3

The French New Wave avoided mystification and questioned melodrama. Their work is the culmination of the movement against traditional cinematic forms that began with neo-realism, and the core of creative energy in the films of the sixties and early seventies. François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard came to intellectual maturity under the tutelage of André Bazin in the fifties and began making full-length films in 1959. Their work was the result of profound engagement with cinema and its history, a point that cannot be stressed too strongly. Whenever a film critic talks about a figure or a movement prior to the New Wave, and whatever qualities of insight and analysis are attributed to that figure or movement, one must keep in mind that—with the rarest of exceptions (such as Eisenstein, Renoir, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson)—the figures who most affected film form and content did so intuitively. Most of them, unless they came from a wider circle of artists and writers—as did Buñuel, for example, or Eisenstein—received their training and formed their ideas while working "in the business." As I pointed out, the neo-realists’ movement was a convergence of theory and practice; but even here the theoreticians and the practitioners were different people. Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica were actively engaged in theater and film before and during the war. They did not step back from their trade and give it prolonged study before coming up with a radicalization of its means and ends. Neorealism was the result of many social, political, aesthetic, and intellectual forces at work at a fortuitous time. The effort was concerted, not premeditated.

The work of the New Wave, on the other hand, began outside the film business, free of the commercial pressures and rapid compromises that business, even in Europe, demands. Which is not to say that these filmmakers were outside film. They were inside it; they developed their intellects with it; they viewed film for hours and days and weeks at a time in Bazin’s cinema clubs and Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque. When they weren’t viewing, they argued and wrote about film. They learned about film from studying it rather than creating it, and therein lies the importance of their education. Rather than learning to make images and narratives in the heat of production, under the aegis of a given tradition, the demands of convention, the unquestioning attitudes of well-used, easily executed and comprehended forms, they first observed these forms. They analyzed and judged. And their judgments were a surprise. Except for some isolated figures-Renoir, of course, Bresson, Jean Rouch, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, and, outside France, Dreyer, Bergman, and the neo-realists-they had little but scorn for the filmmaking of Europe, and of their own country in particular.

In April 1959, on the occasion of the selection of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows as the film to represent France at the Cannes festival, Godard wrote:

The need was to find a place of authority, a frame of reference, something to point to and say, "This is what I mean when I talk about cinema." The European figures of authority—Renoir, Bresson, the neo-realists—were self-evident; they had control over their films, which were investigations as much as statements, examinations of the world they observed more than reconstructions of pre-fabricated ideas and forms. But this pre-fabrication is what Hollywood has always been accused of, indeed what I accuse it of; it is the very thing the neo-realists fought against. Why then did the young French critics turn to it for inspiration and a weapon? For one thing, they were able to see in the work of a number of American filmmakers an ability to overcome the pre-fabrications, the generic conventions, the givens of a reactionary morality and zero-degree narrative style, to burrow in like termites (to use Manny Farber’s analogy) and discover in these forms new modes of expression.³⁴ The perversity of the French was their ability to perceive these triumphs not in the big productions of the major studios—for these were no better than the "Tradition of Quality," the quasi-literary, studio-bound, convention-ridden films of France—but in Howard Hawks’s and Jerry Lewis’s comedies, John Ford’s westerns, Raoul Walsh’s action films, and Alfred Hitchcock’s "thrillers."

In such films they discovered two important things. The first was a continuity of content in the body of the work of one director. Recognizable characters, themes, situations kept reappearing no matter what studio the film was made for, no matter who might have collaborated on the script. The second, more difficult matter was a discovery of form. To find individual marks, traces in many instances, that demonstrated alterations in the uniform narrative construction of American cinema took and still takes a careful and dedicated eye. The formal strategies of the more assertive American filmmakers did stand out clearly. Bazin had already used Welles as a major example of long-take, deep-focus composition. John Ford’s organization of groups in a western landscape, his ability to turn image and narrative movement into a moral statement about community and individual obligation were clear to many people (to Welles himself, who studied Ford’s style). Not so clear (to return to Godard’s example) was Hitchcock’s particular place within the American structure. He was regarded by most as a "master of technique," able to build suspense and surprise an audience, and it took a considerable effort to demonstrate that Hitchcock was more than just clever, that he was profoundly involved in discovering, through the way he structured his films, the way film structured audience response and how that response revealed as much about an audience as about the characters in the fiction.³⁵

In the course of making such discoveries about Hitchcock and others, the French worked out a theory of personality and subjectivity. In response to what they saw as the pompous blandness of traditional French cinema, they described a vigorous plurality in American film. In the face of the assembly-line, producer-dominated, crowd-pleasing aspect of that film, they traced the features of individuals, directors who inscribed their own ideas and spoke individual variations of the common cinematic language. The French were particularly delighted with the inherent dialectic: anonymous studio production no longer anonymous due to the emergence of individuals able to use the system for their own ends; these ends in turn pulled back into the anonymous assembly line, altering and redirecting conventions. The tension between the individual and the line kept American cinema and the individuals responsible for it vital and thriving.

There is a certain bad faith in some of these arguments and analyses. John Hess has pointed out that the attacks on the French Tradition of Quality, particularly those made by Truffaut, were reactionary, condemning the films not only for their pomposity, verbal orientation, and deadness of style, but for their anti-bourgeois attitudes. In his 1954 Cahiers essay "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," Truffaut condemns these films not only for their inability to overcome their literary bias, but for their anti-clericalism and anti-militarism as well. Truffaut blamed the films’ impersonality not only on their dependence upon carefully worked scripts, but on their engagement in the political sphere as well.³⁶ To be fair to Truffaut, he does take care to point out that the filmmakers and the films’ general attitude are themselves bourgeois. He pointedly asks, "What then is the value of an anti-bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois? Workers, you know very well, do not appreciate this form of cinema at all even when it aims at relating to them.³⁷ Certainly these films do not have the working-class orientation of neo-realism. Still, this early statement of displeasure at film concerned with issues beyond the personal boded ill, particularly for Truffaut, whose own work suffers from his refusal to place his characters in the world and observe them as social and political as well as individual and emotional beings. It is a problem that becomes severe in films like Jules and Jim (1961) and The Last Metro (1980), both of which attempt to recreate a specific historical setting (the first World War and the Nazi occupation of France, respectively) and then forget the setting to focus on the romantic preoccupations of the characters.

Another difficulty inherent in the argument of the New Wave emerges from its very perversity. The Hollywood film they admired, the struggle between individual creativity and studio control they celebrated, were phenomena that could only be admired and celebrated from afar. Critically, the French created American film. They gave it status, a taxonomy, a pantheon of individual talent. They discovered its thematic and formal structures and set up the models of analysis we are still using. Had they done nothing else their influence on film history would have been enormous. But when they turned to filmmaking they neither would nor could duplicate the American production process. Not only was the French studio system operating on a different and much smaller scale than the American, but the New Wave did not want to engage it. They did not admire the American production system as much as they admired the heroic endeavor of individual filmmakers in overcoming it. There was a great deal of romanticism in their attitudes toward Hollywood. Their desire was to emulate the individuals and not the system; but they had the historical sense to know that the individuals could not have survived without the system. When they turned to making their own films, they separated out the various components of the Hollywood phenomenon, choosing what they wanted and discarding what they did not need. The financial system of big-studio filmmaking was out. Large budgets to assure large profits meant large compromises. The French received limited funds from backers who were interested at least as much in the film made as in the money made from it and allowed the filmmaker all the control. Filmmaking for the New Wave, in contradistinction to both the French and American traditions, was a personal and independent effort. While the concept of the auteur (the director as guiding, creative force) had to be wrung from the production line of Hollywood, for Truffaut, Godard, and company it was a given, and each assumed the mantle with ease. Their rallying point was the words written by the filmmaker Alexandre Astruc in 1948:

"A true act of writing!" This statement, along with their discov of American cinema, was the most powerful impetus for the French critics to enter production. Having given authorial recognition American directors, they wanted now to assume that burden the selves and write in film, inscribing their personality and perceptions of the world directly into images and sounds, into narratives told them with film, in film.³⁹ Even more, this personal cinematic voice would speak, as Godard says, of "things as they are." Again, though, this statement conflicts with their admiration of Hollywood. American film can hardly be accused of speaking of or showing "things they are." American film alludes to, transforms, modulates historical realities, but rarely confronts them, rarely observes them "as they are." This was the major argument of the neo-realists, and Godard's call parallels theirs, though his romantic sighs for "girls as we I them, boys as we see them every day" bears little apparent relation what the Italians were looking for in the forties. The neo-realists called for filmmakers to allow the world as it is to inscribe itself on film; some Hollywood filmmakers attempted to inscribe their personalities upon, or within, preexisting conventions; the New Wave filmmakers wanted to inscribe their subjective views of the world directly on film.

In working out the conflicts, they made wise choices and interesting combinations. As excited as they were by the promise of "writing" with film, of giving direct voice to their perceptions in a cinematic discourse, they were aware of the theoretical nature of the premise. The physical apparatus of cinema makes such direct inscription a concept only. A pleasant room with typewriter or pen m suffice for the writer. But the filmmaker faces an array of technical equipment, much activity, and the necessity of dealing with (indeed directing) other people. Beyond this, like the writer, the filmmaker does not create from nothing. He or she must confront tradition, the multitude of conventions, the many discourses of the works that came before. The personality the filmmaker would inscribe on film must be informed by experience, insight, and analysis; it must be manifested in characters who are involved in dramatic situations.

Their recognition of these problems and demands brought them back to the Hollywood auteurs. For Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Lang, and the rest it was, as I said, a question not merely of overcoming the studio’s pressure to conform and compromise, but of understanding the cinematic language being used by the studios and forcing it to respond to their own voices. When they began directing, the New Wave filmmakers were not ready or able to confront tradition with a commitment to observe a specific economic class and its concerns, as were the neo-realists; but because they needed a base out of which to work, and because the experience they had to draw upon for making their films came largely from film itself, American film again provided them with assistance. They discovered in its generic richness parameters loose enough to permit movement and expansion but tight enough to offer them codes and conventions they could use and re-speak, or break if they wanted to. One wide, encompassing genre appealed to them the most: the gangster film-film noir-romantic thriller, that complex of statements, gestures, attitudes, characters, and camera placements that epitomized the high forties and early fifties in Hollywood. It was to this genre that most of the members of the New Wave turned when they began their work. After an autobiographical statement, a study of small childhood moments in The 400 Blows, Truffaut turned to it in Shoot the Piano Player; after a false start in Le Beau Serge, Chabrol began his elegant Hitchcockian arabesques around the genre with Les Cousins, Leda (A double tour), and Les Bonnes Femmes (all made in 1959); Jacques Rivette worked for three years on his two-hour-and-twenty-minute version of the genre, Paris Belongs to Us (1961). Godard confronted it head on with Breathless in 1959. Only Eric Rohmer seemed immune, although the urban peregrinations of the destitute hero in his first feature film, The Sign of Leo (1959), are linked to some film noir and gangster traditions.

