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SUSAN SONTAG·
surface of the screen, he finally tries to grab her - ripping away part
of the screen within the screen, and revealing the girl and the bath–
room to be a projection on a filthy wall.
Though all of Godard's distinctive devices serve the fundamental
aim of breaking up the narrative or varying the perspective, he doesn't
aim at a systematic variation of points of view. Sometimes, to be sure,
Godard does elaborate a strong plastic conception - like the intricate
visual patterns of the couplings of Charlotte with her lover and her
husband in
A Married Woman;
and the brilliant formal metaphor of the
monochromatic photography in three "political colors" in
Anticipation.
Still, Godard's work characteristically lacks formal rigor. The jump-cuts
in
Breathless,
for instance, are not of any strict overall rhythmic scheme,
an observation that's confirmed by Godard's account of their rationale.
"I discovered in
Breathless
that when a discussion between two people
became boring and tedious one could just as well cut between the
speeches. I tried it once, and it went very well, so I did the same thing
right through the film." Godard may be exaggerating the casualness of
his attitude in the cutting room, but his reliance upon intuition on the
set is well-known. For no film has a full shooting script been pre–
pared in advance, and many films have been improvised day by
day throughout large parts of the shooting; in the recent films shot
with direct sound, Godard has the actors wear tiny earphones so that
while they are on camera he can speak to each of them privately,
feeding them lines or posing questions which they're to answer (direct–
to-camera interviews).
From Godard's penchant for improvisation, for incorporating acci–
dents and for location shooting, one might infer a lineage from the neo–
realist aesthetic made famous by Italian films of the last twenty-five
years, starting with Visconti's
Ossessione
and
La Terra Trema
and
reaching its apogee in the postwar films of Rossellini and the recent
debut of Olmi. But Godard, although a fervent admirer of Rossellini, is
not even a neo-neorealist, and is far from aiming to expel the artifice
from art. What he seeks is to conflate the traditional polarities of spon–
taneous mobile thinking and finished work, of the casual jotting and
the fully premeditated statement. Spontaneity, casualness, lifelikeness
are not values in themselves for Godard, who is interested rather in the
convergence
of spontaneity with the emotional discipline of abstraction
(the dissolution of "subject matter"). The results are, needless to say,
far from tidy. Although Godard achieved the basis of his distinctive
style very quickly (by 1958), the restlessness of his temperament and his
