GOING TO THE MOVIES
293
duce some of that into his own work. One result is that most of his
films give the impression of speed, verging sometimes on haste. In some
respects, Godard seems
to
be applying the same assumptions about
material as the great silent director, Louis Feuillade, who worked in
the debased form of the crime serial. FeuiIlade's temperament, though,
seems more dogged. On a few essentially limited themes (like ingenuity,
ruthlessness, physical grace) , FeuilIade's films present a seemingly inex–
haustible number of formal variations. His choice of the open-ended serial
fOlm is thus entirely appropriate. After the twenty episodes of
Les Vam–
pires,
nearly seven hours of projection time, it's clear there was no neces–
sary end to the exploits of the stupendous Musidora and her gang of
masked criminals, any more than the exquisitely matched struggle between
archcriminal and archdetective in
Judex
need ever end. The rhythm of in–
cident Feuillade establishes is subject to indefinitely prolonged repetition
and embellishment, like a sexual fantasy elaborated in secret over a long
period of time. Godard's films move to a quite different rhythm; they
lack the unity of fantasy, along with its obsessional gravity, and its tire–
less, somewhat mechanistic repetitiveness.
The difference is accounted for by realizing that, while the hallu–
cinatory, absurd, abstracted action tale is a central resource for Godard,
it doesn't control the form of his films as it did for Feuillade. Although
melodrama remains one term of Godard's sensibility, what has increas–
ingly emerged as the opposing term is the resources of fact - the im–
pulsive, dissociated tone of melodrama contrasting with the gravity
and controlled indignation of the sociological expose (note the recurrent
theme of prostitution in
Une Femme Coquette,
My
Life to Live, A
Married W oman, Deux ou Trois Choses
and
Anticipation),
or the
even cooler tones of straight documentary and quasi-sociology (in
Masculine Feminine, La Chinoise) .
Though Godard has toyed with the idea of the serial form, as in
the end of
Band of Outsiders
(which promises a sequel, never made,
relating further adventures of its hero and heroine in Latin America)
and in the general conception of
Alphaville
(proposed as the latest
adventure of a French serial hero, Lemmy Caution), Godard's films
don't relate unequivocally to any single genre. The open-endedness of
Godard's films doesn't mean the hyperexploitation of some particular
genre, as in Feuillade, but a successive devouring of genres. The counter–
theme to the restless activity of the characters in Godard's films is an
expressed dissatisfaction with the limits or stereotyping of "actions."
Thus, in
Pierrot Ie Fou,
Marianne's being bored or fed up moves what
there is of a plot; at one point she says directly to the camera:
"Let's leave the Jules Verne novel, and go back to the
roman policier
with
guns and so on."