I am not suggesting that these films bear any immediate similarity to Notorious or Lady from Shanghai, to Mildred Pierce, Pickup on South Street, Johnny Eager, or, to go back to the thirties, to Scarface. (". . . I do like A Bout de Souffle [Breathless] very much," Godard once said in an interview, "but now I see where it belongs—along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface. " )⁴⁰ They are not imitations. They share some important elements with neo-realism that divorces them instantly from the Hollywood tradition: they are shot on location; although they do not use non-professionals, they do employ players not well known at the time; they indulge, though in a somewhat different way, in the neo-realists’ desire to use the camera as objective observer, allowing the action to play out before us rather than carefully composing and editing our point of view. Unlike the neorealists, they seriously challenge the Hollywood conventions of continuity cutting. In this one area the New Wave filmmakers’ love of American film turned into a confrontation. Their awe at its facility, its smooth and direct action, became a desire to question those qualities and seek alternative methods of narrative construction and, in turn, audience response to that construction.

Godard, as always, led the way. In his initial infatuation with American film as a critic in the early fifties, he questioned his mentor, Bazin, about the efficacy of the long take. He was taken by the affective power of the closeup, by the ability of American filmmakers to play upon emotions by tightening space through cutting, enforcing the viewer’s proximity to the image. In an essay entitled "Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction," he wrote: ". . . The simplest close-up is also the most moving. Here our art reveals its transcendence most strongly, making the beauty of the object signified burst forth in the sign."⁴¹ Like so many of Godard’s early statements, this is somewhat prophetic. Although he is addressing himself particularly to the emotive power of the face on the screen, his recognition of the sermiological fact of the screen image, the ability of that image to collect a large amount of emotional and cultural information and release it when placed in a specific narrative context, will be of great importance to his later development as a filmmaker. But at this point he was still struggling with some conflicting reactions. He admires the ease with which American film creates and directs feelings through montage. Yet elsewhere he also gives his intellectual assent to Bazin’s principle that the best cinema is that which allows the unmanipulated gaze of the spectator free access to the image. Later in the fifties, when he was already shooting short films, he pursued this problem further. "If direction is a look," he wrote in an essay entitled "Montage, My Fine Care [mon beau souci] ... .. montage is a heart beat. . . . What one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.⁴² This is not a new insight on Godard’s part, but it is a major attempt to seek an understanding of image organization that would take into consideration Eisenstein’s subordination of the image to montage, Bazin’s subordination of montage to the image, and American cinema’s subordination of both to the unobtrusive construction of a story. Again in an anticipation of his approach to filmmaking, Godard works out the problem dialectically: "Knowing just how long one can make a scene last is already montage, just as thinking about transitions is part of the problem of shooting. . . . The montage, consequently, both denies and prepares the way for the mise-en-scène [the spatial organization of the image or of the entire film]: the two are interdependent.³³

Not a breathtaking conclusion, but at least indicative of the attempt to understand the interrelatedness of the two major components of cinematic construction, the shot and the cut. When these reevaluations were put into practice, yet another dialectical struggle occurred, between the American genres the French were adopting and adapting and the new attitudes toward the formal construction of these genres. Godard and his colleagues sought a multiple confrontation with, and revision of, cinematic practice. The construction of a film is determined by the way it is shot and cut. These in turn are determined by the choice of the genre, which dictates content and the way content is created. Choosing a genre, like the gangster film, and then structuring it in a radically new way changes the genre, its character, and our characteristic reactions. In Breathless, Godard announces fundamental changes from the very first shot. The film opens on a newspapers newspaper advertisement showing a woman clad in lingerie to be exact—and by so doing denies us the immediate access promised by American film, which usually opens with a long shot of a place that establishes the area that will subsequently be investigated and analyzed through the cutting of the film. Instead our attention is instantly diverted, even though it is not yet diverted from anything. In the subsequent shots of the opening sequence, Godard gives us the signs of the gangster film in rapid succession. The newspaper falls, revealing a man smoking a cigarette, hat slouched over his eyes, standing before a gate on a city street. He is the perfect image of a movie tough, and in case we miss the codes of dress and stance, he removes the cigarette from his mouth and rubs his lip with his thumb, a gesture that Bogart occasionally used, thereby signaling to us the forties and one of its premier tough guys. The man exchanges glances with a woman on the street. She points out a car. He hot-wires it and drives off. There is a dissolve, the classic cinematic transition of time and place, and we observe the road passing in a shot whose continuity is cut into so that the movement is erratic, changing abruptly. There are various shots outside and inside the car. Our gangster sings and talks to himself; he addresses us as well. He is stopped by a policeman, whom he shoots. But the shooting is shown us in small, discontinuous bits. The camera pans down the gangster’s arm. The pan is interrupted by a cut to a shot further along the arm to the gun itself. It is cocked. There is a shot of the gun barrel. Then a cut to the policeman falling and the sound of the gun. Then a shot of the gangster running across a field.

In the course of a few minutes of screen time, Godard has abstracted and broken down the signs of the genre and questioned the preeminence of our gaze into the fiction. He has brought the fiction and its method to the foreground by first scattering before us the basic things to look at—the gangster, his girlfriend, car, and gun—and at the same time not cutting those images into the patterns we expect to see. By refusing to allow an opening establishing shot he does not comfort us with an inviting overview of place. By surprising us with Michel Poiccard’s (alias Laszlo Kovacs, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) direct address to the camera—he invites us to go to hell if we disagree with him—Godard impolitely reveals the presence of screen and audience. American filmmakers feared that if a character looked directly at the camera he or she would break the inviolability of the fictional space, the safety of the spectator’s anonymity, and reveal the gulf between the spectator and the illusory figure on the screen. But Godard goes even further than this when he ruptures continuity by means of the "jump cuts" that persistently remove chunks of time and space from the action. He insists that the viewer look at the images and their arrangement and comprehend them, rather than pass immediately through them in search of a story.

Breathless performs disruptions similar to those in Last Year at Marienbad (and, of course, precedes it), but performs them with more ease and grace, with less arrogance as well. Godard does not defy us to come to terms with his film; he is as seductive as any of the American filmmakers he so admired, playing his formal investigations and experimentations against movement and adventure, within the comfortable confines of a gangster film. He does not deny content. Even though he redefines the generic confines—creating a gangster self-conscious of his role and its cinematic antecedents, relishing it but anxious about it, suffering for love, betrayed by the woman he loves—the redefinitions remain within recognizable bounds. The recognition factor, however, is deceptive. Breathless is not zero-degree filmmaking, though it is an attempt to return to zero. All aspects of its style and its formal innovation are planned to attack preconceptions of generic movie-making, part of the plan shared in different degrees by all the members of Godard’s group (it must be recalled that Truffaut wrote the original story upon which Breathless is based and

Chabrol gave technical and financial assistance to the filming). They were out to make a new cinema. "What I wanted was to take a conventional story," Godard said about Breathless, "and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done. I also wanted to give the feeling that the techniques of film-making had just been discovered or experienced for the first time."⁴⁴ The Godard of the early sixties was never given to understatement; but he should have added one important point. Breathless not only gives the feeling of cinematic techniques being invented, but also allows the experience of viewing to be rediscovered. There is a tension created by the generic expectations of the gangster film set against the discontinuity of the shooting. The dislocations of the opening; the long tracks of Michel and Patricia (Jean Seberg) on the street or talking in bed; the abrupt jumps within some shots as time is condensed while space remains the same; the jumps between shots, the ellipses that reduce the normal continuity between actions, all force the spectator to consciousness of a cinematic act being performed. The neo-realists had made the viewer look at the image content, at people and events we had rarely seen on the screen before. Godard makes us look at things we were very used to seeing in cinema—a young hood, his contacts and his reluctant girlfriend, the police—and asks us to examine how these things are being looked at. Later he will ask why.

Each of the other New Wave filmmakers enforced this new consciousness of the look. Rivette worked in an opposite manner from Godard. Instead of foreshortening events as Godard bad done, he extended narrative detail and in Paris Belongs to Us built an enormous, labyrinthine structure of paranoia, murder, the search for a worldwide conspiracy. Rivette turns narrative into a practical joke: the more detail we see, the more clues and threats and possibilities that are laid out, the less we and the characters know. Here and in later films, L’Amour fou (four hours and twelve minutes), Céline et Julie vont en bateau (three hours and twelve minutes), the first version of Out One (twelve hours and forty minutes—screened only once at that length), the magnitude of time expended on the characters is in inverse proportion to what we learn about them. Rivette expands emotional and physical detail the way Godard conflates cultural and generic detail; the experience of his films is like that of the fairy-tale children who drop crumbs along their path to find their way back home, only to have the crumbs eaten by birds. The analog is particularly apt for Céline et Julie (1974), which is a fairy tale about two young women who discover a haunted house. By sucking pieces of candy given to them after each visit (a latter-day version of Proust’s madeleine) they can sit at home and relive their adventures, "seeing" them as if they were watching a movie. We learn nothing about the house or its inhabitants, except that they play an endless melodrama of love and violence; nothing about the young women, other than that they enjoy their game immensely and that the magic they dabble in may or may not have something to do with their experiences. We do learn a great amount about our own capacity to fit narrative pieces together and our desire for the pieces to be put into place. We learn that desire can create patience, and it is a mark of Rivette’s talent at arranging and timing his shots and of his direction of actors within the shot that he is able to keep our attention and desire, to delight us with the game even when no end to it is in sight.

Although that desire is threatened by other modernist filmmakers, the New Wave directors insist upon maintaining it. In the counterpoint between familiar genres and the commentary they make on them and on the way we look at film in general, an active engagement between film and viewer is maintained that comes from a forthright wish to please. In Truffaut’s films, for example, the influence of Renoir manifests itself in an enveloping care for all the characters and the audience’s attitude toward them. In the films of Claude Chabrol the pleasure is derived from the exercise of a delighted malignity. He is perhaps formally the most conventional of his colleagues, somewhat less concerned with restructuring narrative means than with narrative ends. In the best of his work he entertains Hitchcockian concerns for the violence that erupts in the most unsuspecting and unprepared of bourgeois circumstances. Chabrol is not concerned with the gangster side of the Hollywood thriller, as is Godard in Breathless and Truffaut in Shoot the Piano Player, nor is he much interested in the Parisian subculture, at least not after Les Cousins and Les Bonnes Femmes. More than the others, Chabrol’s eye is on the propertied bourgeoisie of the provinces or the Parisian suburbs, a class he is able to delineate by their gestures, clothing, and surroundings, by the visual design of their world. Chabrol has the finest eye for production design of any of his peers. While Godard has the best eye for cultural design, for abstracting the sign (in a literal and figurative sense) that sums up a social or political attitude, Chabrol can surround his characters with a habitation that defines them, or with an instrument—a pair of ice-cube tongs, a cigarette lighter, or something larger, like a dinner party—that announces their status and class inclinations.

