GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
GODARD, GODARD, GODARD
&
DE PALMA
"They ain't quit doing it as long as I'm doing it," he said.
-Flannery O'Connor,
Wise Blood
There is much insistence these days in places like
The New
York Times,
that "experimental" art (also called postmodern) is a
thing of the past. The sighs of relief all but ruffle the pages. For some
time, the word "experimental" in the context of the arts has been
loaded against itself, has been a code word for pretension and
obscurity. Radical art is the sworn enemy of the prevalent populist
aesthetic: if it doesn't make money, if it doesn't persuade a large
audience, it has no right to exist. Establishment culture has, of
course, a large stake in opposing art that doesn't pay its way. The
attack on experimentation is, in disguise, an attack against all art,
against the uncompromised nature of art.
There are a few token "experimenters" on the public scene,
however: Donald Barthelme in fiction and, after a hiatus of eight
years, Jean Luc Godard in film.
Every Manjor Himself,
which Godard
calls his second first film, was the major event of the 1980 New York
Film Festival, a radical work that establishment reviewers tended to
domesticate in their muted appreciations. Godard is acceptable, if at
all, as a returned prodigal, as a renegade that has recanted
his apostasy.
Every Man jar Himself
opens with a long shot of a hotel room
corridor and closes with an extended long shot (ex-wife and daughter
walking away from the fallen protagonist). Entrance and exit
circumscribe the film: the world revealed and the world dismissed.
In between the mirror images of beginning and end is the trip into
the mirror, a glimpse of hell (in the guise of Switzerland), the last
stages of civilization as we are only beginning to know it. We follow
the spasmodic movements of three characters, two women (Denise
and Isabelle) and a man (Paul Godard) during a short, undefined
