. J. (1992) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rancière, J. (2003) Le Destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique.

Rascaroli, L. (2008) ‘The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments’, Framework 49(2): 24–47.

Rumley, C. (2016). ‘Give me A Smile´, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies 3(4). https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11370/ [Accessed 30 June 2025].

Sterritt, D. (2023) Haunted by Godard. Second International Philosophy and Film Conference, 25–26 May 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHttjV7oav0 [Accessed 30 June 2025].

Stewart, G. (2010) “Bookwork as Demediation.” Critical Inquiry 36: 410-457.

Verdeure, D. (2017) ‘Ray/Godard’, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, 4(2a). https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11345/ [Accessed 30 June 2025].

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Invite resubmission with minor revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Thank you for inviting me to review this submission. I found the video essay really engaging and stimulating, and while I feel that more work needs to be done in terms of clarifying and focusing the accompanying research statement, I believe all the key ideas necessary for an excellent piece of research are already contained within it. The video essay and supporting statement present an innovative approach to thinking about, responding to, and being inspired by Godard's work through audiovisual research forms.

The work's main contribution lies in its transformation of critical language through images, positioning videographic essays as autonomous works rather than mere illustrations of written arguments. The author successfully demonstrates how images can function as "fragments of thought," fostering metaphorical associations between visual materials and words. However, I feel that the aim of rethinking the video essay, or expanding its forms through audiovisual experimentation, should be set up in one of the opening research questions. Some of the current research questions are too broad and ‘poetic’: e.g. “Who looks? Who thinks?”, and need focusing much more sharply on what the project really delivers. In terms of the latter, I feel that there are several claims made by the author that could be set up by more carefully tailored research questions in the opening of the essay. In addition to the development of the video essay form, these might relate to 1) the politics and poetics of remediation (e.g. “postmodernism’s tendency to challenge traditional distinctions and hierarchies”) ; 2) the focus on Godard as an inspiration for new cinematic forms (“honoring his cinema as an experience of wonder and surprise”; 3) incorporating the author’s bodily presence (“tactile, embodied interaction with the media”).  If these ideas could be set up as research questions at the start of the essay, then each of the following sections would benefit from being focused on these key issues. This would lend greater conceptual clarity and coherence to the supporting statement, and would help the reader navigate the video essay itself. The political dimensions of remediation need stronger integration into the theoretical framework of the essay – this is well-trodden territory, and thus should be acknowledged, but I believe the author does make an original contribution to this debate.

At the same time, some of the ideas discussed in the essay are insufficiently developed, and seem to me to add little to clarifying the author’s key arguments. In particular, references to postmodernism and heterotopies don’t contribute very much to critical discussion, and instead appear to be ways of describing things the author is interested in.

The statement demonstrates strong scholarly engagement and original methodology but needs clearer articulation of its research framework. The innovative approach to videographic criticism and embodied interaction with media represents a valuable contribution to the field, particularly in its exploration of how critical language can be transformed through visual means.

Overall, the work merits publication following these revisions, as it offers a novel approach to both Godard scholarship and videographic methodology.

Review 2: Invite resubmission with minor revisions of practical work and/or written statement.

Re-mediations is a poetic reflection on cinematic images and their relation to death, the gaze, the act of looking and the thought-act itself. The author takes a heuristic approach to the construction of the essay film, which pays homage to Godard through a style seemingly imbued with the spirit of Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard, 1988). The essay film allows for images to comment upon images, mixing the author’s own low-fi imagery with archive footage. As the author notes, the classically essayistic approach differs from videographic criticisms tendency towards the use theoretical voice-over in accompaniment of images cut directly from the films themselves. Re-mediations Godardian attempt to create a uniquely essayistic visual language is appropriate for the topic and theme.

The accompanying statement is engaging and well written, and the theoretical perspectives compliment the practice. The author makes reference to writing on Godard from Rancière, Bellour, Aumont, and Didi-Huberman. These texts should be included in the bibliography. The statement would be enriched by direct engagement with these philosophers. The claim that ‘reflections on Godard within the realm of visual essays are, surprisingly or not, still very scarce’ is quite a broad claim. I would like to see some reference to videographic criticism of Godard’s work that the author finds valuable.

The text hints at the development of a film-philosophical language, but this is not fully articulated. There are references to Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida in the bibliography, but these works are not engaged with in the written component. The concept of the minoritarian is hinted at towards the end of the methods section, but this is not fully developed. The author should engage with one or two of these concepts to help anchor the work’s philosophical position. I would suggest fleshing out the minoritarian perspective, as this seems quite appropriate for Godard’s filmmaking practice, which, one could argue, has resisted majoritarian forms.  

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response