Like Hitchcock, Chabrol delights in the precarious situation of these inclinations, the ease with which they are toppled and the tenaciousness with which they are still grasped when the toppling seems complete. He is less concerned about the motivations for an act of violence than he is with his characters’ reaction to it and—like Hitchcock—with the way he can tune his audience’s reaction to the characters. In that cross-testing of reactions lies a great deal of play. Chabrol is not interested in winning over his audience, like Truffaut, or probing and challenging its ideas, like Godard, and certainly not with testing its endurance for narrative like Rivette. Rather, he is interested in testing the viewer’s and his own commitment to and endurance for melodrama. Most of his films concern overwhelming emotions in highly pressured situations. A psychotic killer, son of a proper and hateful bourgeois family in Leda, is attracted to and murders their lovely bohemian next-door neighbor. A lesbian relationship between a well-to-do lady and a street artist in Les Biches (1968) becomes a game of domination and submission as the lady takes a male lover. Murder ends these films as it begins others. In Just Before Nightfall (1971), an advertising executive accidentally kills his mistress (who is his best friend’s wife) in a fit of sexual violence. The film then proceeds to examine his attempts to work out his guilt, a guilt only he feels, for he goes unblamed by his wife and the friend when they learn about his deed (however, it is suggested that the wife poisons him at the end). The pattern of Violette (1978) is woven about the acts of a young woman who kills her father and attempts to kill her mother. Its characters are working class, but Chabrol is not terribly interested in social-economic problems. The Noziére family are not only cramped in their economic and physical existence, but cramped emotionally. No explanation is offered for Violette’s anti-domestic behavior, though clearly her desire to escape the confines of little rooms and her parents’ mean life and live the pretense of being an upper-class courtesan is a contributing cause. But contributing causes are not the main concern. Violette’s movements through her life of sexual assignations, her preparation and administration of poison to her mother and father, and the details of her trial and imprisonment are the items of interest and delight.

These plot descriptions sound properly gruesome and ridiculous, and those are the exact qualities that appeal to Chabrol. He understands what happens when melodrama is extended to its limits. When he can begin a film, as he does La Rupture (1970), with a father smashing his small son against a wall, continue it with the wife being blamed as instigator of the act by the husband’s crude, arrogant, and rich parents, allow those parents to hire someone to blackmail the wife as the sexual temptress of a retarded girl, and end the film with the loony inhabitants of the wife’s boarding house coming to her rescue as she hallucinates on drugs administered by the blackmailer (who then kills the wife’s husband)—when such an increment of absurdities occurs, melodrama reveals its other face, which is parody, of itself and of our acceptance of such absurdities. Because Chabrol details each element with equal care and gazes upon the characters with a visual embrace that zooms, tracks, exchanges points of view, and defines each character, everything and everyone takes on moment and portent. Quite unlike Godard, and the early Truffaut, Chabrol does not attenuate his narrative, nor does he accumulate material in a linear fashion, as does Rivette. Rather he builds out each sequence with sufficient dramatic detail and a more than sufficient attention to spatial relationships among the characters. Within these dynamics, exaggerated just beyond the necessities of convention, melodrama turns on itself and the ludicrous is visible within the serious.

Rivette’s is a hooking effect, a linking of sequence to sequence to sequence until an enormous interlocking linear pattern is achieved. L’Amour fou contains extended sequences of a play rehearsal. A documentary film unit is recording the rehearsals, and Rivette intercuts "our" view of the work with what the sixteen-millimeter camera sees. The effect is to send us back and forth, in and out. When these intercut and interlocking sequences are linked with scenes of emotional conflict between the major characters (the play’s director and his wife), the result is prolonged diffusion, the weaving of our reactions into a loose pattern that threatens to unravel with each ensuing narrative stitch. Chabrol, on the contrary, knits very tightly, and instead of threatening an unraveling of our emotional attention, he induces a break. Like Hitchcock, he lures us further and further inside the narrative until we come out the other side and see it in all its moral intricacy and melodramatic foolishness. Excess forces a distancing and provokes that consciousness of means that is a primary effect of modernist cinema.

In La Rupture Chabrol creates a contemporary fairy tale of Beauty surrounded by any number of beasts. Their machinations against her and the madness of their blackmail schemes are so appalling that a point is reached in which our own sado-masochism takes over and we begin to enjoy their scheming, trusting that the film will be true to its genre and the woman will triumph in the end. When the triumph comes and the dotty women Hélène has been living with suddenly come to her aid, any guilt the viewer may feel over the perverse enjoyment of her trials is diminished by the joy at a new-found community of women aiding one another. Certainly a rare joy for Chabrol, and he attempts to mitigate it by ending the film with more violence and murder. In the process, he manages to address and expose some of our patriarchal attitudes toward women, indicate through exaggerating them the repulsiveness of those attitudes, and provide some fitting revenge. In his other work, he is more likely to end in an impasse, disallowing any resolution for characters or viewer. The combination track and zoom shot that ends La Femme infidèle (1968) is typical. A subjective point-of-view shot from a man being led off from wife and home by the police (he killed his wife’s lover), it suggests fear and longing: he is drawn to his wife as he is being pulled away. Since it is a point-of-view shot, we share the visual frustration and uncertainty—and more. We share Chabrol’s refusal to permit a resolution.

The acts of meanness, violence, and emotional terrorism committed by Chabrol’s bourgeoisie, combined with their guilt and desire for pity, demand big emotions. Chabrol provides these, but makes them foolish, with the result that one melodramatic requirement goes unfulfilled: spectator identification with the central characters. They are usually too cruel, ridiculous, simple, mean, or self-pitying to elicit an attachment of spectator feelings. Even Hélène in La Rupture (the female lead of a Chabrol film is almost always named Hélène and almost always played by Chabrol’s wife, Stéphane Audran) is too put upon, her victory too outrageous to allow the viewer to feel more than amused horror and then bemused elation. Besides, spectator identification, by permitting the viewer entry into the fictive space that Chabrol creates and examines, would reduce the ability to understand that space and its inhabitants. Therefore, the big melodramatic emotions the films create are not allowed to connect satisfactorily to anything within the films and any attempt by the viewer to identify with a character is frustrated. We are permitted to view the conflict, not partake in it or resolve it. Contemplation ultimately replaces emotional participation. Chabrol exercises neither the intellectual rigor nor the intense ideological analyses of Godard. Like Hitchcock, his is the joyful rigor of making us understand how emotions are manipulated by film at the same time the emotions are being played out and played upon.

Of all of the New Wave filmmakers, Chabrol is most consistent in this cat-and-mouse game he plays with traditional melodramatic forms; he set a pattern that was embellished in a different manner by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Truffaut never could get quite far enough away from his love for Hollywood to avoid the melodrama or turn it into a game. He understates it, but does not distance himself from it. Godard confronts it and analyzes it. Eric Rohmer is the most successful of the group in simply avoiding it. His formal experiments are less openly radical than his colleagues’, and he is the least enamored of the Hollywood style. The six Moral Tales, of which three—My Night at Maud’s (1968), Claire’s Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972)—received wide distribution and popular response, are films that suspend emotional action and reaction in a pattern of talk and introspection.( Rohmer was the late starter of the original group. He did a number of short films in the fifties, and in the great year of 1959 a feature, The Sign of Leo, about a man down and out in Paris. The Moral Tales began with two short sixteen-millimeter films, La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne; then came La Collectionneuse in 1966, which is really the fourth Moral Tale, though filmed before My Night at Maud’s.) Rohmer is perhaps the only filmmaker successfully to make subjectivity its own subject, without allowing it to expand into a form of expressionism. His characters move through persisting states of self-examination, acted out in their relationships with others but always contained, never hysterical or destructive, abusive or hurtful. The Moral Tales are an astringent response to Bergman’s confessionals, for although introspective and centered on dialogue, they are calm and they never ignore mise-en-scène the way Bergman so often does by concentrating on the face and neglecting the spatial context that gives that face meaning. The characters’ surroundings and the way they are situated in them are of subtle and central importance. In fact the environment generates the situations. ⁴⁵ The gray, black, and white December of Clermont in My Night at Maud’s; the bright summer by Lake Geneva in Claire’s Knee; the glassy suburbs and downtown Parisian offices and streets of Chloe in the Afternoon create the situations in which their inhabitants talk out concerns of will and freedom, the morality of making choices and staying with choices made. But the environment never imposes on the characters, never directly or symbolically reflects their intellectual and emotional state. Everything remains in balance, especially the position of the viewer in relationship to the characters in the fiction. Rohmer offers no invitation to emotional involvement and asks of the viewer only disinterested observation and understanding. But there is not the modernist’s defiance of the audience, nor any of Truffaut’s pleasantries and charm (at least not until Chloe in the Afternoon, where Rohmer’s control begins to slip), and none of Godard’s obsessive analysis of the image and the reaction to it. But neither is there impartiality and coldness. Except for characters in La Collectionneuse Rohmer has great affection for all his creations, but it is affection examined rather than indulged; he observes the way his characters tend to observe themselves, commenting by discreet use of camera placement, gesture, expression, and the spatial relationships between them. In the central episode of My Night at Maud’s, Vidal takes his friend, the subject of the film (unnamed throughout and played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), to visit Maud, a self-contained, wise, and ironic doctor and divorcée. She used to be Vidal’s lover, and Vidal is taking his friend to meet her, partly just to see what will happen. The Trintignant character is an engineer and a devout, practicing Catholic, who has seen in church, followed, but not yet spoken to a young woman whom he has decided he will marry. The long sequence that takes place between the Trintignant character, Vidal, and Maud is played out in one room and is divided between the dinner table and the bed on which Maud lies while she talks to the two men.

It is a perfect triangle, and Rohmer shoots it as such, isolating the characters, often putting Maud and Vidal in a two-shot, while the Trintignant character is alone. Rohmer will observe at length the face of one of the characters who is listening to another (a favorite device of his, in direct violation of the "rule," current since the beginning of sound, that visual attention must be paid to the person speaking). Most of the talk revolves around the Trintignant character’s moral choices, his belief in the Pascalian leap of faith, and—given the company he is in (Vidal is a Marxist, Maud not very religious)—his defense of his religion. None of the conversation becomes pompous, no one treats the other with cruelty, least of all Rohmer, and the sequence, like the film as a whole, is a study of people dealing with ideas and experiences informed by understated emotion.

In the course of the sequence, Vidal leaves. Maud has gotten into bed, and Trintignant sits in a chair at some distance from her. A lamp at the side of the bed accents the distance between them because its brightness focuses our attention in every shot in which it can be seen. Rohmer separates the characters further by isolating them in one shots, and further still by having Trintignant get up from his chair and move to the opposite wall, where there is another lamp and a painting of a perfect circle. As he stands by the wall, he and Maud talk about the difficulties he has with women, his inability to separate the moral and physical aspects of love. He moves in front of the lamp, and its light surrounds him from behind; the painting of the circle is seen to one side. She thinks that it is a trick of the devil not to be able to separate the moral and the physical, and he says he would be a saint if he could. The quiet irony of the illumination and the painting in this shot is indicative of how Rohmer integrates dialogue, gesture, and setting. His character is the perfect homme moyen sensuel, not a saint and certainly not of the devil’s party (the halo-like circle is off to one side and the illumination behind him is only a lamp and not the fires of hell). Instead of moralizing his morality or condemning it as priggish, Rohmer regards it from a slightly ironical distance and comments upon it visually. At no time does Rohmer attempt to absent himself. His control is absolute, and in a film that concerns problems of choice, will, and probability, that control offers the capping irony. It is the director’s will the characters follow.

The Trintignant character spends the night with Maud, but does not make love to her (and she is angered not by his refusal, but by his indecision). Later in the day, he accidentally meets his "blonde," Françoise, the woman he saw at church. Eventually he marries her. In a coda to the film, the character, with his wife and child, meets Maud in another of the coincidental encounters that mark the events of the narrative, and he learns that his wife, before they were married, had an affair with Maud’s husband, before Maud was divorced.

