292
SUSAN SONTAG
Contempt
was based, Moravia's
Ghost at Noon,
as "a nice novel for a
train journey, full of old-fashioned sentiments. But it is with this kind
of novel that one can make the best films." Although
Contempt
stays
close to Moravia's story, Godard's films usually show few traces of their
literary origins. At the other extreme but more typical is
Masculine
Feminine,
which bears no recognizable relation to the stories by Maupas–
s:mt, "La Femme de Paul" and "La Signe," from which Godard drew
his original inspiration.
But whether used as text or pretext, it hasn't ordinarily been a novel
of old-fashioned sentiments that Godard has chosen as his point of depar–
ture, but heavily-plotted action stories. He has a particular fondness for
American
kitsch. Made in U.S.A.
was based on
The lugger
by Richard
Stark,
Pierrot le Fou
on
Obsession
by Lionel White and
Band of Out–
siders
on Dolores Hitchens'
Fool's Gold.
Godard resorts to popular
American narrative conventions as a fertile, solid basis for his own
antinarrative inclinations. "The Americans know how to tell stories
very well; the French not at all. Flaubert and Proust don't know how
to narrate; they do something else." Though that something else is
plainly what Godard is after too, he has discerned the utility of starting
from crude narrative. One allusion to this strategy is the memorable dedi–
cation of
Breathless:
"To Monogram Pictures." (In its original version,
Breathless
had no credit titles whatever, and the first image of the film
was preceded only by this terse salute to Hollywood's most prolific
purveyors of low-budget quickie action pictures during the nineteen
thirties and early nineteen forties. ) Godard wasn't being impudent
or flippant here - or only a little bit. Melodrama is one of the integral
resources of his plotting. Think of the comic-strip quest of
Alphaville;
the gangster-movies romanticism of
Breathless, Band of Outsiders
and
Made in U.S.A.;
the spy-thriller ambiance of
Le Petit Soldat
and
Pierrot Ie Fou.
For, precisely melodrama - which is characterized by
the exaggeration, the frontality, the opaqueness of "action" - provides a
framework for both intensifying and transcending traditional realistic
procedures of serious film narrative, but in a way which isn't necessarily
condemned (as the Surrealist films were) to seeming esoteric. By adapt–
ing familiar, second-hand, vulgar materials - popular myths of action
and sexual glamor - Godard gains a considerable freedom to "abstract"
without losing the possibility of a commercial theater audience.
These materials being what they are, Godard's films retain some
of the vivacity of their simplistic literary and cinematic models. Even
as he employs the narrative conventions of the
Serie Noire
novels and
the Hollywood thrillers, transposing them into abstract elements, Godard
has responded to their casual, sensuous energy and been able to intro-
