GOING TO THE MOVIES
GODARD
The relation to models offered by literature illuminates a
major part of the history of cinema. Film, both protected and patronized
by virtue of its dual status as mass entertainment and as art form, re–
mains the last bastion of the values of the nineteenth-century novel and
theater - even to many of the same people who have found accessible
and pleasurable such post-novels as
Ulysses, Between the Acts, The Un–
nameable, Naked Lunch
and
Pale Fire,
and the corrosively de-dramatized
dramas of Beckett, Pinter and the Happenings. Thus, the standard
criticism leveled against Godard is that his plots are undramatic, ar–
bitrary, often simply incoherent ; and that his films generally are emo–
tionally cold, static except for a busy surface of senseless movements,
top-heavy with undramatized ideas, unnecessarily obscure. What his
detractors don't grasp, of course, is that Godard doesn't want to do
what they reproach him for not doing. Thus, audiences at first took the
jump-cuts in
Breathless
to be a sign of amateurishness, or a perverse
flouting of self-evident rules of cinematic technique; actually; what looks
as though the camera had stopped inadvertently for a few seconds in
the course of a shot and then started up again was an effect Godard
deliberately obtained in the cutting room, by snipping pieces out of
perfectly smooth takes.
(If
one sees
Breathless
today, however, the once
obtrusive cutting and the oddities of the hand-held camera are almost
invisible, so widely imitated are these techniques now.) No less deliberate
is Godard's disregard for the formal conventions of film narration based
on the nineteenth-century novel - cause-and-effect sequences of events,
climactic scenes, logical denouements. At the Cannes Film Festival
several years ago, Godard entered into debate with Georges Franju,
one of France's most talented and idiosyncratic senior directors. "But
surely, Monsieur Godard," the exasperated Franju is reported to have
said at one point, "you do at least acknowledge the necessity of having
