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SUSAN SONTAG
The organlzmg principle of Godard's films is not serial repetitive–
ness and obsessional elaboration, but the juxtaposition of contrary elements
of unpredictable length and explicitness.
If
Feuillade's work implicitly
conceives art as the gratification and prolongation of fantasy, Godard's
work implies a quite different function for art: sensory and conceptual
dislocation. Each of Godard's films is a totality that undermines itself,
what Sartre calls a de-totalized totality.
Instead of a narration unified by the coherence of events (a "plot")
and a consistent tone (comic, serious, oneiric, affectless or whatever),
the narrative of Godard's films is regularly broken or segmented by the
incoherence of events and by abrupt shifts in tone and level of discourse.
Events appear to the spectator partly as converging toward a story,
partly as a succession of independent tableaux.
The most obvious way Godard segments the forward-moving
sequence of narration into tableaux is by explicitly theatricalizing some of
his material, once more laying to rest the lively prejudice that there is
an essential incompatibility between the means of theater and those
of film. The conventions of the Hollywood musical, with songs and
stage performances interrupting the story, supply one precedent for
Godard - inspiring the general conception of
A Woman Is a Woman,
the dance trio in the cafe in
Band of Outsiders,
the song sequences and
Vietnam protest skit performed on the street in
Pierrot le Fou .
His other
model is, of course, the nonrealistic and didactic theater expounded
by Brecht. An aspect of Godard's Brechtianizing is his distinctive style
of constructing political micro-entertainments: in
La Chinoise,
the home
political theater-piece acting out the American aggression in Vietnam;
or the Feiffer dialogue of the two ham radio operators that opens
Deux ou
Trois Choses.
But the more profound influence of Brecht resides in
those formal devices Godard uses to counteract ordinary plot develop–
ment and complicate the emotional involvement of the audience. One
technique is the direct-to-camera declarations by the characters in many
films, notably
Deux ou Trois Choses, Made in U.S.A.
and
La Chinoise.
("One should speak as if one were quoting the truth," says Marina
Vlady at the beginning of
Deux ou Trois Choses,
quoting Brecht. "The
actors must quote.") Another frequently used technique derived from
Brecht is the dissection of the film narrative into short sequences: in
My Life to Live,
not only is this done, but Godard puts on the screen
prefatory synopses to each scene which describe the action to follow.
Another, simpler device is the relatively arbitrary subdivision of action
into numbered sequences, as when the credits of
Masculine Feminine