In his quest for moral perfection, he has tripped himself up. Earlier on, his fiancée confessed to him that she had had an affair (with whom she did not say) and he lied in order to comfort her, saying that he had slept with Maud (he does not mention her name and in fact only partly lies—he did spend the night in her bed). This final revelation about his wife’s affair therefore throws into question the moral and theological models he has constructed for his life. His lie to comfort his fiancée put the lie to his moral rectitude. Because of that lie and Françoise’s indiscretion, he is embarrassed and forced to lie further when he and Françoise meet Maud. His wager with himself that marriage to Françoise would be better than having affairs with others is made at the cost of embarrassment for him and pain for Maud, who recognizes Françoise. But it is a cost he is willing to pay. He does, after all, make a choice and stay with it. The carefully engineered revelation at the end of the film does not emotionally undo him, but merely points up the ironies of chance he had been unwilling to consider.

No one is undone in the Moral Tales, and because of this they are in a curious way the most "realistic" of contemporary films—realistic, that is, to the temperament and sensibilities of middle-class, intelligent French people whose passions are internalized and who structure their world with talk. Rohmer does not lay siege to his characters nor allow them to attack us emotionally. His particular use of the long take allows us to be comfortable with them, aware of the way their reactions and gestures comment on their words and the way their environment supports them or ironically sets them off.

In Claire’s Knee, the male character, Jérôme (Jean-Claude Brialy), is on a vacation before his marriage. He allows his friend Aurora, a novelist—in fact an actual novelist (Aurora Cornù) playing a novelist—to use him as if he were a character in a story, tinker with his passions, see how he reacts to different women. They chat in her room in front of a mural of Don Quixote, blindfolded on a wooden horse. "The heroes of a story are always blindfolded," says Aurora. "Otherwise they wouldn’t do anything. It doesn’t matter, because everyone has a blindfold, or at least blinders." Jérôme is blind, but certainly no picaresque hero, not even a would-be hero like Don Quixote. The callow young woman whose knee attracts him and whom he would save from her equally callow boyfriend is uninterested in his attentions, but he persists in his game and his vacation becomes enriched by a series of false emotions and thoughtless tamperings with the emotions of others. In the end Jérôme succeeds only in blindfolding himself further and sharing with Aurora the illusion of being able to affect another person’s life. He is left as solitary as he was in the beginning. But as in Maud, what we learn about him, and perhaps he about himself, is not shattering. This is not a film about loneliness and the inability to communicate. Quite the contrary. If Rohmer’s characters suffer a gap between what they say and what they are able to do, it is a gap filled not with pain, but with understanding. The closest they get to being Quixotic is to be a little silly and somewhat removed from the realities of others’ feelings; but they are never crippled by what they learn of themselves, or do not learn. Rohmer guides us and his characters through a moment in their lives that is not terribly important to anyone in the long run, yet important enough in his demonstration that cinematic storytelling can be engaging merely through the observation of small gestures and details and the accumulation of good talk.

In the films following the Moral Tales, Rohmer tries different ways to counter melodrama through manipulation of mise-en-scène and adoption of a painterly style. In The Marquise of 0. (1976), a film based on a Heinrich von Kleist story, the carefully composed lines and color of neo-classical painting structure the compositions, giving a context and a distance to the exaggerated gestures and domestic hysterics that inform the narrative."⁴⁶ The mise-en-scène of Perceval (1978), a French-German-Italian television co-production, reaches further back in time to medieval painting and design, eschewing location work for a studio cyclorama and flat, painted sets. Perceval is a celebration of Catholic mythology and ritual, and as such presents itself in ritual form, with singing, direct and indirect address, and animation mixed with live action. It seemed possible that Rohmer’s cinematic engagement with the contemporary world was over until in

1981 he released a contemporary comedy, The Aviator’s Wife. In the Moral Tales Rohmer demonstrated better than any of his colleagues how small, unobtrusive films could be made. He modified conventional narrative structure so that action and intensity are replaced by the observation of subjectivity. Rohmer has proven that the intensity of event and emotion that most filmmakers believe necessary to gain and hold audience attention can easily be modulated to draw attention to detailed thought, to a discourse of the passions, in which passion is placed at the service of the discourse. For Rohmer, what we think about feelings is as important as the feelings themselves. His characters create themselves not by what they do or feel, but by what they say.

Unlike Godard, Rohmer’s influence on other filmmakers is small, and he himself seems unable to extend his insights much further than where they were in the mid-sixties. He is the most conservative of the New Wave filmmakers, yet for all this, his denial of melodrama was crucial to the collective endeavor of the group (if, after 1959, their endeavor can in any way be called collective). It is a denial crucial to the work of most major European filmmakers of the sixties and seventies as well, for no matter what their individual concerns or their particular formal strategies, their central problem—which we saw developing in the theory and practice of the neo-realists—was an analysis of why American film transposed reality into conventional narrative patterns and of the ways the audience was asked to accept the reality of those transpositions. The modernist movement in cinema, in all its various forms, was directed to the redefinition of narrative form and viewer response. The questioning of the phenomenon of melodrama was central to its work.

4

Of all the experiments, the searching for alternative narrative forms, the almost obsessive desire to discover the ways that cinema can communicate and engage the spectator’s mind, the work of Godard has been the most persistent, inquisitive, and influential. His influence can be seen in the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Miklós Jancsó, the sixties films of Bergman, the later films of Buñuel, all of the major Latin American political filmmakers, and the new German filmmakers, Wim Wenders and Fassbinder especially. In America too his influence has been strong, particularly in the films of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. But Godard’s is an influence that extends beyond individuals. The basic structures of commercial narrative film world wide since the mid-sixties—the treatment of locations, use of color, styles of cutting and shot composition—have their foundations in his work. If American cinema had colonized the world through the late fifties, the French, and Godard in particular, started a guerrilla war in the sixties, a war on the colonizer that took on special meaning as the decade wore on and the struggle of the new filmmakers could be seen in very rough parallel to the struggles of the Vietnamese against another form of American colonialism. In the fall of 1972, Godard spoke directly to this point in discussing his and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film-essay on a news photograph of Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, Letter to Jane: "We can deal with the million dollar picture by making a film with two stills. The North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, invented a two-still war against the million dollar picture war of the Hollywood Pentagon."⁴⁷ The political turmoil of the sixties was both catalyst and companion to the aesthetic turmoil in film, and Godard was aware of the parallels more clearly than anyone. The acuteness of his insight makes the contrast between the 1980s and the 1960s all the more ironic. In

1980, Godard was signing production and distribution deals with Francis Ford Coppola, who had in fact made the (thirty) million dollar picture war of the Hollywood Pentagon (it was called Apocalypse Now). After spending the seventies in isolated experiments in political filmmaking and work with video, Godard returned from the front with an inoffensive, acceptably cynical thirty-five-millimeter theatrical film, Sauve qui peut (La Vie), which Coppola liked. These two new and unlikely partners are not going to make revolutionary films. (Since forming this strange partnership, Godard has made a film in France—Passion (1981)—and it is not clear what his association with the American neo-mogul will be.) But though Godard in his middle age may no longer want to carry on the good fight, the legacy he has left is still influencing filmmakers and filmgoers. The struggle he carried forward from 1959 through 1972 produced some of the great works of the modern imagination.

To understand Godard’s accomplishment and influence, we need to retrace some history and look at the ideas of a figure who influenced him and some other major practitioners of modernism. The cinema guerrilla war of the sixties and early seventies was fought on the most difficult of fronts: where aesthetics and politics joined to reevaluate the work of the past, bring it to account, and change the attitudes of and toward cinema that had been all but unshakable since its inception. The theory for the struggle came from the modernist movement, with its literary and painterly roots in the twenties and thirties and its political roots in the work of Bertolt Brecht, who was carrying on struggles in the theater similar to those carried on by the filmmakers who concern us here. Poet, playwright, political and aesthetic theorist, Brecht attempted to change certain fundamental concepts of art that had been part of western culture since Aristotle.

That is an enormous statement, but it was in fact an enormous tradition that Brecht fought against, persistently, persuasively, often ironically, in his plays and his theoretical writings. Central to it was the notion of art as imitation, as mimesis, the idea that the work of art represents the world, in a condensed and abstract way, but recognizably as a reflection. This concept of art as illusory representation of the world is a constant throughout history and it forms the basis of Bazin’s theories of cinema. But it is essentially an ideal, a fantasy. E. H. Gombrich (among others) has demonstrated that the representation of reality in any period (and in any form of imaginative expression) is in fact the representation of the idea of reality current at any given time, using the formal conventions of representation operating at that time.⁴⁸ The persistence of the desire for representation, however, is stronger than the need to acknowledge that reality is always mediated by the codes and conventions of a particular art at a particular time, the digital mode I spoke of earlier. The urge for "realism"—for an apparently unmediated representation of the real world—is found at its most obsessive in popular theater and cinema, and we have seen this obsession operating in the zero-degree style, which embraces the spectator, brings him or her into the spectacle of the work, and presents it in a forward-moving continuity of time with all the conventions of proximity and transition and the exaggeration of motivation and event that create, through constant repetition, an illusion of unmediated substance and the absence of form.

For Brecht, who was a Marxist committed to a materialist understanding of the world and our perception of it, the illusory aspect of the realist tradition was more delusion than illusion and not entertainment but a snare. Rather than dealing with the world, as the tradition claimed it did, it evaded the world. The images that are said to reflect our lives turn out to deflect us from understanding our lives precisely because they concentrate our attention on something else: a reflection rather than an investigation. Middle-class art, of which theater and cinema (and now television) are important components, adds the most complicating element. It is meant to be entertainment, a means of allowing us to remove ourselves for a while from the debilitating, often brutalizing sphere of work and the pressures of day-to-day life. But remove ourselves to what? If theater and film are meant to be realistic, how can they also claim to offer us an escape from our reality? They cannot, and of course do not, do both. Instead of reality they present "reality," a set of conventions in form and content that divert the viewer from a confrontation with his or her world to a sympathy with the lives of "recognizable" characters suffering problems that appear to be possible but are in fact a fantasy of problems and a fantasy of solutions which are not merely improbable, but impossible.

But not irrelevant. The form and content of popular (and serious) "realist" art is profoundly tied to the various cultures of the West and it may not be dismissed. Novel and theater, film and television are inseparable from those cultures, and merely to condemn them is to evade the responsibilities that they themselves evade. The imaginative expression of any culture—high or low, elitist or popular—represents that culture and its ideology. Criticizing the form and content of a culture’s art is implicitly to criticize the culture, just as analysis of that art expavblains the culture’s attitudes. In calling for an alternative form of imaginative expression, the artist-critic is expressing a hope for change throughout the culture. Brecht’s examination of the realist tradition and his theories about its demolition were part of a larger notion of social reorganization. Roland Barthes writes:

Brecht saw the work of art as part of society’s work as a whole. Such a work might reflect the dominant ideology, working from the top down, helping to mold people to the will of those in power, and therefore needing to be unmasked. Or it might work for the needs of the people and reconcile, because it explains and reveals the culture to its members and the members of the culture to each other. The work of art could combine the acts of unmasking and reconciliation by constantly making the spectator aware of what it was saying and how, whose voices were speaking in it, making the spectator privy to its methods, function, and purpose.

