On Jean-Luc Godard

Author(s): Richard Locke

Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 120 (WINTER 2010), pp. 24-26
Published by: Threepenny Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25651100 .
Accessed: 21/06/2014 20:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Threepenny Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Threepenny
Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.199 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 20:17:28 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 FILM montage, the arch refusal of convention last pages. At times in his films, appar
al narrative exposition and psychology ently continuous quotations have in
?all changed film history forever. fact been cobbled together from differ
On Jean-Luc Godard At nineteen, I was a sucker for ent works. One biographer notes that
Godard's perpetuum mobile of wise at the formal dinner table of his child
cracks and declamations. For years I hood in Switzerland and in France?
mentally replayed the scene where the Godards and Monods were old
Richard Locke
Seberg interviews a supposedly famous French Protestant families based on the
novelist (named Parvulesco, after a Swiss and French sides of Lake Geneva
right-wing philosopher Godard knew, as well as in Paris?the four Godard
FORTY-FIVE YEARS ago, Jean New York, London, and Paris?each but acted by Godard's friend the direc children had to maintain a silence that
Luc Godard was hailed as the one felt like some new Athena bursting tor Jean-Pierre Melville?such inside could be broken only if theywere spo
from the head of Zeus. My fervorwas was of Godard's ken to or if they interjected an apposite
Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky of dope part mystique).
cinematic art?the mid-century "cul only increased by the extreme variety "What is your greatest ambition?" she quotation in the grownups' conversa
ture hero" (in Susan Sontag's phrase) of their subjects and styles and their asks him. He replies, "First, to become tion. A later variation on such singing
immortal. Then, to die." Initially I for one's supper was Godard's wildly
whose powers of invention, visual varying coherence and cogency. They
intensity, intellectual bricolage, and wit seemed beyond category. I remember thought thiswas a kind of perverse tri hostile, self-destructive theft not only
in a New umph of the will?dying to demon of money (from his family, from his
epitomized both the modernism of coming out of Breathless
"make it new" and the postmodernism York art cinema in the spring of 1961 strate one was even more powerful employers, from the magazine he
of "get it used" (to steal a la Godard with my ears full of French and Fifties than immortal: sheer adolescent brag famously wrote for, Cahiers du cine
from Andrei Codrescu). But in 1967, jazz and my eyes still seeing Jean-Paul gadocio. Then I got the French joke ma), but also of the signed first editions
after fifteen films in eight years, this Belmondo, shot in the back, running that a novelist who becomes immortel of Paul Valery's works from the library
Prometheus of the nouvelle vague? away from the camera down a cobbled is a member of the Academie Fran of his grandfather Monod, who had
whose Breathless in 1960 and My Life Paris street to fall at the crossroads like chise, so it's a wholly understandable been Valery's longtime friend and
to Live in 1962 proclaimed his mastery an Olympic warrior. I was nineteen, ambition to achieve before one's death. became his literary executor. The
of both the active (Hitchcock/Hawks) and I fell head-over-heels in love with Then I realized that the brash contra young Godard would sell them to the
and contemplative the Romantic brio and doom of it all, diction of the two terms?if you're neighborhood bookshop, where his
(Dreyer/Bresson)
cinematic traditions?declared that cin the jokes and cartoony violence, the immortal you can't die; if you die, grandfather would often browse and
ema had come to an end and turned grand pronunciamenti, the swimming you're not immortal?is a way of evok buy them back. Of course, not every
himself into aMaoist agit-propagandist camerawork and exhilarating montage ing the grandiose determinism that dic neurotic thieving son of a distinguished
and sixteen-millimeter and video essay as Belmondo and Jean Seberg dashed tates the plot of the film: its hovering family becomes a genius, but the nearly
ist formost of the next dozen years. In through the pinball game of black-and Humphrey Bogart doom presupposes compulsive swag of quotations in this
1980 he returned to more commercial white August Paris. I was even that people are unvarying essences? particular genius's films reminds us
formats, financing, and distribution, enthralled by Seberg's appalling Iowa "betrayers betray, burglars burgle, kill that only a footnote (or an admiring
and over the next two decades he pro accent, her close-cropped head that ers kill, lovers love each other," as public) separates citation from appro
duced a flood of fifteen more or less makes her look like a pixie fromMars, Belmondo says. In short, the rhetorical priation, or theft. But then, as T. S.
narrative films of visual and aural and her blank, schoolgirl, feckless, shape of the novelist's declamation Eliot said, "Good artists borrow, great

glamour, saturnine caprice, sorrow, fatal innocence (Daisy Miller as a kill embodies the proud reductionism of artists steal."

