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SUSAN SONTAG
The theme of cultural disburdenment is treated most fully and ironically
in
La Chinoise.
One sequence shows the young cultural revolutionaries
purging their shelves of all their books but the little red one. Anotlier
brief sequence shows just a blackboard at first, filled with the neatly
listed names of several dozen stars of Western culture from Plato to
Shakespeare to Sartre; these are then erased one by one, thoughtfully,
with Brecht the last to go. The five pro-Chinese students who live to–
gether want to have only one point of view, that of Chairman Mao;
but Godard shows, without insulting anyone's intelligence, how chimeri–
cal and inadequate to reality (and yet how appealing) this hope actually
is. For all his native tendency to sympathize with the most radical view,
Godard himself still appears a partisan of that other cultural revolution,
ours, which enjoins the artist-thinker to maintain a multiplicity of points
of view on any material.
All the devices he uses to keep shifting the point of view within a
film themselves contribute to a larger strategy of overlaying a number
of narrative voices, whereby Godard appears to bridge the difference
between first-person and third-person narration. Thus
Alphaville
opens
with three samples of first-person discourse: first, a prefatory statement
spoken off-camera by Godard; then a declaration by the computer-ruler
Alpha 60; and only then the usual soliloquizing voice, that of the
secret-agent hero, shown grimly driving his big car into the city of the
future. Instead of, or in addition to, using "titles" between scenes as
narrative signals (for example,
My Life to Live, A Married Woman)
Godard seems now more likely to install a narrating voice in the film.
This voice may belong to the main character: Bruno's musings in
Le
Petit
S
oldat,
Charlotte's free-associating subtext in
A Married Woman,
Paul's commentary in
Masculine Feminine.
It may be the director's,
as in
Band of Outsiders
and "Le Grand Escroc," the sketch from
Les
Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde.
What's most interesting is
when there are two voices: as in
Deux ou Trois Choses,
throughout
which both Godard (whispering) and the heroine comment on the
action.
Band of Outsiders
introduces the notion of a narrative intelli–
gence which can "open a parenthesis" in the action and directly address
the audience, explaining what Franz, Odile and Arthur are really feel–
ing at that moment; the narrator can intervene or comment ironically
on the action or on the very fact of seeing a movie. (Fifteen minutes
into the film, Godard off-camera says, "For the latecomers, what's
happened so far is....") Thereby two different but concurrent times
are established in the film - the time of the action shown, and the
time of the narrator's reflection on what's shown - in a way which
