Carmen the Intangible

At the time Godard was still dreaming of innocence. Although he found it later – dirty, manipulated, yet still pure – in the various Histoire(s) du Cinéma, at the time of First name: Carmen he was still very much involved in disarranging the unity of Godard’s Passion, a film which failed to fulfill its purpose or satisfy expectations. The idea that the female icon was tactile rather than tangible – more willing to touch than to be handled – had already been presented by Jean-Paul Belmondo/Michel Poiccard/ Laszlo Kovacs in Breathless, yet it was perhaps the perfectly mirrored, symmetrical figures of Carmen/Mary that finally and definitively enabled Godard to expound his theory via an almost sublime comparison of the innocence of the soul and the flesh debated under the very weight of its purity.

Like its “twin” Hail Mary, First name: Carmen tests the innocence of a figure which both possesses and generates the original fullness of being. Indeed, it is no mere chance that both Carmen and Mary are women whose identities are nourished by the intangibility of their flesh, by ideas rather than material substances. Both are putains and mamans who flaunt their carnal sensuality and maternity before the trembling hand of a man – two different versions of the same Joseph – who has not yet learned how to possess in order to perfect his desire. Both Carmen and Mary separate, yet contain their innocence, being the altar to which they sacrifice their destiny. Carmen’s sacrifice is imposed on her by myth, or rather the story of the film. She is (hyper)active, overflowing with furious subversion and forced (as is Mary) to unquestioningly accept the significance of her role. The fact that she is named Carmen enables Godard to remind us – even in the title of the film, First name: Carmen – of her pre-existing identity. Carmen is an archetype, a typical example of a certain genre. Yet her translation into film shatters the common understanding of her story to produce a narrative which denies the logic of continuum in favour of the concept of fusion. Mary accepts. Carmen refuses, inversely sustaining the weight of her determination not to give in, an innocence which Godard almost seems to depict in the infantile attitude of her screen destiny. Carmen’s subversion is playfully frenetic, configured in gun-battles which seem like children’s games. The protagonists’ nudity is almost hedonistic while the attention focused on Carmen’s willingly flaunted pubis is flagrant and infantile. Carmen’s hand-to-hand struggle with Joseph is loaded with a childlike sensuality which finally explodes in the onanistic shower scene. Godard’s childlike figures refer to characters whose innocence prevents them from understanding the meaning of their actions, characters who are still at the dawn of their sensual awakening, who are still caught in that paradisiacal moment in which awareness does not exist and innocence is not separated from guilt, as Carmen says on Uncle Jean’s suggestion.

First name: Carmen is a truly virgin film, a film which captures the very moment in which sense awakens and finds the strength to exist. The immanence of the natural landscapes (the sea, the moon, the dawn), upon whose significance many spectators have become ingenuously concentrated, is tout court the flagrancy of the language with which Godard works in portraying the innocence in fieri of these two films.

From Carmen’s seductions to Mary’s pregnancy, the films set up relationships with the world which are, in the end, realities. The sphere of Carmen’s attraction is circumscribed by a pretend film set created for a pretend kidnapping, a persistent game of refractions which brings all the elements of the film on screen. Mary, on the other hand, nullifies the film set with her body, with the centrality of her pregnancy, leaving the film to continue in a limpid naturalness which reaches its height in the finale. Carmen is destined to die invoking the separation of the innocent from the guilty. Mary answers Gabriel’s (e)vocation by opening her (heavily made-up) mouth to such a point that it becomes the very set of the film. Godard lingers on the dark limits of the cavity, never fully penetrating it, but only hoping to capture the sound of a word which gives a sense to the world.