GOING TO THE MOVIES
297
ety (temporarily slowing down the action); they interrupt the action
and offer ambiguous comment on it; and they also vary and extend the
point of view represented in the film.
Alien to movies as this kind of material may seem, at least in
such profusion, Godard would no doubt argue that books and other
vehicles of cultural consciousness are part of the world; therefore they
belong in films. Indeed, by putting on the same plane the fact that
people read and think and go seriously to the movies as the fact that
they feel and act, Godard has disclosed a new vein of lyricism and
pathos for cinema: in bookishness, in genuine cultural passion, in in–
tellectual callowness, in the misery of someone strangling in his own
thoughts. (An instance of Godard's original way with a vein hardly
neglected in movies, the poetry of loutish illiteracy, is the twelve-minute
sequence in
L cs Carabiniers
in which the soldiers unpack their picture–
postcard trophies.) His point is that no material is inherently unassimil–
able. But what's required is that literature indeed undergo its transforma–
tion into material, just like anything elsc. All that can be given are
literary extracts, shards of literature. In order to be absorbed by cinema,
literature must be dismantled or broken into wayward units; then
Godard can appropriate a portion of the intellectual "content" of any
book (fiction or nonfiction) , borrow from the public domain of culture
any contrasting tone of voice (noble or vulgar), invoke in an instant
any diagnosis of contemporary malaise that is tactically relevant to his
narrative, no matter how inconsistent with the psychological scope or
mental competence of the characters as already established it may be.
The spectator is almost bound to be misled if he regards these texts
simply, either as opinions of characters in the film or 'as samples of
some unified point of view advocated by the film which presumably
is dear to the director. More likely, just the opposite is or comes to be
the case. Aided by "ideas" and "texts," Godard's film narratives tend
to consume the points of view presented in them.
Like the ideas, which function partly as divisive elements, tl1e frag–
ments of cultural lore embedded in Godard's films serve in part as a
form of mystification and a means for refracting emotional energy. In–
evitably, Godard broaches the menace of the bastardization of culture,
a theme most broadly stated in
Contempt
in the figure of the American
producer with his booklet of proverbs. And, laden as his films are with '
furnishings of high culture, it's perhaps equally inevitable that Godard
should also treat the project of laying down the burden of culture, as
Ferdinand in
Pierrot le Fou
does when he abandons his life
in
Paris
for the romantic journey southward carrying only a book of old comics.
