GOING TO THE MOVIES
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films is the landscape of alienation - whether he is displaying the pathos
in the mundane facticity of the actual life of dislocated, urban persons
such as petty hoodlums, discontented housewives, left-wing students,
prostitutes (the everyday present) or presenting antiutopian fantasies
about the cruel future.
A universe experienced as fundamentally dehumanized or dissociated
is also one conducive to rapid "associating" from one ingredient in it
to another. Again, the contrast can be made with Bresson's attitude, which
is rigorously nonassociative, and therefore concerned with the depth
in any situation; in a Bresson film there are certain organically derived
and mutually relevant exchanges of personal energy that flourish or
exhaust themselves (either way, unifying the narrative and supplying
it with an organic terminus). For Godard, there are no genuinely
organic connections. In the universe of pain, only three strictly unre–
lated responses of real interest are possible: violent action, the probe
of "ideas" and the transcendence of sudden, arbitrary, romantic love.
But each of these possibilities is understood to be revocable, or artificial.
They are not acts of personal fulfillment; not so much solutions as
dissolutions of a problem. It has been noted that many of Godard's
films project a masochistic view of women, verging on misogyny, and
PSYCHOTHERAPY:
THEORY, RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
Quarterly journal of the
Psychotherapy Division-American Psychological Association
EUGENE
T.
GENDLlN,
Editor
University of Chicago
PSYCHOTHERAPY also welcomes non-psychologist subscribers.
The journal specializes in:
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Write: Eugene T. Gendlin,
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Department of Psychology
University of Chicago
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