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SUSAN SONTAG
announce a film conslstmg of "fifteen precise actions"
(quinze faits
precis).
A minimal device is the ironic, pseudoquantitative statement
of something, as in the brief monologue of Charlotte's little son explain–
ing how to do an unspecified something in exactly ten steps in
A Married
Woman.
Apart from the general strategy of "theater," perhaps the most
striking application of the dissociative principle in Godard's narrative
technique is his treatment of ideas. Certainly ideas are not developed
in Godard's films systematically, as they might be in a book. They aren't
meant to be. In contrast to their role in Brechtian theater, ideas are
chiefly formal elements in Godard's films, units of sensory and emotional
stimulation. They function at least as much to dissociate and fragment
as they do to indicate or illuminate the "meaning" of the action. Often
the ideas, rendered in blocks of words, lie at a tangent to the action.
Nana's reflections on sincerity and language in
My Life to Livt,
Bruno's
observations about truth and action in
Le Petit Soldat,
the intellectually
articulate self-consciousness of Charlotte in
A Married Woman
and of
Juliette in
Deux ou Trois Choses,
Lemmy Caution's startling aptitude for
cultivated literary allusions in
Alphaville
are not functions of the realistic
psychology of these characters. (Perhaps the only one of Godard's in–
tellectually reflective protagonists who still seems "in character" when
ruminating is Ferdinand in
Pierrot le Fou.)
Although Godard proposes
film discourse as one constantly open to ideas, ideas are only one element
in a narrative form in which there is an intentionally ambiguous, open,
playful relation of
all
the parts to the total scheme.
A variant on the presence of ideas in Godard's films is the intro–
duction of literary "texts." Among the many instances: the Mayakovsky
poem recited by the girl about to be executed by a firing squad in
Les
Carabiniers;
the excerpt from the Poe story read aloud in the next-to-Iast
episode in
M y Life to Live;
the lines from Dante, Holderlin and Brecht
that Lang quotes in
Contempt;
the passage from Elie Faure's
Hist or)1
of Art
read aloud by Ferdinand to his young daughter in
Pierrot le Fou;
the lines from
Romeo and Juliet
in French translation dictated by the
English teacher in
Band of Outsiders ;
the scene from Racine's
Berenice
rehearsed by Charlotte and her lover in
A Married Woman;
the quote
from Fritz Lang read aloud by Camille in
Contempt;
the passages from
Mao declaimed by the FLN agent in
Le Petit Soldat;
the antiphonal
recitations from the little red book in
La Chinoise.
Usually someone
makes an announcement before beginning to declaim, or can be seen
taking up a book and reading from it. These texts introduce psycho–
logically dissonant elements into the action; they supply rhythmical vari-
