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SUSAN SONTAG
lapse into a disingenuous rhetoric, the contrast with Bresson stands.
For Bresson, who was originally a painter, it is the austerity and rigor
of cinematic means which make this art (though very few movies)
valuable to him. For Godard, it's the fact that cinema is so loose, promis–
cuous and accommodating a medium which gives movies, even many
inferior ones, their authority and promise. Specifically, this fact is
what gives film the decisive advantage over literature in the quest
for a truly spontaneous or discovered form such as Edouard envisages for
the novel in
The Counterfeiters.
Film can
mix
forms, techniques, points
of view; it can't be identified with any single leading ingredient. Indeed,
precisely what the film-maker must show is that nothing is excluded.
"One can put everything in a film," says Godard. "One must put every–
thing in a film."
A film is conceived of as a living organism: not so much an object
as a presence or an encounter - a fully historical or contemporary event,
whose destiny it is to be transcended by future events. Seeking to create
a cinema which inhabits the real present, Godard regularly puts in his
films references to current political crises: Algeria, de Gaulle's domestic
politics, Angola, the Vietnam war. (Each of his last four features in–
cludes a scene in which the main characters denounce American
aggression in Vietnam, and Godard has declared that until that war
ends he'll put such a sequence into every film he makes. ) The films
may indude even more casual references and off-the-cuff sentiments–
a dig at Andre Malraux; a compliment to Henri Langlois, director of
the Cinematheque
Fran~aise;
an attack on irresponsible projectionists
who show 1: 66 films in CinemaScope ratio; or a plug for the unreleased
movie of a fellow-director and friend. Godard welcomes the opportunity
to use the cinema topically, "journalistically." As photography, cinema
has always been an art which recorded temporality; but up to now this
has been an inadvertent aspect of feature fiction films. Godard is the
first major director who deliberately incorporates certain contingent
aspects of the particular social moment at which he's making a film–
sometimes making these the frame of the film.
Unworried by the issue of impurity - there are no materials un–
usable for film - Godard is, nevertheless, involved in an extremely
purist venture: the attempt to devise a structure for films which speaks
in a purer present tense. His effort is to make movies which live in the
actual present, and not to tell something from the past, relate some–
thing that's already taken place. In this project, of course, Godard is
following a direction already taken in literature. Fiction, until recently,
was the art of the past. Events told in an epic or novel are, when the