A truly popular art might be created, one that did not condescend to its audience or attempt to fool, satiate, or divert them. Brecht had a revolutionary optimism that an audience was there and ready for an expression of its realities:

In the dialectical movement of this statement lies the method of Brecht’s attack against the traditions of art that promote passive reaction instead of active engagement, sympathy instead of anger, assent rather than dissent. That method was to understand the thing in light of its opposite, to deconstruct every element that laid claim to being "realistic," every convention that invited from the spectator that willing suspension of disbelief that is the paradoxical, central premise of the realist tradition. What Brecht demanded was that the disbelief be reconstituted. If drama—or novel, or film—is to be in touch with reality then it must shed any pretense toward itself being a form, a representation, or a reflection of reality and clearly announce itself as a kind of speculum, an instrument to allow us to probe the world. It must probe, not reflect; move forward, not preserve outmoded ideas and relationships; make reality, or catch up with it, not perpetuate worn-out forms that claim to be real. It must be not a way of being, but a way of seeing.

This ought to sound familiar, for it is in fact the kind of thinking that led to the modernism of the early Resnais, of Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. But there is a major difference. Their works do not manifest a need to go any further than themselves. The foregrounding of form in Last Year at Marienbad, the narrative and visual dislocations in Antonioni’s films, can act on their own behalf, promoting in the spectator a desire to investigate the dislocations and intrigues of form. The Brechtian notion of the work as speculum-spectacle-speculation had a different end. By forcing the spectator to examine the structure of a work, alienating him or her from direct contact with its content and from any assumption that content can exist without the intervention of form, Brecht hoped that the work would be able to act as a tool by which the spectator could learn more not only about the workings of art, but about the self in relation to the social and psychological realities that surround and create that self. Rather than an end in itself, a consumer article purchased, enjoyed, and forgotten, the work would be an active arbitrator between the spectator and his or her communal experience; at the same time it would be subject to the spectator rather than the other way around. Instead of reinforcing the dominant ideology (which is the primary role of popular entertainment), the Brechtian work would first challenge it by challenging its presumptions about imaginative expression ("realism," identification with the main character, emotional catharsis or gratification) and then challenge the spectator by asking her or him to think about what is being shown instead of indulging in easily got emotions. The spectator might then use the work as a means for understanding his or her role in society and history.

With this, Brecht obviates the romantic urge of art, which since the late eighteenth century has demanded on the part of creator and observer an excess of emotion at the expense of reason. "We murder to dissect," Wordsworth cried, announcing an anti-intellectualism in art, a domination of feeling over analysis, that has tended to remove art from social-political responsibility. Brecht would return the responsibility by making the work deny itself as an emotional way station, refuge from the turmoil of the everyday, and instead turn itself into an instrument to clarify history and return the spectator to history.

Brecht set out the basic methodology in a little dialectical table that he included in his essay "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre," "epic" being his term for the new work that would open the world to the viewer’s active participation. On the left are the conventional elements of theater (and film), on the right Brecht’s negation of and response to them:⁵¹

The precise method of achieving these "shifts of accent, as Brecht modestly calls them, involves breaking emotional continuity and realist representation throughout any given work. He would, for example, employ a non-realist acting style. "In order to produce A[lienation]effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learnt of getting the audience to identify itself with the characters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself."⁵² Brecht (developing techniques from the radical Berlin theater of Erwin Piscator) would break dramatic continuity by having the character address the audience, go into a song, step out of the role and out of the narrative movement. The mise-en-scène of the work would be disruptive; no illusion of real space would be allowed. In theatrical presentation, the notion of the privileged view through an absent fourth wall would be disallowed, and all manner of verbal, graphic, and cinematic intrusions into the stage space would be called upon to identify it as a place where specific theatrical activity was going on. This is not the place to examine how Brecht specifically worked out his theories in his own productions. Nor can a great deal be said about his own direct experience with film, which was not very happy. He was never completely comfortable or successful with film as a narrative form, and could not come to terms with the commercial nature of the medium. He sued the production company of G. W. Pabst’s version of The Threepenny Opera (1931) for changes made in his play, and lost (writing, as a result, a long economic and political analysis of the film business). The one film in which he did have a direct hand, Kuhle Wampe (1932, directed by Slatan Dudow), was cut by the German censors. Given the fact that it was the first and last Communist film made before the Nazis took power, it is remarkable that it survived at all. The film employs, sporadically, some Brechtian techniques, and an early sequence foreshadows some neorealist approaches: a montage of bicyclists desperately seeking work bears comparison to the ride to work of the cyclists in Bicycle Thieves.⁵³ In Hollywood, the writing Brecht did for Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die ( 1943) was greatly altered.

Though Brecht’s own success in film was limited, his posthumous influence on its later development was enormous, greater than it was on the theater, and for a number of reasons. In those rare instances when the filmmaker has independence and control, film is the best form in which to make aesthetic principles clear and sure. The filmmaker does not have to worry about other productions of the work and can achieve through images and dialogue a clear and permanent presentation of methods and ideas. More important, film offers the perfect arena for the testing of Brechtian ideas. Through its short history, film has built up conventions of realism more profound and harder to crack than those of theater, and when they are broken, the effect is even more extraordinary than it is on the stage. When in 1962 Godard introduced a version of Brechtian devices, the effect, though not unprepared for (there had already been Last Year at Marienbad, and the New Wave filmmakers were busy experimenting with traditional narrative) was thrilling and conclusive. Marienbad might have been a sport, and certainly was in part a joke. But Godard’s fourth full-length film, My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie) was neither sport nor joke; it announced more clearly than had Breathless, or any of the early works of the New Wave, a departure from traditional modes of narrative filmmaking and film viewing. More gently and firmly than Marienbad, it projected the fact that film was a form that could investigate and analyze its function as a language that addressed people in their lives.

My Life to Live is a "woman’s picture"; its tradition is the thirties and forties MGM and Warner Brothers genre of the woman misused and abandoned by her man, the woman too free with her sexuality, too ready to look for happiness outside normal domestic circumstances, who must suffer for those desires and perhaps even die. The film is an odd combination of Camille and Marked Woman, or rather a reflection upon such films and the way we read them. Nana (Anna Karina) is one of many Godard women who turn to prostitution to live, who allow themselves to be an object, a commodity, in order to discover, economically and emotionally, their own subjectivity. Its structure turns the film into an object as well—though not a commodity—something to be contemplated and understood before it can be felt. As if he had Brecht’s table of oppositions before him, Godard arranges an orderly deconstruction of classical narrative principles and replaces them with the structures of inquiry. There is no continuous plot development, but rather twelve episodes, each numbered and introduced with a title. There is no linear development of character or action; we see only fragments, "each scene for itself." And rather than requesting our involvement in emotional turmoil, the film turns us into observers and makes us face something, many things, the most important of which is the way we look at the film and understand its meaning. Brecht writes,

In the first shot of the first episode, Godard denies us what every other film has always promised and delivered: the face. While low-lit, almost silhouette closeups of Nana begin the film, in the first narrative sequence we watch two characters, Nana and Paul, sitting and talking at a bar. Their backs are to the camera. Each is presented alone in alternating shots, and each shot is played out without camera movement and with only a slight movement of their heads. Their faces are present, but reflected in the mirror in front of them, and because of that literally disembodied. A double screen is created: the one on which the image is projected and the mirror in that image on which is projected the faces that we should be seeing on the primary screen. If we did see them there, if Godard had begun his film with a conventional two-shot and then proceeded to intercut the two faces singly, we would have no perception of a screen at all. Our own look would have been untroubled. But because he doubles the image, giving us in the secondary screen (the mirror) what he denies in the primary, we are disrupted and disengaged. The image is made object and the viewer made to confront it as such. Later in the film, in another conversation, in another café, Nana sits with her pimp. When he first joins her, the camera picks them up in profile and then arcs around so we see them face each other, the back of the man’s head covering the front of Nana’s. Behind them is a window looking out at the traffic below. Only the traffic is not moving. It takes a moment or two to realize that it is an enormous photograph of the street. Faces that we should see, but once again are not permitted to see; a street that is not a street, but a frozen process shot (films, especially American films, had always used a rear-screen projection of the outside world placed behind the characters when the concentration was meant to be on the characters with the world acting only as a backdrop). But the camera begins to move again, awkwardly tracking around the two characters as if looking for the best way to look at them. There is a cut to a profile of the man and, as the conversation continues, the camera pans back and forth, from one profile to the other. The film is filled with such tryings-out of points of view, of distance and proximity. Godard searches throughout for alternative ways of seeing, of directing our gaze without falling into standard patterns of cutting or creating simple spatial relationships. He discovers new ways of telling a story.

Earlier in the film there is another investigation of the problem of the face. Nana goes to the movies to see Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, and she cries. Dreyer’s great, passionate closeups of a suffering woman reach Nana’s heart and we see her on the screen, and Dreyer’s Joan on the screen within the screen, both in closeup, in tears. "The simplest close-up is also the most moving," Godard had written. But he is now ready to try to understand what this ease of emotional reaction means. His fictional character understands her sadness only through the cinematic image of another fictional character’s sadness, and there is something wrong about that. An image is just an image. Yet with these images we are led to experience stronger emotions than we ordinarily experience in our day-to-day lives. Godard is seeking a way to short the emotional circuitry, the analogue circuitry that conveys the notion that films are like life, even better than life, and replace it with another structure that will assure us that films are only like films. They will discuss life and investigate it, but not reproduce it or allow us to think they are a substitute for it. That is why he keeps tinkering with something as apparently simple as the closeup, precisely because it seems to be a simple element of the language that allows us access to the emotions of the fictional characters. Once looked at objectively, its simplicity vanishes and it emerges as a major element of complexity and confusion.

But not the only one. In My Life to Live Godard begins another process of breaking down. He begins analyzing the modes of discourse used by film—that is, the way the narrative is told, by whom and to whom. The traditional film assumes the perspective of an omniscient point of view, a neutral telling in which all the elements—character, mise-en-scéne, music, narrative construction, and viewer position are integrated, assured, and controlled. We have already established that this narrative is not neutral, that the integration and control are carefully worked out and drilled to assurance by repetition, that our secure place in the narrative is based only on our acceptance of the conventional forms and their ability to make us forget the formative means. Godard, like Brecht, wishes to separate out the homogeneous discourse into its component parts and allow us to hear the various voices that are speaking the film to us. For example My Life to Live presents itself as simultaneously a fiction about a prostitute and a documentary about prostitution.

