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SUSAN SONTAG
an indefatigable romanticism about "the couple." It's an odd but rather
familiar combination of attitudes. Such contradictions are psychological
or ethical analogues to Godard's fundamental formal presuppositions.
In work conceived of as open-ended, associative, composed of "frag–
ments," constructed by the (partly aleatoric) juxtaposition of contrary
elements, any principle of action or any decisive emotional resolution
is bound to be an artifice (from an ethical point of view) or ambivalent
(from a psychological point of view).
Each film is a provisional network of emotional and intellectual
impasses. With the probable exception of his view on Vietnam, there
is no attitude Godard incorporates in his films that is not simultaneously
being bracketed, and therefore criticized, by a dramatization of the
gap between the elegance and seductiveness of ideas and the brutish or
lyrical opaqueness of the human condition. The same sense of impasse
characterizes Godard's moral judgments. For all the use made of the
metaphor and fact of prostitution to sum up contemporary miseries,
Godard's films are not "against" prostitution and "for" pleasure and
liberty in the unequivocal sense that Bresson's films directly extol love,
honesty, courage and dignity and deplore cruelty and cowardice.
From Godard's perspective, Bresson's work is bound to appear
"rhetorical," whereas Godard is bent on destroying rhetoric by a lavish
use of irony - the familiar outcome when a restless, somewhat dissocia–
ted intelligence struggles to cancel an irrepressible romanticism and ten–
dency to moralize. In many of his films Godard deliberately seeks the
framework of parody, of irony as contradiction. For instance,
A Woman
Is a Woman
proceeds by putting an ostensibly serious theme (a woman
frustrated both as wife and as would-be mother) in an ironically senti–
mental framework. "The subject of
A Woman Is a W oman/'
Godard
has said, "is a character who succeeds in resolving a certain situation,
but I conceived this subject within the framework of a neo-realistic
musical: an
absolute contradiction,
but that was precisely why I wanted
to make the film." Another example is the lyrical treatment of a rather
nasty scheme of amateur gangsterism in
Band of Outsiders,
complete
with the high irony of the "happy ending" in which Odile sails away
with Franz to Latin America for further, romantic adventures. Another
example: the nomenclature of
Alphauille,
a film in which Godard takes
up some of his most serious themes, is a collection of comic strip identities
(characters have names like Lemmy Caution, the hero of a famous
series of French thrillers; Harry Dickson; Professor Leonard Nosferatu,
alias Von Braun; Professor Jeckyll) and the lead is played by Eddie
Constantine, the expatriate American actor whose mug has been a cliche
