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PARTISAN REVIEW
period of time-the time sometimes out of sequence or confused.
The characters, particularly Denise, are less stylized than those in
much of Godard's earlier work, though they remain essentially
opaque, their psychology irrelevant to the movement of the film.
These characters are figures in a cityscape and often of secondary
interest to the scape itself, to the images that compose it. The
camera, in fact, moves away from the main actors on occasion to
observe the passing scene. Although seemingly improvisational,
Every Manfor Himself
is rigorously worked out, classical in its concern
with form. Godard's disparate fragments come together into some–
thing new and complete.
There is in Godard's work a temperamental resistance to giving
the audience what it perceives itself to want. Godard starts with a
story in order to efface it until it is merely the clues to something
impacted in the text. It's not that Godard is unconcerned with narra–
tive (or can't tell a story, as his detractors claim), but that he doesn't
want his audience mesmerized by empathy, doesn't want the image,
and the ideas encoded in the image, adumbrated by story.
If
there's
no dramatic expectation to keep us from fidgeting in our seats, the
filmmaker has to make every moment of the film visually charged,
has to replace the interest in what comes next with the discovery of
what is. Godard anatomizes the vocabulary of cinema in order to
rediscover the language as if no one had used it before. His films are
exciting because, beyond their own self-discovered wonders, they
take exemplary risks.
If
you can circumvent the wisest of received
wisdom, if you can overturn the most sacred of accepted conven–
tions, then what isn't possible?
Every Manfor Himselfis
the most unrelentingly bleak of Godard's
films, not apocalyptically bleak like
Weekend
but despairing and
resigned. Lovers bruise one another. Self-concern precludes aware–
ness of almost anyone else . At the same time, the surprise of the
image exhilarates. Denise's attempted escape from the city, for
example, is occasioned by the extraordinary stop-action shots of her
bicycling in the country . The gesture of cycling, the process reper–
ceived, is more important to Godard than the destination of the trip.
In the world of this film there is no escape , nowhere to go . Similarly,
in the film of this world we are not carried along from one sequence
to another.
Every Man for Himself
is a mosaic composed of related
cinematic fragments, is momentarily amusing or horrifying or
beautiful or absurd or all of these. As there are no expectations in
Godard's narrative, there is no future for his characters. Nothing