The discourse of fiction and the discourse of documentary have always been allowed a convenient separation in the history of film. Lumière and Mé1iès are posited as the progenitors of two separate modes of cinematic expression, the one photographing things existing in the world, the other creating fantasies in the studio. But film always documents something. As long as a camera is used to record an image, taking a picture of something that preexists the photographing of it ("pro-filmic reality" is the term Christian Metz uses),⁵⁵ an act of documentation has occurred. This is not merely playing games with words. As I pointed out earlier, the neo-realists, in taking their cameras out of doors and into the lives of working-class characters, were documenting people and events, even though they were making fictions. Godard is very much aware of this element of neo-realism and all his films play with the dialectic of fiction and documentary, making the viewer aware of how each mode borrows from the other. ". . . I saw a film at the Cinémathèque, a film on Lumiére . . . ... says Guillaume, the Jean-Pierre Léaud character in La Chinoise (1967):

Particularly Godard’s. The last sequences of the film introduce material that breaks open whatever narrative seams have been left intact. Nana sits (again) in a café, where she has a conversation with a philosopher. Not an actor playing a philosopher, but Brice Parain, a French linguist. They talk about words and meaning and the betrayal of them, about thinking and action, about how, to understand life, one must go through the death of not talking, about concerns seemingly beyond this story of a prostitute (and beyond the character of Nana), yet central to Godard and everything he does. The obsession with language-with the way things are said, the proper relationship between things and words and images, the appropriateness of any kind of discourse—inhabits all his work. If Parain’s discourse breaks the narrative of My Life to Live, it advances the discourse that works its way throughout Godard’s films, the discussion of why and how words and images mean, where that meaning lies, who controls it, and how it is perceived.

Part of the discourse involves the meaning of the filmmaking act itself. After the sequence with the philosopher, Nana’s lover reads to her from Poe’s story "The Oval Portrait," about an artist who sucks the spirit from his wife by painting her. The lover reads, but it is Godard’s voice dubbed over him pronouncing the words (Baudelaire’s words, of course, Poe’s French translator). As he reads, Godard makes cinematic portraits of Nana—Anna (who was, at the time, Godard’s wife; at one point his voice says, "It’s our story: a painter who does a portrait of his wife"). Just before and right after the reading, the film goes silent: Nana and her lover talk to each other, but we only see their words in subtitles. Spoken language runs out for the moment and only the visual remains. Spoken dialogue is momentarily given up, the image dominates. The film attempts to regress to an "innocent" time when the image was silent (the characters themselves are trying to regress into an "innocent" love, to separate themselves from Nana’s world). Perhaps Godard is experimenting with Brice Parain’s idea of understanding life by going through the death of not talking (understanding the image by silencing its verbal component). Perhaps he is merely withdrawing another conventional element of film to test the viewer’s reaction. Certainly he is reflecting upon Poe’s story: the artist uses up his material, saps its life, saps spoken language, in this instance. He reflects on the story in other ways as well. As a commodity Nana is used and not loved; she falls to the domination of her pimp. Anna, the actress, has been used by her director, who forces her to give up her personality and become an object, the way a prostitute must.⁵⁷ For the moment it becomes impossible for language to express the complexity of all this. The characters talk again, but the ending—at this point in Godard’s career—is the impasse of silence and death. Nana is shot by her pimp. It is a conventional end, or a parody of conventional endings, for Nana dies just when she decides to give up prostitution and live with her true love. Godard allows the climax that takes care of the character and her story and our emotions, but he still leaves all the other discourses intact. For while the story may end, the process of storytelling goes on, not only in this film whenever it is seen, but in the subsequent films Godard makes. As Brecht suggests, Godard’s eyes are on the course rather than the finish. His voice is persistent and his look continues to gather the fragments of the world.

My Life to Live is not Godard’s most complex film. In each succeeding work more levels of discourse are added, more connections made among the apparently disjointed images of the world. The social-political connections of these images are examined more and more closely as the Marxist discourse, Brecht’s substrate, forms as the base of Godard’s own thinking and seeing. The concern of his films is always the same, the attempt to make sense of the human figure in the environment of contemporary history and culture. Following Brecht, he attempts to see the ways that figure is alterable; his characters and his viewers are asked to be part of a process of breaking down passivity and alienation. By alienating the viewer from a simple emotional reaction and from unquestioned involvement in a film’s story, Godardian cinema integrates the viewer in an active engagement with the meaning-making process. In so doing it can create alterations in the way we see and understand. It can teach. If we learn that the stories we see on the screen are not simple reflections of reality—complete, closed, satisfying—but meditations on reality, mediations of reality, even intrusions upon reality, then we may come to understand that reality is not an absolute, but something malleable and, in the end, created. Alterable.

With the exception of a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies when he turned to a politically rigorous, agit-prop style (the "Dziga Vertov" films, which I will look at later), Godard’s work is enormously accessible. He is able to fuse wit and irony, intellect and passion into narratives any one of which covers a large area of subjective, social, political, and cultural experience and has a vitality that invites any viewer willing to engage and meet its demands. The same cannot be said about the work of a filmmaking team who follow in the Godardian-Brechtian mode. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are French, but have done their work in Germany and Italy, work so demanding, films so unwilling to yield anything to the viewer’s comfort and solace that they have remained on the radical end of the modernist movement, noted by many but seen by few.

Viewing a film by Straub and Huillet, be it Not Reconciled (1965), Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Othon (1970), History Lessons (1972), or even their spectacular (for them) version of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron (1975), is essentially an act of watching oneself watch a film. More than other modernist filmmakers, they call acute attention to the process that occurs between the viewer and the screen, rather than the events that are going on within the images on the screen. Theirs is the work of paring down, of removing every unessential link, transition, reference point, continuity cut, internal explanation; ours is the work of putting all of these back, of demanding of ourselves an attention so committed, a desire for engagement and understanding so strong that we are willing to take the little they give us as a starting point from which to elaborate a film.

Not Reconciled is "based" on Heinrich Böll’s novel Billiards at Half Past Nine, about the effects of Nazism on a family and a number of individuals whose lives intertwine before, during, and after the war. The film eschews all novelistic and cinematic conventions of chronology, character identification, character motivation, and historical explanation; the settings, while concrete, are highly allusive and disconnected. The filmmakers provide us with no locus and assume we will either be familiar with the novel or be willing to work through the film(which is only fifty minutes long) a number of times until the characters’ faces become familiar to us and the relations between them begin to emerge.

In Last Year at Marienbad, the narrative—more accurately, the reverie about the making of narratives—is complete within itself at the moment we realize that its only external referents are the structures of cinema and the ways people have told stories with it. But Not Reconciled has a referent; it is about history and the inability to overcome it or fully understand it. And its success lies just here, in creating a narrative form that first forces the viewer to understand how intractable history is, how difficult it is to make sense of it, and second requests that the viewer try to make sense of it in a way the characters themselves cannot; the way, perhaps, Germany and the West willfully cannot make sense of it. The fragments of images that make up this film, the skewed, off-centered compositions, the bland non-acting of the non-professional cast who talk rather than perform their lines (an epigraph from Brecht at the beginning of the film says that actors must demonstrate that they do not make up lines but only quote them) are all not reconciled, and it is finally less important to comprehend entirely what goes on within the film than it is to understand how the film is going on. Its unreconciled pieces are analogous to the pieces of historical memory which, if put together in the ways of conventional filmic storytelling, would hide reality under melodrama (think, for example, of the television film Holocaust). The refusal to put them together avoids the threat of an emotional detour and instead makes us aware of the difficulties of memory (as do most of Resnais’s films) and our inability to reconcile ourselves to a past that is, relatively, only a few years old. If, no matter how often we view Not Reconciled, we cannot separate its strands, cannot clearly identify the various characters, their relationships, the events alluded to, partly acted out, never fully begun or concluded, then we still have been successful with the film-at least as successful as Straub and Huillet in reflecting upon Nazism as a series of disconnected acts committed by banal people who could make no clear connection between themselves and those acts.

But finally the film errs in so completely refusing analysis, in leaving all judgment to the viewer and placing upon him or her the entire burden of continuity and comprehension. As a response to melodrama, it is a lesson of restraint, an example of film as blueprint, with the spectator given the task of building the structure. But as a work that might create in us the desire to investigate, to inquire further into a way of looking at history and its participants, it fails. Its radically elliptical structure risks provoking anger as much as the wish to make it yield meaning; it threatens merely to alienate rather than using alienation as a device to permit an understanding of its form.

Understanding the films of Straub and Huillet demands an acutely dialectical perception. The viewer has to work as much, perhaps more, from what is not given by the film as from what is. The first act in the confrontation (and it is confrontation, not observation, that the films require) is to discover the idea out of which the images emerge, or upon which the film’s structure is built. From the idea, the viewer must return to the images and work out the fit. It is film viewing as struggle. Even their most accessible work, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, requires great patience, as well as knowledge of the conventional film biography of an artist, a wish to deny the validity of that convention, and a willingness to accept a visual and narrative structure as rigorous as that of Bach’s music. Straub and Huillet are uninterested in creating any passion out of Bach’s life and work, at least not the passion of the struggling artist we are used to seeing in film biographies. The only biographical problem they are curious about is financial, and the voice-over narration given us by Anna Magdalena (who wrote no chronicle) is concerned mainly with the various positions Bach held, the financial arrangements made, the occasional intrigues with various employers, and the family’s perpetual concern about money. Conventional action and emotional expression are held to a minimum. In a moment of high drama, Bach is physically removed from his place of work in the middle of a rehearsal. He is led out and down a staircase. But lest we become too involved in this excess of movement, the camera holds on the empty staircase for a very long time, forcing us to consider the events, ‘withdraw from them, recompose ourselves, reorient ourselves back to the image and away from the extra-musical events that heretofore were restricted mostly to the voice-over commentary. For the body of the film is the music, performed by actual players, recorded directly, in ornate period locations. But we are not permitted to become comfortable with the "authenticity" of these locations. Bach gives an evening concert out of doors. He stands at a harpsichord, framed to the right of the screen. To the left is a burning torch. This part of the composition is photographed almost, but not quite, at eye level. Behind is a rear-screen projection of a building which is shot at a tilt greater than that of the foreground figure. The result is a composition of disorienting artificiality that finally emphasizes not the contrasting realism of the other shots, but their own relative artificiality. (This technique of making obvious the rear-screen projection of a building or landscape has been since used to effect by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, by Michael Verhoeven in The Nasty Girl (1990), and by Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers (1994) and Nixon (1995).

Straub and Huillet are obsessively concerned that the viewer not be comfortable with what is being shown. Most of the shots in the film are extremely long. The camera is set at a diagonal to the figures and often, in the course of the shot, will track, briefly, along that diagonal. The performers are rarely in the foreground. Quite the contrary. Soloists often have their backs turned to the camera, or are in the rear or off to one side of the composition. The result is to make the viewer search the image and integrate it with the music emanating from it. The shots are so long that we begin to perform with them a kind of visual and aural counterpoint. The visual composition works both with and against the composition of the music, and every detail, every architectural nuance, every grouping of the musicians contributes to a visual-musical "movement." Richard Roud describes it:

These performance—compositions are punctuated by shots of an engraved title page of a piece of music, or a score sheet, on one occasion by a shot of the sun over the ocean, on another by a tree and a cloudy sky. We occasionally see Anna Magdalena at home, ill in bed in one instance, sometimes with children, and at the end there is a shot of Bach by himself looking out a window, as Anna Magdalena tells us of his failing health, blindness, regaining of eyesight, and death. We see no death. We do not even see him age.

