Against Interpretation (28 page)

NOTE
:
Godard, who was born in Paris in 1930, has now completed ten feature films. After the four mentioned above, he made
Les Carabiniers
(1962-63) with Marino Mase and Albert Juross,
Le Mépris
(1963) with Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang,
Bande à Part
(1964) with Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur,
Une Femme Mariée
(1964) with Macha Méril and Bernard Noël,
Alphaville
(1965) with Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Akim Tamiroff, and
Pierrot le Fou
(1965) with Karina and Belmondo. Six of the films have been shown in America. The first called
Breathless
here, is by now established as an art-house classic; the eighth,
The Married Woman,
has had a mixed reception; but the others, under the titles
A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Contempt,
and
Band of Outsiders,
have been both critical and box-office flops. The brilliance of
A Bout de Souffle
is now obvious to everybody and I shall explain my esteem for
Vivre Sa Vie.
While I am not claiming that all his other work is on the same level of excellence, there is no film of Godard’s which does not have many remarkable passages of the highest quality. The obtuseness of serious critics here to the merits of
Le Mépris,
a deeply flawed but nonetheless extraordinarily ambitious and original film, seems to me particularly lamentable.

1

“The cinema is still a form of graphic art,” Cocteau wrote in his
Journals.
“Through its mediation, I write in pictures, and secure for my own ideology a power in actual fact. I show what others tell. In
Orphée,
for example, I do not narrate the passing through mirrors; I show it, and in some manner, I prove it. The means I use are not important, if my characters perform publicly what I want them to perform. The greatest power of a film is to be indisputable with respect to the actions it determines and which are carried out before our eyes. It is normal for the witness of an action to transform it for his own use, to distort it, and to testify to it inaccurately. But the action was carried out, and is carried out as often as the machine resurrects it. It combats inexact testimonies and false police reports.”

2

All art may be treated as a mode of proof, an assertion of accuracy in the spirit of maximum vehemence. Any work of art may be seen as an attempt to be indisputable with respect to the actions it represents.

3

Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already contained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are always further angles of understanding, new realms of causality. Analysis is substantive. Analysis is a mode of argument that is, by definition, always incomplete; it is, properly speaking, interminable.

The extent to which a given work of art is designed as a mode of proof is, of course, a matter of proportion. Surely, some works of art are more directed toward proof, more based on considerations of form, than others. But still, I should argue, all art tends toward the formal, toward a completeness that must be formal rather than substantive—endings that exhibit grace and design, and only secondarily convince in terms of psychological motives or social forces. (Think of the barely credible but immensely satisfying endings of most of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the comedies.) In great art, it is form—or, as I call it here, the desire to prove rather than the desire to analyze—that is ultimately sovereign. It is form that allows one to terminate.

4

An art concerned with proof is formal in two senses. Its subject is the form (above and beyond the matter) of events, and the forms (above and beyond the matter) of consciousness. Its means are formal; that is, they include a conspicuous element of design (symmetry, repetition, inversion, doubling, etc.). This can be true even when the work is so laden with “content” that it virtually proclaims itself as didactic—like Dante’s
Divine Comedy.

5

Godard’s films are particularly directed toward proof, rather than analysis.
Vivre Sa Vie
is an exhibit, a demonstration. It shows that something happened, not why it happened. It exposes the inexorability of an event.

For this reason, despite appearances, Godard’s films are drastically untopical. An art concerned with social, topical issues can never simply show that something is. It must indicate how. It must show why. But the whole point of
Vivre Sa Vie
is that it does not explain anything. It rejects causality. (Thus, the ordinary causal sequence of narrative is broken in Godard’s film by the extremely arbitrary decomposition of the story into twelve episodes—episodes which are serially, rather than causally, related.)
Vivre Sa Vie
is certainly not “about” prostitution, any more than
Le Petit Soldat
is “about” the Algerian War. Neither does Godard in
Vivre Sa Vie
give us any explanation, of an ordinary recognizable sort, as to what led the principal character, Nana, ever to become a prostitute. Is it because she couldn’t borrow 2,000 francs toward her back rent from her former husband or from one of her fellow clerks at the record store in which she works and was locked out of her apartment? Hardly that. At least, not that alone. But we scarcely know any more than this. All Godard shows us is that she did become a prostitute. Again, Godard does not show us why, at the end of the film, Nana’s pimp Raoul “sells” her, or what has happened between them, or what lies behind the final gun battle in the street in which Nana is killed. He only shows us that she is sold, that she does die. He does not analyze. He proves.

6

Godard uses two means of proof in
Vivre Sa Vie.
He gives us a collection of images illustrating what he wants to prove, and a series of “texts” explaining it. In keeping the two elements separate, Godard’s film employs a genuinely novel means of exposition.

7

Godard’s intention is Cocteau’s. But Godard discerns difficulties, where Cocteau saw none. What Cocteau wanted to show, to be indisputable with reference to, was magic—things like the reality of fascination, the eternal possibility of metamorphosis. (Passing through mirrors, etc.) What Godard wishes to show is the opposite: the anti-magical, the structure of lucidity. This is why Cocteau used techniques that, by means of the alikeness of images, bind together events—to form a total sensuous whole. Godard makes no effort to exploit the beautiful in this sense. He uses techniques that would fragment, dissociate, alienate, break up. Example: the famous staccato editing (jump cuts
et al.
) in
A Bout de Souffle.
Another example: the division of
Vivre Sa Vie
into twelve episodes, with long titles like chapter headings at the beginning of each episode, telling us more or less what is going to happen.

