Collaboration blurs the line of personal identity. Can one truly collaborate in a manner that does not limit the person you already are? Catherine Grant quotes Godard in the beginning of Home Movies: The Curisous Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard "The Straubs work in tandem, on the same bicycle, him in front, her behind. We have two bicycles." Grant categories the three strands of a Miéville/Godard collaboration: joint projects, "acting" together or alone in each other's films, and forms of parallelism in the works they have directed alone. The last two are focused on individual works, but yet Grant considers it form of collaboration. But (and how) can auteur theory be applied to a collaboration like Miéville/Godard (Sonimage)?
Regardless of their roles as collaborators, their collaboration is one that is both complex and simple. Miéville/Godard or Miéville and Godard are interchanging the meanings of auteur director and collaborators and at the same time, serving their main purpose: producing audio-visual work.
-arv
Nice topic... Thinking about the disagreements that Gorin and Truffaut had with Godard- I think this is relevant now only within the content of Godard's films (from Weekend-Breathless, especially), but also his personal life. Though, from a Deleuzian (or Leibnizian) standpoint I think that it gets messy to say that collaboration in some way problematizes the former sense of self, because in many ways - we are only a series of relations (including human relations). Thinking of most of Godard's 70s and 80s work, it seems like he is building more on the sense of relations between people (like you say), and less on the problem of the self. I think this makes his politics pretty interesting- especially in that he doesn't propagandize easy forms of collaboration- insteads shows the world like he sees it (which is chaotic).
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