The work of Straub and Huillet is a cinema of withholding. It is not "minimalist," a term often applied to them. That implies abstraction. In fact their images are very concrete, full of material. In their film of Corneille’s play Othon (titled by them Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times, or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Permit Herself to Choose in her Turn), characters go about in togas, reciting Corneille’s alexandrines in an impossible sing-song, while, through the first part of the film, we see and hear the traffic of modern Rome move in the distance. The images are packed with the contradictions of the world, insisting we read them as part of history and through the material of our lives. They insist so much that they become annoying in their demands. Othon is one of the most irritating films ever made. It does not permit us to enjoy Corneille’s poetry, the complexities of the court intrigue presented by the poetry, the pleasures of period re-creation. Instead it demands an accounting for all of these, an accounting so defiantly on Straub and Huillet’s own terms that, were it not for the calmness, indeed the recessiveness, of this film and the others, we would feel bullied. Certainly we feel put upon, for they ask of us more than do other filmmakers and they make their demands with the least promise of returns. There is no humor, no clear and clever didacticism, certainly no conventional passion (except that contained in the music that is part of Chronicle and Moses and Aaron, though Bach and the late Schoenberg are not composers noted for overt passion).

Somewhere between spectacle and aphorism, withholding at all times the fullness of the former and the incisiveness of the latter, treating the viewer with a respect that appears to be arrogance, the films of Straub and Huillet endanger the complex relationship between viewer and film. But here is, in fact, where their importance lies. By endangering that relationship they force the viewer to question it, and that questioning satisfies the first part of the Brechtian endeavor—to make the relationship between work and spectator a primary area of concern. Straub and Huillet may not be able to go beyond the first part; their work does not exhibit Godard’s vital, inquisitive embrace of and ironic quest through the images and myths of contemporary culture. Their films are much more subdued and limited, but they are equally concerned with the how and why of cinematic seeing.

The Brechtian mode of the modernist movement, especially as it was worked out by Godard in the course of his sixties films culminating in Tout va bien, where romance, politics, the factory, unions, the media, and feminism are mixed in a counterpoint of comedy, drama, and didacticism—had a wide-ranging influence, particularly (and not surprisingly) among those filmmakers searching for means of political expression in their work. I will be returning to that influence a number of times in the course of examining the films of Fassbinder and, especially, the revolutionary filmmakers in Latin America. Before that, however, I want to look briefly at the influence of the New Wave on some other figures, in particular two filmmakers who began their work well before Godard and his colleagues appeared, but picked up their influence in the course of the decade. While neither is within the Brechtian tradition, they both practiced, even before their contact with the New Wave, modes of cinematic inquiry that demanded responses from an audience different from those required by conventional cinema. After contact with the New Wave these demands took on a new form.

In 1966, Buñuel made Belle de jour, his second film in color (the first was his hilarious version of Robinson Crusoe in 1952). Los Olvidados had marked Buñuel’s return to commercial filmmaking and a revision of his style and approach based on the influence of neo-realism; Belle de jour marks another revision. Its subject—a moral investigation into the cultural psychosis of the middle class—was hardly new for him, but its style and approach was. The subjects of repression are no longer the various religious idiots-savants or the Mexican or Spanish bourgeoisie that had populated most of his films in the fifties and early sixties. No matter what the historical period of these films, they always appear to be somehow out of time; they create a closed world of perversity and obsession. In Belle de jour Buñuel announced his modernity. The main character is a contemporary young Parisienne (Catherine Deneuve), a doctor’s wife, who takes up prostitution to relieve her sexual frustration and repression.

The images (made by Resnais’s cinematographer, Sacha Vierny) have a clarity strongly influenced by the photographic style that Raoul Coutard developed with and for Godard. The film’s narrative structure and cutting style, an easy, unexplained slipping into different modes of consciousness, was influenced by the New Wave experiments in shifting narrative modalities. As we saw, Buñuel was not a newcomer to these modes; indeed the crazed structure of Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or had helped prepare the young French filmmakers for their own experiments, and Buñuel’s films of the fifties and early sixties had always intermingled dream and fantasy, distortion and disruption into narratives that never quite settled down into an easily acceptable "realistic" mode. Thus Buñuel did not copy Godard or Chabrol; he recognized that their methods of inquiry offered him ways of getting to the contemporary world he had not thought of before. He was so pleased with what they had to offer that he acknowledged it openly. In Belle de jour he introduces a gangster, a tough with steel caps on his teeth, dressed in a leather coat (played by one of the fine contemporary European toughs, Pierre Clementi, who might have come from Breathless, Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, or from a film of Jean-Pierre Melville—one of the godfathers of the New Wave to whom Godard gave a guest role in Breathless). The gangster first appears on a Paris street where someone is selling the New York Herald Tribune like Michel Poiccard’s girlfriend in Breathless; and when he is finally shot down, Buñuel films the sequence as a homage to Poiccard’s death.⁵⁹ (Godard returned the great compliment by entitling a section of Weekend "The Exterminating Angel" after Buñuel’s 1962 film about a group of Mexican hauts bourgeois who find themselves unable to leave a dinner party and slowly decay to a primitive, deranged state.) The references to Breathless in Buñuel’s film are more than a homage by an old filmmaker to a younger one. They are a sign of rejuvenation, an indication that the old man who taught so much could still learn. The New Wave offered Buñuel a way of altering his mise-en-scène and his editing rhythms, of introducing a contemporaneousness, observing the perversities of his characters in a modern French bourgeois environment, somewhat after the manner of Chabrol and the Godard of A Married Woman, Pierrot le fou, and Weekend.

Belle de jour not only shows the ability of an established filmmaker to modify his style, to be both teacher and student; it validates Godard’s statement that the work of the young French filmmakers was a reinvention of cinema, a reexamination of its form so thorough that any intelligent director would have to take notice of what was happening. European film in the sixties became a great network of cross-references and influences—something, in fact, like a Buñuel narrative in which everyone’s cinematic dreams keep interfering with everyone else’s. Each filmmaker’s work seemed to give aesthetic support to the others’ and a communal energy developed. Buñuel was not the only member of an older guard who partook of this energy. Robert Bresson, whose filmmaking career began in the thirties, is among the most uncompromising of directors. He is not locatable in any one tradition, though the demands he puts on his audience can be seen in the modernist context.

Bresson is interested not so much in making the audience aware of the formal patterns in his work as in withdrawing as much as possible from the audience (a methodology that greatly influenced Straub and Huillet).⁶⁰ He not only denies melodrama, he attempts to deny all emotional contact between viewer and character. His players exhibit no facial expression (save perhaps a small, brief smile at a moment of perverse or ironic triumph); they are the blank slate upon which the viewer may write or not, develop emotions for the character, or simply view that character as part of a pattern, moving through—or, more accurately, being moved through—a network of events. Working in opposition to Bazin’s notions of the long take and the open frame which give the viewer room to look and make connections between character and environment, Bresson frames closely and edits sharply. His shots are mostly short and highly analytical, directing and redirecting our gaze to parts of his characters’ anatomy or sections of their environment: a hand or foot, the wall of a room, the top of a staircase, objects and gestures that cohere spatially because they are clearly related to each other, yet at the same time are disconnected and refused wholeness by Bresson’s fragmenting of them. The result is a recessiveness of mise-en-scène and an elliptical quality that have the effect of intensifying each image and forcing the viewer to complete the space and the narrative. Every Bresson film is built upon a continuous series of withdrawals and absences in which character and surroundings contribute spasmodically to an account of failure and destruction and (at least until the films of the late sixties) redemption.

In the sixties, Bresson’s images take on an even greater substance and immediacy than they previously had, while at the same time removing the grace his characters usually enjoyed. As with Buñuel, Bresson’s contact with sixties cinema brought him closer to the contemporary world; but in his case, the contact turned his insights darker. In earlier films like A Man Escaped (1956), about a prisoner of war who silently, meticulously plans and executes an escape from a Nazi jail, and Pickpocket (1959), which documents, through the disconnected movements of hands and arms in train stations, streets, and barren rooms, the career of a small-time Parisian thief, the world of the characters is out of time. The individuals and places are dreary, isolated, expressionless, offering no information about themselves except through their dreariness. The characters are saved by love, or by the grace of God, or perhaps by our own understanding of their sufferings. In his observation, his disengagement, Bresson is able to discover in his characters a plenitude, the grace of salvation not so much expressed in the films as offered through that disengagement and the character’s persistence, teased from the narrative in spite of its sparseness, or because of it.

In the sixties, Bresson’s slivered perceptions became much grimmer, while the mise-en-scène of his films became brighter and richer. After two films (Au hazard, Balthazar, 1966, and Mouchette, 1967) set in rural France, in which the characters are young women who fall victim to despair and a spiritual claustrophobia so extreme it destroys them, Bresson began working in color and, with the exception of Lancelot du lac (1974), setting his films in contemporary Paris.

In Une Femme douce (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) his characters are young and urban. The streets and rooms they inhabit have a brightness and modernity not apparent in the earlier work. But while the production design changes, the basic approach does not. The fragmentation of action into its smallest parts continues and, if anything, is exaggerated, serving to break down the sense of wholeness and movement that the New Wave directors sought. Where Godard and Truffaut embraced their urban environment in the early films, comfortably situating their characters in it, Bresson takes the streets and bridges, the rooms and traffic of the city and makes them the image of his characters’ despair. The effect is not the same one Antonioni achieves by enveloping his characters in large, oppressive, or mysterious objects. Bresson has no expressionist tendencies (and the montage at the end of L’Eclisse is an overstatement in comparison to Bresson’s methods). Rather, by accentuating parts of the figure and the surroundings, by rarely allowing the viewer to see things whole, he creates a subdued montage of repressed characters and disconnected personalities. The sounds of the city become overwhelming. Traffic noise predominates and imposes a kind of external continuity on an otherwise fragmented world. Everything else in the two films either reflects or objectifies an unyielding immobility and insularity. Une Femme douce begins with the suicide of the central character. More accurately, it offers partial glimpses of a suicide: a table falling over on a balcony; the sound of a screeching car below; a shot of a white scarf falling from the window; feet gathering around a body. The film pretends to piece together, in flashbacks, the life that led to this act. What is exposed is an old story of a husband who is possessive and jealous, a wife who is restless and desirous of more than she has.

But the power of the film lies in what is not exposed, in the silent exchanges of looks and the unchanging expressions of faces, movements in a movie theater or at a performance of Hamlet. The jealous husband stalks his wife; he drives her to illness. And all we learn about this couple is that obstructed passion fragments the soul, and that we, as observers of this fragmentation, can only see the pieces from the outside. Personality is never revealed. In this film, and in Four Nights of a Dreamer, the lively urban milieu mocks the hopeless breakdown of the characters, who are neither comforted by it (as they are in Truffaut’s work) or molded by it (as in Godard’s). City and character defy each other and both break down into pieces. Bresson’s characters are pathetic and moving. The gentle creature of Une Femme douce is unable to articulate her stifled emotions, and the young artist of Four Nights of a Dreamer walks around the city with a tape recorder on which his own voice repeats the name of his love over and over. They cannot unburden themselves or us, and the result of our contact with them is an impasse, but an impasse that is charged with feeling and a desire to understand .⁶¹

"Accustom the public," Bresson wrote, "to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it."⁶² Like other modernists, Bresson demands that the audience work at the film. Like the filmmakers of the New Wave, who are something of his children as he in turn is something of their follower, he perceives cinema as the object of desire. This object is more obscure for Bresson than for the younger French filmmakers, and much more hermetically sealed. Like many a modernist, Bresson is a romantic who defies his romanticism by paring away all excess, breaking up the core of yearning in the work, making the viewer search out its parts.( This defiance goes even deeper when we consider the literary sources of the films. Both Une Femme douce and Four Nights of a Dreamer, as well as the earlier Pickpocket, which is a rough analogue to Crime and Punishment, are based on stories by Dostoievski. Bresson removes all the eloquence and embellishment, though not the irony, from Dostoievski’s talkative and self-analyzing characters.) A filmmaker like Godard will engage his characters, audience, and his own self at every level and moment of this search, actively seeking with them a place where some connections might be made. Bresson absents himself from the work and leaves in his place a broken discourse made up of glances, expressionless faces, and rooms, all finally bespeaking a terrible sadness and incapacity.