and crepuscular cultural denunciation. er, not a victim). The light and noise of the entire movie. There is no freewill At the risk of Gallic hyperbole, I'd
Some of these won prizes (FirstName: Paris, the glamour of the Champs in this Manichean melodrama, this suggest that such theft is also a species
street static universe of Racinian absolutes of shocking juxtaposition?a form of
Carmen, 1983) and provoked contro Elysees with the lamps coming
versy (HailMary, 1985) or, like In on at dusk and gleaming through the that have shrunk to the scale of a creative collage, a willful distortion of
Praise of Love in 2001, were embraced B-movie. Kitsch fatalism. The last echo conventional aesthetic order. Perhaps
night. The central sequence of the lov
as evidence of the "self-surpassing cre ers' dialogue in the tiny room of the of a classical world. Modern in its Godard's most famous bon mot came
ative renewal of one of the century's Hotel de Suede (nearly one third of the combination of novelty and cultural in a conversation with a master of cine
in its pop-cul matic melodrama
leading artists" (to quote Godard's film) with its Picasso and Renoir post nostalgia; postmodern (either Georges
and ers tacked on the wall, the squawking ture pep. Profoundly self-comforting in Franju or Henri Clouzot, the sources
biographer critic, Richard Brody).
the static melancholy that lies beneath "But M. Godard, you
Two of these fifteen films?In Praise of radio, the symphonie concrete of the conflict): surely,
Love and Passion in 1982?contain traffic in the street below, the ciga its virtuoso hyperactivity. at least acknowledge the necessity of
moments of great beauty and creative rettes, banalities, and bickering, and having a beginning, middle, and end in
force, but none of the ten I've seen the buried disaster (and possible moti your films." "Certainly, but not neces
vation for betrayal) of her pregnancy are the central and most sarily in that order." For Godard the
approaches the distinction of Godard's
and his brutal indifference to it,despite Aphorisms tropes in Godard's essence of cinema is not the mise en
early films?particularly Breathless, his problematic
films. Though W. H. Auden and scene but montage?not the fluid
first, My Life to Live, his fourth, his self-proclaimed obsession with her. ninety
Louis called aphorism direction of actors in continuous space
Contempt (1963), his sixth, and Seeing Breathless again today, I find Kronenberger
an genre," in and deep focus (epitomized byWelles
Alphaville (1965),hisninth. the light and sound and sprung rhythm "essentially aristocratic
For me, even after many viewings all still exhilarating, even though the our age of putative democracy its char and Rossellini and beloved by Andre
over many years and long periods of adolescent self-dramatics and the flood acteristic authoritative tone seems to Bazin, the critical seer of the nouvelle
indifference or impatience, these four of pretentious (yetnow also impressive) mask anxiety. For Auden, "the aphorist vague), but the kind of editing that cre
continue to arouse and allusions to films, art, and literature does not argue or explain, he asserts; ates new meanings from the juxtaposi
curiosity
a and in his assertion is a convic tion of shots. Godard's films do resem
intense emotion (including both admi high and low can become drag. The implicit
ration and exasperation), and to pro realism of the central tion that he iswiser or more intelligent ble metaphysical or modernist poetry:
psychological
love scene, with the camera and mon than his readers." For Susan Sontag, "The most heterogeneous ideas are
voke, even demand interpretation. Like
all works of art that appear to be clas herself an aphoristic essayist and violence nature and
tage enacting the characters' advance yoked by together;
sics (not authoritarian monuments but and retreat, their frustration, attrac admirer of such aphorists as Barthes, art are ransacked for illustrations,
But her Walter Benjamin, and Godard, and allusions; their
works that emit polyvalent force, tion, and evasion, still works. Canetti, comparisons,
unso and their
rewarding repeated attention over betrayal now is so abrupt and extreme "aphoristic thinking is informal, learning instructs, subtlety
many years), they exceed their declared that it seems misogynistically imposed, ciable, adversarial, proudly selfish." In surprises; but the reader commonly
intentions and cannot be reduced to and Belmondo's wonderful swagger? Godard's case, especially, the aphorism thinks his improvement dearly bought
the critical or historical cliches they particularly in the superb encircling smacks of adolescent absolutism; its and, though he sometimes admires, is
rhetorical conceals and com seldom pleased." Of course, Dr.
appear to invite.My purpose here is to traveling shot in the travel agency? precision
doesn't distract as much as it once did pensates for formlessness and confused censure has become praise,
try to understand how the tensions Johnson's
films between from his character's ideas and feelings; it represents an and "pleasing" the audience is the last
throughout Godard's sociopathology
the from conflict, thing a modernist or postmodernist
story and essay, between aphorism and (car theft, assault, murder). Still, escape ambiguity,
drama and vivid self-advertising glamour of their nuance, and most of all any possibility artist desires. Without contraries there
lyric, between personal
can of reply, of riposte, of argument, of dia is no progression. Conflict is all:
impersonal didactic declamation bodies, voices, and gestures transforms
once famously arranged for
produce both nasty trifling and gran them into something more than flat, logue. It always declares itself the last Godard
deur?not merely grandiosity (though cartoons. The formal word?apocalyptic, authoritarian. the great B-movie director Samuel
nonpsychological
and allusive richness so Godard's extravagant citations and Fuller to declare in a cameo in Pierrot
they certainly contain plenty of that) complexity
but grandeur masked in self-defensive brilliantly described by Michel Marie allusions serve both as autodidactic le fou (1965), "A filmis likea battle
in the familiar in his Comprendre Godard (ten kinds camouflage and as treasures for a ground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence.
irony modern/postmod
ern manner. of cars, dozens of films and works of boastful cultural potlatch. They run Death. In one word, emotions."
throughout his life and work. Truffaut But if forGodard juxtaposition is the
I should confess that, like so many literature) provide gravity as well as
other young people in the nineteen-six of course, the natural recalled Godard frequently taking heart of cinema ("direction is a look,
grace. And, light,
ties, I was wildly excited by his early the hand-held documentary-style cam every book off a shelf when visiting montage is a heartbeat," he wrote in an
movies, which I saw again and again in erawork, the majestic virtuosity of the friends and reading just the first and early essay), story is the devil. Godard

