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SUSAN SONTAG
standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration
and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for excluding
anything from a film. This view of film as an assemblage rather than
a unity lies behind the seemingly facile characterizations Godard has
made of many of his recent films.
"Pierrot le Fou
isn't really a film,
it's an attempt at cinema." About
Deux ou Trois Choses:
"In sum, it's
not a film, it's an attempt at a film and is presented as such."
A
Married Woman
is described in the main titles: "Fragments of a Film
Shot in 1964" and
La Chinoise
is subtitled "A Film in the Process of
Being Made." In claiming to be offering no more than "efforts" or
"attempts," Godard acknowledges the structural openness or arbitrariness
of his work. Each film remains a fragment in the sense that its possi–
bilities of elaboration can never be used up. For granted the accepta–
bility, even desirability, of the method of juxtaposition ("I prefer simply
putting things side by side") which assembles contrary elements without
reconciling them, there can indeed be no internally necessary end to
a Godard film, as there is to a film of Bresson. Every film must either
seem broken off abruptly or else ended arbitrarily - often by the violent
death in the last reel of one or more of the main characters, as in
Breathless, Le Petit Soldat, My Life to Live, Les Carabiniers, Contempt,
Masculine Feminine
and
Pierrot le Fou.
Predictably, Godard has supported his views by pressing the relation–
ship (rather than the disjunction) between "art" and "life." Godard
claims never to have had the feeling as he worked, which he thinks
a novelist must have, "that I am differentiating between life and crea–
tion." Or the familiar mythical terrain is claimed once again: "the
cinema is somewhere between art and life." Of
Pierrot le Fou,
Godard
has written: "Life is the subject, with Scope and color as its attributes
.... Life on its own as I would like to capture it, using pan shots on
nature,
plans fixes
on death, brief shots, long takes, soft and loud
sounds, the movements of Anna and Jean-Paul. In short, life filling the
screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the
same rate." This, Godard claims, is how he differs from Bresson, who,
when shooting a film, has "an idea of the world" that he
is
"trying to
put on the screen or, which comes to the same thing, an idea of the
cinema" he's trying "to apply to the world." For a director like Bresson,
"cinema and the world are moulds to be filled, while in
Pierrot
there
is neither mould nor matter."
Of course Godard's films aren't bathtubs; and Godard harbors his
complex sentiments about the world and his art to the same extent and
in pretty much the same way as Bresson does. But despite Godard's
