GOING TO THE MOVIES
311
of "B" French detective films for two decades; indeed, Godard's original
title for the film was
Tarzan versus IBM.
Still another example: the film
Godard decided to make on the double theme of the Ben Barka and
Kennedy murders,
Made in U.S.A. ,
was conceived as a parodic remake
of
The Big Sleep
(which had been revived at an art house in Paris
in
the summer of 1966), with Bogart's role of the trench-coated detec–
tive embroiled in an insoluble mystery now played by Anna Karina.
The danger of such lavish use of irony is that ideas will be expressed
at their point of self-caricature, and emotions only when they are muti–
lated. Irony intensifies what is already a considerable limitation on the
emotions in the films that results from the insistence on the pure pre–
sentness of cinema narration, in which situations with less deep affect
will
be
disproportionately represented - the expense of vividly depicted
states of grief, rage, profound erotic longing and fulfillment, and physical
pain. Thus, while Bresson, at his almost unvarying best, is able to con–
vey deep emotions without ever being sentimental, Godard, at his less
effective, devises turns of plot that appear either hardhearted or senti–
mental (at the same time seeming emotionally flat).
Godard "straight" seems to me more successful - whether in the
rare pathos he has allowed in
Masculine Feminine,
or in the hard cool–
ness of such directly passionate films as
L es Carabiniers, Contempt
and
Pierrot le Fou.
This coolness is a pervasive quality of Godard's work.
Strikingly, for all their violence of incident and sexual matter-of-factness.
the films have a rather muted, detached relation to the grotesque and
painful as well as to the seriously erotic. People are sometimes tortured
and often die in Godard's films, but almost casually. (He has a par–
ticular predilection for automobile accidents: the end of
Contempt,
the
wreck in
Pierrot le Fou,
the landscape of affectless highway carnage in
Weekend.)
And people are rarely shown making love, though if they
are, what interests Godard isn't the sensual communion but what sex
reveals "about the spaces between people." The orgiastic moments come
when young people dance together or sing or play games or run –
people run beautifully in Godard movies - not when they make love.
"Cinema is emotion," says Samuel Fuller in
Pierrot Ie Fou,
and
one surmises that Godard shares that thought. But emotion, for Godard,
never comes unaccompanied by some decoration of wit, some
transmut~
ing of feeling that he clearly puts at the center of the art-making
process. This accounts in part for Godard's preoccupation with lan–
guage - with words both heard and seen on the screen. Language
functions as a means of emotional distancing from the action. The pic-