24 The Threepenny Review

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.199 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 20:17:28 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
has been quite candid about this: "I banalities of the contemporary world life, which Godard adored), but the Godard's Contempt, made the follow
don't really like telling a story. I prefer can be contrasted and condemned. glory ofMy Life to Live is the im ing year?a big-budget international
to use a kind of tapestry, a background Irony permits him to play it safe. It mensely varied and emotionally super cinemascope and color production
on which I can embroider my own cloaks rage and sorrow and provides a saturated series of portraits of the adapted (and significantly altered) from
ideas..." What's notable here is the camouflage that obscures all manner actress Anna Karina. In addition, some a novel by Alberto Moravia. The film
antique aesthetic model of the tapestry of inchoate thought and feeling, but it of Godard's most accomplished mo stars Brigitte Bardot as the wife of a
and the separation of form and content can also enlarge and deepen a work. ments of dramatized psychological playwright(MichelPiccoli) sellingout
between "background" and "ideas"? And in his films there are other anti realism occur in long two-shots: of the himself, and her, by pushing her into
as if thought were independent of didactic countervailing forces at work: girl and her husband, and later of the the arms of a grandiose American
expression and a work of art simply a the unending richness and invention of girl and theman who will become her movie producer (Jack Palance at his
means of supporting preexisting ideas. the cinematography, montage, music, pimp and murderer. The first is shot most brutish) who is filming the
That ideas are embodied and thereby and sound. The visual is never merely entirely from the back to express the Odyssey
as a sun-sweat-sword-and
transformed in works of art, that decorative?it's exploratory, critical; as couple's disconnection as they sit side sandals extravaganza like Hercules.
works of art are organic (to use the old his cinematographer Raoul Coutard by side at a bar; the second is shot so Though Contempt takes place over
New Critical metaphor) and can only once said, Godard's images are never the back of the pimp's black close only two days in Cinecitta, in an
be violated or destroyed by plucking postcards. Most importantly, there are cropped head obscures and negates one unfinished apartment inRome, and on
out their "ideas"?all this seems for also the unpredictable intensities and part or another of the girl's face. the red rooftop altar of the Villa
eign to Godard's aesthetic declarations. overtones in the figures and perfor The film also has several famous set Malaparte on Capri, it encompasses
He seems to have no notion of narra mances of some of the actors: Bel pieces, such as a remarkable conversa the hurly-burly of commercial film pro
tive as a specific, authentic form of mondo, Seberg, Anna Karina, Jean tion in a cafe about language, truth, duction, the extravagant beauty of the
a species of thought, Pierre Leaud, Michel and error with an endearingly scruffy
cognition?as Piccoli and Mediterranean landscape, a plethora of
inquiry, exploration that need not be Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, Eddie philosopher (Brice Parain), but several visual and verbal echoes of the classical
confined to conventional coercive Constantine and Akim Tamiroff in are less successful: a too-cute flirta world and European high culture
forms and can, in fact, transform them Alphaville, and Isabelle Huppert and tious dance around a billiard table, a (Greek and Roman sculpture and fres
(as his beloved Hollywood directors of Hanna Schygulla in Passion. too-long, didactic love scene presented coes, Dante, Holderlin, Corneille), and
Westerns and gangster films did). In his Certainly Godard's best films can through a reading from Poe's hostile the history of cinema, embodied by
revulsion at the lies of the conventional exhibit genuine aesthetic and emotion fable "The Oval Portrait," and, most Fritz Lang playing himself as the
worldly-wise director of the wretched
travesty of Homer. But in the midst of
this spatial, temporal, and cultural cir
cus, Godard presents a scrupulously
detailed domestic drama?of the self
pitying, lazy, vain, and greedy husband
pimping his wife, who goes from doubt
to disbelief to anger to contempt and
finally leaves her husband. Piccoli and
Bardot fully capture this unraveling?
particularly in the central thirty-min
ute sequence of a quarrel that goes
from pseudo-sensitive questions to stat
