I’m fascinated with Godard’s theorizing – both in cinema and in reflection on cinema (if one can even draw much of a distinction in his work) – the ethics of representation. Documentary filmmaking, which for Godard is hardly distinguishable from serious fiction filmmaking, is an especially pressing context for the question. What is asked of the filmmaker, the director, that auteur who bears so much responsibility?

Godard is revealing in an interview from 1972, where he considers the significance of the differences between his work (in particular, his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in Tout va bien) and Marin Karmitz’s Coup pour coup. Karmitz’s work is similarly obsessed with the ethics of representation, which he addresses in Coup pour coup by turning the camera’s voice over to the workers – the subjects of representation. That makes sense. Erasing the auteur’s hand absolves the filmmaker of responsibility for the image, and in so doing marks the film with a kind of purity.

But Godard objects:

Coup pour coup goes directly to the textile workers of Elbeuf and makes a film with them. In my personal opinion, he skips a step. He thinks that we can listen directly to what they have to say, though they’ve been denied a voice for so long, and that we can be of use to them with no problem. We think there is a problem, which is that the very medium we use was, up until now, in the hands of those we’re fighting against. Therefore, despite our good intentions, we don’t completely control it. We think we’re making a film ‘in the service of,’ and it risks being ‘to the detriment of.’ We don’t fully realize this…So I have to find a way to approach these people and, most of all, to let them speak.

“Let them speak” is therefore the deceptive commandment. Letting speak is the responsible cinematic act, but the director’s hand – from pointing the camera to editing to allocation of time to speak – is as powerful as the voice in the image. So, responsibility to both the Other’s voice and a sense of the ubiquity of the auteur sends image-making into a kind of decidability. There is no location – singular or doubled or otherwise layered – within and from which responsibility can be satsified. There is only the recurrence of the call to responsibility and the return, always, to the mixed scene of generosity and violence: cinema itself.