The rhythm of
Vivre Sa Vie
is stopping-and-starting. (In another style, this is also the rhythm of
Le Mépris.
) Hence,
Vivre Sa Vie
is divided into separate episodes. Hence, too, the repeated halting and resuming of the music in the credit sequence; and the abrupt presentation of Nana’s face—first in left profile, then (without transition) full face, then (again without transition) in right profile. But, above all, there is the dissociation of word and image which runs through the entire film, permitting quite separate accumulations of intensity for both idea and feeling.

8

Throughout the history of film, image and word have worked in tandem. In the silent film, the word—set down in the form of titles—alternated with, literally linked together, the sequences of images. With the advent of sound films, image and word became simultaneous rather than successive. While in silent films the word could be either comment on the action or dialogue by the participants in the action, in sound films the word became (except for documentaries) almost exclusively, certainly preponderantly dialogue.

Godard restores the dissociation of word and image characteristic of silent film, but on a new level.
Vivre Sa Vie
is clearly composed of two discrete types of material, the seen and the heard. But in the distinguishing of these materials, Godard is very ingenious, even playful. One variant is the television documentary or
cinéma-vérité
style of Episode VIII—while one is taken, first, on a car ride through Paris, then sees, in rapid montage, shots of a dozen clients, one hears a dry flat voice rapidly detailing the routine, hazards, and appalling arduousness of the prostitute’s vocation. Another variant is in Episode XII, where the happy banalities exchanged by Nana and her young lover are projected on the screen in the form of subtitles. The speech of love is not
heard
at all.

9

Thus,
Vivre Sa Vie
must be seen as an extension of a particular cinematic genre: the narrated film. There are two standard forms of this genre, which give us images plus a text. In one, an impersonal voice, the author, as it were, narrates the film. In the other, we hear the interior monologue of the main character, narrating the events as we see them happening to him.

Two examples of the first type, featuring an anonymous commenting voice which oversees the action, are Resnais’
L’Année Dernière à Marienbad
and Melville’s
Les Enfants Terribles.
An example of the second type, featuring an interior monologue of the main character, is Franju’s
Thérèse Desqueyroux.
Probably the greatest examples of the second type, in which the entire action is recited by the hero, are Bresson’s
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
and
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé.

Godard used the technique brought to perfection by Bresson in his second film,
Le Petit Soldat,
made in 1960 in Geneva though not released (because for three years it was banned by the French censors) until January 1963. The film is the sequence of the reflections of the hero, Bruno Forestier, a man embroiled in a right-wing terrorist organization who is assigned the job of killing a Swiss agent for the FLN. As the film opens, one hears Forestier’s voice saying: “The time for action is passed. I have grown older. The time for reflection has come.” Bruno is a photographer. He says, “To photograph a face is to photograph the soul behind it. Photography is truth. And the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.” This central passage in
Le Petit Soldat,
in which Bruno meditates on the relation between the image and truth, anticipates the complex meditation on the relation between language and truth in
Vivre Sa Vie.

Since the story itself in
Le Petit Soldat,
the factual connections between the characters, are mostly conveyed through Forestier’s monologue, Godard’s camera is freed to become an instrument of contemplation—of certain aspects of events, and of characters. Quiet “events”—Karina’s face, the façade of buildings, passing through the city by car—are
studied
by the camera, in a way that somewhat isolates the violent action. The images seem arbitrary sometimes, expressing a kind of emotional neutrality; at other times, they indicate an intense involvement. It is as though Godard hears, then looks at what he hears.

In
Vivre Sa Vie,
Godard takes this technique of hearing first, then seeing, to new levels of complexity. There is no longer a single unified point of view, either the protagonist’s voice (as in
Le Petit Soldat
) or a godlike narrator, but a series of documents (texts, narrations, quotations, excerpts, set pieces) of various description. These are primarily words; but they may also be worldless sounds, or even wordless images.

10

All the essentials of Godard’s technique are present in the opening credit sequence and in the first episode. The credits occur over a left profile view of Nana, so dark that it is almost a silhouette. (The title of the film is
Vivre Sa Vie. A Film in Twelve Episodes.
) As the credits continue, she is shown full face, and then from the right side, still in deep shadow. Occasionally she blinks or shifts her head slightly (as if it were uncomfortable to hold still so long), or wets her lips. Nana is posing. She is being seen.

Next we are given the first titles. “Episode I: Nana and Paul. Nana Feels Like Giving Up.” Then the images begin, but the emphasis is on what is heard. The film proper opens in the midst of a conversation between Nana and a man; they are seated at the counter of a café; their backs are to the camera; besides their conversation, we hear the noises of the barman, and snatches of the voices of other customers. As they talk, always facing away from the camera, we learn that the man (Paul) is Nana’s husband, that they have a child, and that she has recently left both husband and child to try to become an actress. In this brief public reunion (it is never clear on whose initiative it came about) Paul is stiff and hostile, but wants her to come back; Nana is oppressed, desperate, and revolted by him. After weary, bitter words, Nana says to Paul, “The more you talk, the less it means.” Throughout this opening sequence, Godard systematically deprives the viewer. There is no cross-cutting. The viewer is not allowed to see, to become involved. He is only allowed to hear.

Only after Nana and Paul break off their fruitless conversation to leave the counter and play a game at the pinball machine, do we see them. Even here, the emphasis remains on hearing. As they go on talking, we continue to see Nana and Paul mainly from behind. Paul has stopped pleading and being rancorous. He tells Nana of the droll theme his father, a schoolteacher, received from one of his pupils on an assigned topic, The Chicken. “The chicken has an inside and an outside,” wrote the little girl. “Remove the outside and you find the inside. Remove the inside, and you find the soul.” On these words, the image dissolves and the episode ends.