ic banalities to slaps and seething rage.
This is as close as Godard gets in
psychological realism to much of what
Bergman and Antonioni do in their
many scenes from marriages, but
Godard sets this closet drama in the
midst of a grand exfoliating historical
context. For inmany ways the film is
essentially about translation?of past
culture to present, of one language to
another (there's a superb use of a multi
lingual personal assistant spinning
back and forth from English to French
to Italian to German), of male and
female styles of feeling and communi
cation. At one point Lang remarks that
Juarez, Mexico, 1978 the horizontal cinemascope ratio?in
which Contempt and its film-within-a
film are shot?is fit only for "snakes
or commercial story, he turns to al abundance, authentic range and daringly, a scene inwhich the girl goes and funerals," but Godard has used it
Brechtian declamation (debased) or nuance. Breathless, for example, and to themovies and sees the magnificent here both for emotional inwardness
violent parody?both of which are My Life to Live?a somber ceremony climax of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan and spectacular cultural pageantry,
forms of the same didacticism that in black and white that combines a of Arc, inwhich a young monk (Anto though Contempt is in some ways his
leads him to aphorism and compromis social documentary about Parisian nin Artaud) asks Joan (Maria Falcon most conventional, linear work. The
es or destroys much of his work. His prostitution with a saint's life, an exis etti): "And the great victory?"?"It will closest to story, even though the central
career exhibits themost perplexing and tentialist beatification modeled after be my martyrdom." "And your deliver characters and theirmoral predicament
vexatious instances of bursts of nearly Dreyer's silent The Passion of Joan of ance?"?"Death." Godard filmsKarina don't generate the emotional resonance
unparalleled originality and productivi Arc. Godard described it as "a film with tears coursing down her cheeks as to match the sound and light show of
ty?at the highest level of quality? about prostitution that relates how a she sees on the screen this Lesson and the setting.
which are repeatedly interrupted by young and pretty Parisian salesgirl Prefiguration of her own fate. But If Breathless was Godard's razz
works of willful, narcissistic self-indul gives her body but keeps her soul..." viewed again today, this seems inescap matazz Citizen Kane, My Life to Live
gence and formal carelessness. In twelve "tableaux" bearing titles ably sentimental; Dreyer absolutely his grave Joan of Arc, and Contempt
Godard may resist story, but he often like Brechtian stations of the cross, we overwhelms Godard. Even more trou his Hollywood psychodrama,
relies on the conventions of popular follow an impoverished shop girl (who bling, later in the film there is a con Alphaville is his most adroit interweav
genres (and on stand-up comic anec has left her husband and child for spicuously disruptive shift of tone in ing of parody and lyric. It combines
dotes) to distance himself from his unexplained reasons) as she sinks into the long, over-expository, and unironi anti-technocratic sci-fi, a noir detec
characters, to contain sentimentality, prostitution. Like a figure of Grace she cally voyeuristic documentary sequenc tive/secret agent story, and the myths
and to provide dramatic propulsion to maintains her equanimity, but at the es about the working lives of prosti of Prometheus and Orpheus. Eddie
overcome the inertia of the great piles moment of her escape (through true tutes. But at its most successful My Constantine, an expatriate American
of quotes, allusions, and references and love, no less, I'm afraid) she is shot as Life to Live manages to be both a love star of forty French action pictures,
the constant temptation of didacticism. she's being sold by one pimp to another lyric and a neorealistic tragedy like two plays his standard raincoat and snap
Yet at his best he can also employ the and dies on the street. Most of the of the films that Godard most brim tough guy (Lemmy Caution) on a
conventions of genre to evoke a grand movie takes place in cafes and sordid admired: Rossellini's Open City and quest to find, capture, or kill an evil
structure from an earlier heroic time? hotel rooms and is filmed with the Germany Year Zero. genius (Professor von Braun, aka
a time of lyric and epic?against which chaste objectivity of Bresson's Pick Itwould be hard to find a more bla Nosferatu) bent on intergalactic domi
the sordid confusions, betrayals, and pocket (another petty criminal saint's tant contrast toMy Life to Live than nation, but en route he meets the vil

