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GOING TO
THE MOVIES
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allows free passage back and forth between the -fitst-perSoilnarratioil
and the third-person presentation of the action.
Although the narrating voice already has a major role in some of
his earliest work (for instance, the virtuoso comic monologue of the
last of the
pre-Breathless
shorts,
Une Histoire d'Eau),
Godard continues
to extend and complicate the task of oral narration, arriving at such
recent refinements as the beginning of
Deux ou Trois Choses,
when
Godard off-camera first introduces his leading actress, Marina Vlady,
by name and then describes her as the character she will play. Such
procedures tend, of course, to reinforce the self-reflexive and self-referring
aspect of Godard's films, for the ultimate narrative presence is simply
the fact of cinema itself; from which it follows that, for the sake of
truth, the cinematic medium must be made to manifest itself before the
spectator. Godard's methods for doing this range from the simple ploy of
having an actor make rapid playful asides to the camera (i.e., to the
audience) in mid-action, which happens in many of his films, to the
aggressive devices in
La Chinoise
such as flashing the claque on the
screen from time to time, or briefly cutting to Raoul Coutard, the
cameraman on this as on most of Godard's films, seated behind his
apparatus. But then one immediately thinks of some underling holding
another claque while that scene was shot, of someone else who had
to be there behind another camera to photograph Coutard. It's impos–
sible ever to penetrate behind the final veil and experience cinema
unmediated by cinema.
But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Godard pro–
poses a new conception of point of view, thereby staking out the
possibility of making films in the first person. By this, I don't mean
simply that his films are subjective or personal, like those of many other
directors, particularly in the cinematic avant-garde and underground,
but something stricter and more original - namely, the way in which
Godard, especially in his recent films, has built up a narrative presence,
that of the film-maker, who is the central
structural
element in the
cinematic narrative. This first-person film-maker isn't an actual charac–
ter within the film. That is, he isn't to be seen on the screen (except
in the episode in
Far From Vietnam,
which shows only Godard at a
camera talking), though he is to
be
heard from time to time and
one is increasingly aware of his presence just off-camera. But neither
is this off-screen persona a lucid, authorial intelligence, like the de–
tached observer-figure of many novels cast in the first person. The
ultimate first person in Godard's movies, his particular version of the
film-maker, is the person responsible for the film who yet stands outside
