GOING TO THE MOVIES
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reader starts the book, already (as it were) in the past. But in much
of the new fiction, events pass before us as if in a present coexisting
with the time of the narrative voice (more accurately, with the time
in which the reader is being addressed by the narrative voice). Events
exist, therefore, in the present - at least as much of the present that
the reader himself inhabits. It is for this reason that such writers as
Beckett, Stein, Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet prefer to use an actual
present tense, or its equivalent. (Another strategy: to make the distinc–
tion between past, present and future time within the narration an ex–
plicit conundrum, and an insoluble one - as, for example, in some
of the tales of Borges and Landolfi and in
Pale Fire.)
But if the develop–
ment is feasible for literature, it would seem even more apt for film
to make a comparable move since, in a way, film narration knows
only
the present tense. (Everything shown is equally present, no matter when
it is "said" to have taken place.) What was necessary for film to exploit
its natural liberty was to have a much looser, less literal attachment to
telling a "story." A story in the traditional sense - something that's
already taken place - is replaced by a segmented situation in which
the suppression of certain explicative connections between scenes creates
the impression of an action continually beginning anew, unfolding in the
present tense.
And, of necessity, I should argue, this present tense must appear
as a somewhat behaviorist, external, antipsychological view of the
human situation. For psychological understanding depends on holding
in mind simultaneously the dimensions of past, present and future. To
see someone psychologically is to layout temporal coordinates in which
he is situated. An art which aims at the present tense cannot aspire
to this kind of "depth" or innerness in the portrayal of human beings.
The lesson is already clear from the work of Stein and Beckett; Godard
demonstrates it for film.
Godard explicitly alludes to this choice only once, in connection
with
My Life to Live
which, he says, he "built . .. in tableaux to
accentuate the theatrical side of the film. Besides, this division corres–
ponded to the external view of things which best allowed me to give
a feeling of what was going on inside. In other words, a contrary
procedure to that used by Bresson in
Pickpocket,
in which the drama
is seen from within. How can one render the 'inside'? I think, by stay–
ing prudently outside." But though there are obvious advantages to stay–
ing "outside" - flexibility of form, freedom from superimposed limiting
solutions - the choice is not as clear-cut as Godard suggests. Perhaps
one never goes "inside" in the sense Godard attributes to Bresson - a