Winter 2010 25

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.199 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 20:17:28 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Iain's brainwashed careers and sex and contraception; for World poverty by African and Arab vivants of classic European masterpiec
daughter?Anna
es by Rembrandt, El Greco, Ingres, and
Karina as a "pretty sphinx"?and them political action is a thankless garbage men and in the leading lady
delivers her from evil. It's "a film about chore or an adolescent prank or a calmly devouring the remains of her Delacroix. But the central character of
late husband with cannibalistic delight. the director is a cipher, and the film's
light," said Godard. "Lemmy is a char bewildering off-screen calamity. By
acter who brings light to people who contrast, La Chinoise is full of conten Picaresque road-runner satire has similarities to Fellini's magnificent 8V2
no longer know what it is." With tious young psychos (several extremely turned into a Grand Guignol rant. only make its differences (of character
remarkable aplomb?a triumph of well-off) eager to submerge themselves Within months Godard embarked ization, narrative, photography, and
visual and dramatic taste over risible in the certainties of violent debate and upon his twelve-yearMaoist crusade. montage) all the more unhappily con
didacticism?Godard has a grizzled, terrorism. It came out one year before After he returned, his films became spicuous.
and whimpering Akim the student uprisings ofMay 1968. visually sumptuous and filled with an Another late film that marks an
growling,
Tamiroff give Lemmy a volume of Paul neither of these films extraordinary density of voice-over exception is In Praise of Love, whose
Though
to use as an four strongest, sounds (bird cries and the visual force and complexity?in which
Eluard's love poetry approaches Godard's recitations,
instrument of enlightenment and one sign of their complexity and rich waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Godard employs both profoundly dark
escape. The film ends with the frog ness can be seen in the fact that despite Geneva), and music (Mozart, black and white (after decades without
faced shamus and the enchanted prin the satire of consumer culture and late Beethoven, Faure, New Age), but they it) and Fauvist digital video color?do
cess driving away from the apocalypse adolescent confusion in Masculine were generally either oblique and mud much to redeem its muffled medita
of this technocratic Sodom and Feminine, the characters achieve real dled, or crass in their narratives and tions on French collaborators and
Gomorrah. Love has conquered all. in their sorry sentimental fatally arbitrary in their grandiose and Catholic resistants and its oracular
poignancy
What makes much of this nonsense education. The film ismuch less emo capricious adaptations or references to denunciations of American consumer
Carmen, the Virgin Mary, King Lear, Steven Spielberg and his
work is the extraordinary fluidity and tionally and thematically monochro culture,
black and white contrasts of the expres matic than it seems at first or may and the myth of Amphitryon. Their Schindler's List, and atrocities in the
sionist camerawork. Shot almost entirely appear in hindsight. A similar enlarge historical-political-cultural-religious Balkans.

at night in contemporary Paris?in the ment takes place in La Chinoise, where ruminations move between Delphic fog There are certainly many who praise
monolithic buildings of La Defense, in Godard includes a debate on terrorism and banality ("Europe has memories, the films of Godard's late period, but
the national radio headquarters, and in between Wiazemsky and her teacher America has T-shirts"). In several forme they never achieve the charac
the home office of an international com Francis Jeanson, a political philosopher Godard casts himself as a goofy film teristic force of the late works of (say)
puter company?to show us that the and former Algerian War activist, in director/holy fool, and inmost of them Picasso, whose recently exhibited late
dark future is already here, Alphaville's which she blandly calls for bombs and he uses the naked female body for paintings and prints of musketeers and
dramatic chiaroscuro recalls Lang's and he with great courtesy and clarity shock and awe, as if Courbet's nudes remind us of the true scale of
Welles's symbolic intensities.To be sure,
it can be sappy and preposterous
(Lemmy quoting Pascal on his horror of
infinite space is a doozy), but its visual
ingenuity and momentum are extraordi
nary. It has a place beside Metropolis
andModern Times.

