Cahiers du cinéma no. 304; October 1979.

Cahiers (300th edition)

            I’d said that my film Origins of a Meal was equivalent to a cow’s neutral gaze. But not everyone had the same opinion about this gaze.

—

Dear Cahiers,

I feel, perhaps mistakenly, called into question by Godard in your 300th issue. He presents “three photos of cows: it seems evident to me that they all have a different expression.” “The gaze of these animals is anything but neutral. It’s a truly critical gaze.” The third photo shows a cow with a bell, the second one without a bell and the first cow without a bell doesn’t appear to be the same as the second. These are three different cows, as Godard confesses when he speaks about “three photos of cows”.

Moreover, the face of the first bovid is a three-quarter profile, while we only see the left part of the face of the other two cows.

These differences in identity, lighting, angles bring about a slight difference in gaze (not of the first two anyway) and attitude. In the same technical conditions, Godard could well have taken, as a tribute to Hitch, three photos of Giancarlo Giannini, current-day Delon and Robert De Niro and claimed that it pertained to a critical gaze. Godard simply proves is, in fact, that the attitude and the gaze of one cow is not identical to those of another, especially when the technical conditions are different. But what if they were comparable?

To be fair, what was needed was three photos of the same cow in similar technical conditions. Then, I think, we’d have arrived at the same neutrality over time, just like with the three aforementioned “artists”. After reading Cahiers, I went to various pastures (Alps, Pyrenees, Massif Central) where I got a confirmation of this famous neutrality. This sameness of gaze, from birth to death, is even the opposite of a critical gaze, which is clearly not the same when faced with the trivial and when faced with facts conducive to criticism.

I can’t help but raise my voice against this undertaking of Godard’s, who seeks to rob cows of their unique privilege which men have access to only very rarely.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]