The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art – Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

Have Not (1944). Richard, unlike Roger, knows the answer to the question of the
dead bee. With a dignified speech, Elena dismisses the staff, the actual producers
of the cinematic total work of art, and drives away with Richard—an image commonly
used by Godard for the imaginary journey that the feature film offers, at the
exclusion of all real social conditions, to its viewers. 22
The Arabesque as Motif and Cinematic Form
Originally a decorative motif used to frame jewelry, the autonomized arabesque in
romantic and neo-Romantic total works of art testifies to the existence of a form
that emerges from the innermost forces of nature itself. In this sense, Henry van
de Velde had based his vision of a synthesis of the arts on a philosophy of the line
as “transferred gesture[s].” 23 He referred back to primitive techniques, to which he
attributes an immediate expressive power that is comparable to nature as an artist:
Psychic forces led the hand armed with primitive tools—bones or stone—just as natural
forces bend the tip of the blade of grass to Earth, where it draws small circles in the sand.
Natural forces shook the rock, which, upon falling, left behind visible traces on the surfaces
it hit; natural forces created those capricious, fleeting arabesques in moving water. 24
2 Shot from Nouvelle Vague: Arabesques in
the moving water.
Godard makes reference to this tradition of modern “natural” ornaments, and indeed
not only in the image of glistening, rippling water surfaces that are filmed
decidedly in such a way that sharply contoured biomorphic patterns emerge. The
arabesque, in its art theoretical importance as an aesthetic form that—as Runge
and Schlegel have shown us—is in keeping with the fullness of being and directed
against historical imagery and the linear narrative of the novel, is both subject and
agent of the film Nouvelle Vague.
202 The Critical Arabesque