This incapacity and sadness is a major theme of the modernist endeavor. The struggle with despair in life and in art is continual and unavoidable in cultures where individualism is promoted as an essential personal, social, and economic quality but then denied because the social and economic structures will not allow the individual to function with the freedom that is supposed to belong to her or him. Contemporary middle-class art responds to this ideological dilemma by depicting the sufferings of the individual whose expression of self is thwarted. Ingmar Bergman’s films stand almost as archetypes of the expression of the frenzied and tormented self, speaking its despair to an empty world, hoping, after it has torn itself apart, that love will heal it again. Brecht and his followers responded to the theme of self diminishment by asking for an examination of the causes rather than the expression of the despair and by disallowing the spectator’s taking part in it, for that would only communicate it like a disease rather than examine it for a possible cure. Bresson caught the despair when he moved away from the Christian grace that provided something of a cure in his pre-sixties films. Rather than seek out other curative forms, he sought to place the despair at a greater distance, to empty its expression of all but the most essential parts. He makes his cinematic form echo quietly the fragmentation and despair of the soul.

Despair and disconnection-the alienated personality—is at the center of so much twentieth—century art that the subject would quickly lose interest through repetition were it not for the many forms of expression it is given. The vitality of form and the excitement of discovering life through cinema saved most of the New Wave filmmakers and many of their followers from yielding to it as subject, the way Antonioni and Bresson do. Two post-New Wave British filmmakers, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell, attack the subject with sometimes interesting results. Roeg works with alienated subjects quite literally, with strangers in strange lands; Russell takes despair and fills it to overflowing, purging it by choking the audience with its excess.

Like Resnais, Roeg is fascinated by the cinematic possibilities of manipulating time, not so much fracturing its continuum but playing with his characters’ perceptions of it against the spectators’. To achieve this he uses the intrinsic formal textures of his medium: color, movement, shape, and sound-to build montages in which space is put at the service of time and time at the service of the mysteries of subjective perception and the coincidences of association. The science fiction genre offers the best room for such speculation, and both Roeg and Resnais have tried their hand at it. In Je t’aime, ie t’aime (1968) Resnais uses the hoary old convention of the time machine to allow his subject to suffer a kaleidoscope of jarring memories, snatches of images of lost love and bad decisions built into an agony of discontinuity. In The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Roeg does something more interesting. He begins with the equally hoary convention of a visitor from space and then alters it, creating a narrative from the visitor’s perspective, so that the events of the film are seen two ways at once: from the point of view of the naïf, the man who fell to earth, who can barely discriminate "reality" from the television images of it and cannot separate the nostalgia for his lost home from the betrayals he suffers in his new one; and from our own point of view, in which we see what is happening, attempt to supply the continuity the visitor cannot, and end up as frustrated and lost as he. By the end of the film, when everyone has aged but the visitor, trapped in his own timelessness, the audience comes to share his perspective and even go beyond it, so alienated from a comprehension of the film’s obdurate chronology that we become aliens, wandering outside the fiction while the visitor is imprisoned within it.

Roeg was especially adept at making this kind of twice-told tale in which two perceptions of events—from within the film and from the outside—conflict and deform one another. Don’t Look Now (1973), is, on the level of plot, a not too interesting story of the occult, of a man who is given presentiments of the future and is lured to a deadly confrontation with a homicidal dwarf in Venice, whom he takes to be the incarnation of his drowned daughter. On the level of perception, however, the film is what it is about—seeing. Colors and shapes, places and figures, keep appearing and reappearing. Space and its possible configurations become as important as time, and the configurations of both give the film a rhythm of the seen and possibly seen, of images associated on the level of form only, their content based on little more than the fact of their being seen. The main character is an architect who has written a book called Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space, and it is just this fragile geometry that Roeg explores. Although he blunts his findings by resolving them with a bloody and silly ending, the structure he sets up is larger than the resolution and indicates how well film can play with a discoordination of its images, replacing an inevitable continuity with an ineffable reverie about images and the possible ways of seeing and interpreting them.

Roeg belongs at a peculiar intersection of contemporary filmmaking. Too commercially oriented and too politically evasive to fit well with modernism or the Brechtian tradition, his films are created to be money—making entertainments, which is no condemnation, given the fact that within this context he is willing and able to position his audience into a perceptually active role, counteracting the simple contours of melodrama with more complex functions, allowing the audience to piece together attenuated bits of information, probing the relationships between them. It is unclear where he is going with these inquiries. His most recent film (as of this writing), Bad Timing (1980), is a nasty bit of business about sexual degradation in which the formal excitement of his previous work is reduced to its most banal components. The deracinated character, searching for self and for feelings, is still present, but now reduced to a moral squalor that is unenlightening and uninteresting. The respect he once showed for his audience and their ability to be engaged by his film’s formal intricacies has vanished. Roeg, like too many other adventurous filmmakers, may have fallen victim to the economic pressures of the business, reducing his imagination to gain distribution. Or he may, in Bad Timing, merely have run out of imagination.

The work of Ken Russell offers a different response to the subject of the despairing, alienated individual and the problem of audience engagement and melodramatic continuity. His work is based more in the dramatic theory of Antonin Artaud than in that of Brecht. Rather than stand back and analyze events, Russell would overwhelm the spectator with them, present melodramatic gesture so enormous that it goes beyond parody to a point of self-recognition. Near the end of The Music Lovers (1971), Russell’s biography of Tchaikovsky, the composer contemplates the title of his last symphony. He will call it "Tragic," as that best defines his life. No, no, says his brother Modeste, "that’s too pompous." Call it the "Pathetic," he suggests, that’s a much better description of your life. With this kind of deflation effected by one character upon the other, sometimes verbally, but most often in the images and their juxtaposition, Russell attempts to join sympathy with the ridiculous, understanding of suffering with the stupidity of suffering brought on by false perceptions and miscalculation. Deflation occurs through plenitude rather than scarcity: shots are filled with violent action and dynamically edited so that they extend the action or ironically comment upon it. Russell attempts to deal with romantic mythologies by undercutting them with their own absurd excesses: for example, Tchaikovsky lies in a stupor while his passionate patron, Madam von Meek, moves about the room licking the fruit her genius composer has eaten, while the strains of his Romeo and Juliet play on the soundtrack. Again, Tchaikovsky attempts to commit suicide by leaping into a canal. The water, unfortunately, only comes up to his knees, and he stands foolishly as a well-dressed woman walks by with her dog and smiles at him.

The important part of the Russell canon consists of the films he made for the BBC, "lives" of Frederick Delius, Isadora Duncan, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Richard Strauss (among others), and feature films, the most important of which are The Music Lovers and The Devils (1971), and to a lesser degree, Savage Messiah (1972) and Mahler (1974). In each, a historical figure or artist is scrutinized in the light of a number of mythologies: the popular myth generated by the figure during and after her or his life and the larger myths created by the genre of film biographies in which the artist (or scientist) struggles for recognition against his or her ignorant peers, dies in the attempt or ‘ more frequently, achieves transcendent recognition. When Russell takes up a biography, the myths are shown to be inadequate or destructive, and the inadequacies—particularly those of the central figure—are not treated gently. Russell puts his figures through a series Of cruel, mocking ceremonies of humiliation visited on them by themselves and by the people who surround them. The train sequence in The Music Lovers, in which Nina (Glenda Jackson) attempts to seduce Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain), her homosexual husband, is as savage a moment of hysteria and self-abasement as exists in contemporary film. The participants are drunk and half crazed, the car rocks, the lamp in the compartment swings back and forth creating a mad pattern of light and dark, disguising the cutting and further deranging our senses. In this violence of movement, champagne spills over Nina’s body and Tchaikovsky cringes in terror, the camera alternately looking at the scene from above, regarding his face, then taking his point of view and moving up the hoops of Nina’s skirts, creating a monstrous parody of sexual fear. It is a sequence worthy of the combined cinematic perversions of von Stroheim and Buñuel, and is not the least of the horrors and humiliations Russell heaps upon his characters. Though he is far removed from the quiet analysis of a Bresson or Godard, his challenge to the conventional pieties of film biographies and the hagiography of artists in general gives him an important place in contemporary cinema.

Russell has spawned no followers, though his influence can be seen in Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1976), whose a temporal kaleidoscope of images and sounds that make up the biography of one particularly distraught artist is more complex than anything Russell has attempted. As for Russell himself, the energy of his early seventies films dissipated rather quickly. In 1980 he moved to Hollywood and made a film called Altered States in which the ironic perspectives and mocking deflations of pomposity that humanized the characters of the earlier films is gone. Instead of putting his characters through an excess of emotion that might clarify their situation for the audience, he puts his audience through an excess of stimuli that clarifies only one thing, that an option for filmmakers with nothing more to say is to assault their audience with image and sound in an attempt to make them believe they have something to say.

There has always been a great deal of the showman and faker in Russell, and looking back upon the films of the early seventies one can see that he loves the very melodramatic gestures he seems to want to get some distance from. He shares with a more important figure, the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, an inability to secure a

consistent point of view. It is true that Pasolini was a much more intelligent filmmaker than Russell is, and films like Teorema (1968) and Pigsty (1969) stand as major Brechtian documents (I shall speak about Pigsty in more detail in the next chapter). But like Russell, Pasolini was capable of losing himself—in pornography, for example and films like The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972) are as scrambled in their exploitative sexuality as is Russell’s Lisztomania (1975). In Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), the last film he made before he was murdered, Pasolini attempted an intriguing social-political-sexual spectacle. He elided Sade’s mathematical epic of sexual cruelty with the late fascist period in Italy, and by so doing moved Sade’s work from the area of quasi-philosophy and speculation into a political arena where it more appropriately belongs. Saló is a huge allegorical fantasy of power and male domination in which the human figure is turned into an object to be exploited, hurt, and destroyed.

But the events of Saló, despite Pasolini’s attempts to treat them as tableaux, to observe them coldly and distantly, as if they were on some far stage, to make them into a Brechtian spectacle, create as much perverse attraction as they do repulsion. Its final sequence, in which prisoners are literally taken apart and dismembered, is photographed from the point of view of one of the captors observing the scene through binoculars. Even so it is not far enough away, and the viewer is put in the peculiar position of wanting to look at the horrors and being unable to keep from averting his or her eyes at the same time. While the political perspective is never lost in Saló (it is not present at all in Russell’s films), the proper analytical perspective is never quite found. The film hovers between profound anti-fascist statement and crude pornographic horror show, much as—on a considerably lower level—Russell’s films hover between a healthy antiromanticism and crude pornographic spectacle.
                                         
                Continue With Chapter Two