four films of the 1960s are

These still Godard's most successful. But
there are more than eighty others, and
many of them continue to reward atten
tion. For example, Band of Outsiders
(1964), a melancholy crime caper with
a waifish Anna Karina, a tricky bird
dogging Claude Brasseur, and the
romantically gloomy Franz Kafka look
alike Sami Frey, that has moments of
great tenderness and naive longing
amidst stumblebum violence, a charm
ingly awkward jukebox line dance (the
Madison), and a nutty race through the
Louvre. On a much grander scale, one
can't ignore the documentary impor
tance and historical prescience of two
later films that perfectly captured the
changing youth culture of the mid
1960s. In 1966 Godard made Mascu
line Feminine, which is filled with the
winter-gray frustrations and bickering Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1973

of the "children of Marx and Coca

Cola," an anxious leftist intellectual
Creation of the World were the ulti genius. For all of Godard's immense
(Jean-Pierre Leaud) and a calmly mate refutes her feckless assertions. When
rialistic pop singer (Chantal Goya). The Godard made the film he supplied mate instance of speaking truth to originality and distinction, which once
I should note that I to
film is shot in grayish black and white, Wiazemsky with her lines and thought power. Though prompted eager comparisons Picasso,
in the old-fashioned, square Academy she had bested Jeanson; looking at it haven't seen those available only in we should not think him unequaled as a
ratio. Then, one year later, came the the filmmaker ifwe remember the careers
again years later, he acknowledged European-format DVD?including
brash, primary-colored glare of the Jeanson was correct. So in themidst of filmsSauve qui peut (la vie) (1980) and of Bergman or Kurosawa?or even the
wide-screen La Chinoise, in which a its abrasive leftist speechifying, this Nouvelle Vague (1990), as well as the much shorter career of, say, Fassbinder.
cadre of young fanatics hole up in a film that endorses adolescent fanati reputedly masterful, five-hour histori When Godard was at the height of
luxurious Paris apartment forMaoist cism has moments of genuine dialogic cal/cultural video essay Histoire(s) du his celebrity in the 1960s, Donald
summer camp led by a focused and achievement. Not just the Dostoyev cinema (1988-98)?too often the ten I Barthelme had a character in a very
self-confident young man (again played skian polyvocalism ofWiazemsky and have seen manage to be at once jejune Godardian story called "The Indian
the inclusion of a and massively depressed, despite antic declare that he wants to be
by Leaud), who famously erases the Jeanson, but also Uprising"
bursts of violence. Godard. It seems fitting that I
names of dozens of great writers from character called Kirilov (out of Jean-Luc
the study group's blackboard and leaves Dostoyevsky's Demons), who kills him One exception is Passion, which con should end, a la Godard, by quoting
only Brecht, and an earnest grad stu self, and another, less violent student tains detailed and intense performanc (from later in the same story) Donald
dent (played by Anne Wiazemsky, look who displays attractive vulnerability es by Isabelle Huppert as a leftist facto Barthelme's quotation of an aphorism

ing like Ondine in a sweater and a and equanimity (unlike theMaoists). ry worker and?as her rival for the by Paul Valery, who gave Godard Latin
By contrast, Godard's very next film, love of a Polish film director?Hanna lessons as a boy. For me, the aphorism
poorboy cap). These aspiring revolu
tionaries speechify, study, quarrel, and Weekend (1967), was a shriek of Schygulla playing thewife of the facto epitomizes many of the themes, predic
finally assassinate two men, one by a rage?a monomaniacal satire of a con ry's bullying owner. Much of the early aments, and perplexities of Jean-Luc
Feminine sumer culture of lust, greed, rape, and part of the movie is devoted to the Godard's life and work: "The ardor
stupid mistake. Masculine
was full of neurotically self-conscious car crashes (including the greatest traf filmmaker's efforts to overcome his aroused in men by the beauty of
or blandly conformist young people fic jam in movie history), culminating creative block, to find a story and to do women can only be satisfied by
short on cash and anxious about their in two hectoring speeches on Third more than photograph tableaux God."D

26 The Threepenny Review

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.199 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 20:17:28 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions