We all know Godard's 1981 short film "Letter to Freddy Buache" (with English subs here https://vimeo.com/11523072), but there's also an undated "Second Letter to Freddy Buache" from among Godard's correspondence. It is not uncommon for Godard to employ titles and collages in personal correspondence, and this is no exception. The letter is partly his own writing, with excerpts from the text by Fassbinder which Godard mentions pasted between paragraphs. What is Godard's will be in italics.
Dear Freddy,
In the Spring of '78, the author of these lines received some words from his colleague Rainer Werner Fassbinder, intended to save him from stammering too much during a conference in Zurich about what remained of the only cinema in Europe which once dared to resist American cinema.
One can't talk about the meaning of life without using erroneous, inexact words. But there are no others. If there is something, it's movement. One fine day a solar system was formed which is no longer in movement because its movement is restricted. For it to move again, there would need to be some destruction. This is why man was invented. But this was done without prior planning. We are no longer allowed to say in any way, "we're here to..." The plans of the mighty are achieved in our study of those causes which seek only to form value systems, to ground meaning. All stories and all mythologies are the results of these projected causal chains. But if we were to destroy the cogs of this system, the regulated forces of gravity would no longer concord. Thus everything collapses. And suddenly there's movement, and so there's something. But we're here to stay, producers of values. That's why we're here.
I imagine, today, in view of this film to compose on the double theme of utopia and Switzerland, that I arrive on the shores of the Limmat, leaving those of Lake Geneva, where this conference is to take place.
We are not able to accept the contrary of what is. Thus we are nowhere near freedom. If we do not allow destruction the way we accept the regulated solar system which petrifies us, then we are not free. This is the case because the individual doesn't know that he can have an ends. I don't mean intellectual knowledge, but rather a corporeal certainty, present in everything he does, and the possibility of understanding this has always been refused him. He only has the corporeal experience when it's too late. If the individual acted as quickly as possible,
By foot, by car, then by train. Making my way, I encounter people as well as landscapes. Of much variety.
on the certainty that he must die, a corporeal certainty, then existential suffering would disappear for him - hate, desire, jealousy. There would be no more fears.
On the train, for example, there's a class of young schoolchildren with their professor of the time, Claude Gallaz, now journalist for the Lausanne tribune. That day, he develops his favourite theme of Switzerland and evil, and the fresh faces of the girls and boys make a counter-point to the bold and somber notions of their tutor.
In the life of every being there is this terrible and marvelous moment, which penetrates like a beacon into the consciousness of few and like a sacrosanct suffering to the subconscious of the greater majority: the moment when one recognises the finitude of one's own existence. But, our heads full of false notions, we have learnt to consider as just, imperative, definitive, and immutable, many false and disgusting things, and, above all, this curious paralysis, unnecessary but manifestly useful, which seizes us at the same time as the desire for a utopia which would seem right to us.
With my eyes and ears, I register everything, that is, the fresh faces, the calm and uniform landscape, the pompous conversations of businessmen, the anxious looks of immigrants, all accompanied by the words sent by RWF which ricochet in a thousand ways around Swiss images, of which they make the legend.
Our relations with others are cruel games, because we don't want to recognise our end as something positive. It is positive, because it is real. The end is the concrete life. The body has to understand death.
We have been taught to take such false and retentive ideas as our own, and even the struggle for certain utopias can only make these ideas endlessly recommence, allowing methods which turn out to be false -- not more false, no, but exactly as false as all the rest.
The final impression felt by the author of these lines at the end of his imaginary voyage - over the course of which life will have escaped to give back to the cinema that which it stole from it, such as Louis Dellue ardently wished from 1925 --
All the same, the terrible recognition of our approaching end - rather than liberating us, which truly could be the case - can serve to consolidate for us the atrocious enjoyment of our happiness in the mediocrity of servitude. The pleasure which this same recognition could offer to every being, this recognition of the ultimate absence of meaning and the essential contingency of all existence, precisely from the sacred moment when this recognition is acquired - This pleasure which should have rendered to each existence its meaning in the freedom of the decision, which is a great force in the struggle for something marvelous, something possible - for something which, in a constructive manner, gives meaning where there is none... We have not learnt to know it as a pleasure, as a joyously freed joy, but rather as an anguish - this anguish which allows us to enjoy servitude without joy. This honourable jungle doesn't seem to possess, beyond suicide, any path which leads beyond, if that isn't one.
... the path leading to madness, which one can choose to take. But it's a matter of the "world of madness," as it's a matter of death: the hope which they offer us can satisfy us, but it's not certain. And we only have new fragments of the beautiful anarchy which, in the world of madness, must allow the senses to know freedom.
was contained in another letter from RWF, which I received a short time after, and which ten years later was an article, under the title: For us, birds of paradise, it's going to get harder.
One day, when I will demand of myself a decision, one must hope that I will have courage enough to take the right paths, and not succumb to the tremendous variety of red herrings which are offered us.
Dear Freddy, could this footage serve as a denial?
Jean-Luc Godard
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1180 ROLLE
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