The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (165 page)

Impossible to avoid a Godardian treatment of Godard, here is an exposition in seven paragraphs (with a coda to update).

1. Godard is the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject. He emerged from the darkness of the Cinémathèque rather than from any plausible biographical background. Thus, it is inadequate to accept the definition he prompted from Samuel Fuller in
Pierrot le Fou:
“The film is like a battlefield … Love … Hate … Action … Violence … Death … In one word Emotion.” Emblems or slogans in Godard are chronic and palindromic. One might amend the definition in two ways: “Cinema is slogans” or “What is emotion? … It is cinema.” Godard’s collected works are an Encyclopedia Cinematografica, the insistence that all things exist only to the extent that they can be expressed in cinema. Godard more than any other director taunts reality. It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens—in camera or eye—notices it. Filmmaking for Godard is neither occupation nor vocation, it is existence itself. His inescapable dialectic is in terms of cinema and his politics have arisen—disastrously, I think—from cinema theory. It was only as Godard abandoned the
politique des auteurs
—as a child might throw out a once favorite toy—that he became a politicized author.

2. Like Welles, he is trapped in the role of Young Turk. Anger (or contempt), his most abiding mood, increases as he becomes aware of his inability to relinquish it. He was an extraordinary critic, hurling down one dogma after another in the pages of
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Arts
. Richard Roud has said that he was “unkind, unfair, unreasonable,” but that seems secondary to the schizoid mingling of incoherence and penetration in his writing. Already, he was the noble madman,
Pierrot le Fou
, in that truly useful insights were offered in writing that was appalling, trite, chaotic, and gratuitously unreadable. It came armed with frightful name-dropping from literature and painting. Hardly a film could be classified without reference to Faulkner, Proust, Auguste Renoir, or Velázquez. In part, this was his need for classification, the unappeasable urge to cross-refer rather than to describe a thing itself. And these references are meaningless. What is it to wonder whether eyes are Renoir grey or Velázquez grey, but to doodle with the coffee-table art expertise no different from the grotesque advertisement language parodied in
Pierrot?
Godard’s criticism is so aggressive that one feels only its insecurity. The craving for a Pantheon and the inverted appeal to conspiracy that hopes for others whose tastes will support the same gods is like the atmosphere of Rivette’s
Paris Nous Appartient
. It means that his articles are addressed to himself, rather than to readers. The tone is austere and forbidding, as if to exclude others from cinema in the very act of celebrating it.

3. The first young Godard adored Americana. In violence to French cinema of the 1950s and the history of art or intellectual cinema, he recognized the virtues of every director from Griffith to Fuller, with running and contradictory confusion as to whether Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Minnelli, or Anthony Mann was the greatest of directors. It was sufficient that the director he admired at any moment was the greatest; the urge to classify had a weak memory and a helpless index. The vital admiration of the beauty of American action cinema, and of the way it expressed character, emotion, and universal meanings within rigid genres and unwholesome production systems took too little account of the commercial position of the American director, of genres, and of the inability of revered directors to understand his praise of them. But in terms of plot, image, and character, Godard’s first films were a magnificent critical explanation of American movies. The tragic pitch of
Pierrot le Fou
lies partly in the sense of a dying American cinema.

4. As American cinema shrank into seriousness, and as more young people rediscovered its earlier glory, Godard moved violently to shun such company. He went first into his own invented sociology that allied the exploitation of film directors with a diffuse notion of prostitution throughout society. The idea had been expressed best in
Vivre Sa Vie
and
Le Mépris
, and recurs with decreasing precision in
Une Femme Mariée, Alphaville
, and
Deux ou Trois Choses
. That conception thrust Godard forward into a near-total abandonment of America for Marxist cinema. But the new political awareness was as shy of reality as his liking for American movies had been insecurely rooted. He could only make his revolutionary films in groups named after Dziga Vertov or Medvedkin. And from
Made in USA
onward, the political imperative accelerates his incoherence, replaces action with slogan and human meetings with the barren exchange of dialectic.
Deux ou Trois Choses
is the film in which his generalization of people works best, poised on the edge of a numbing obscurity that is a grotesque proof of the alienation Godard sees in the world. His protests, therefore, are pathological and humorless.

5. Godard’s greatness rests in his grasping of the idea that films are made of moving images, of moments from films, of images projected in front of audiences. A critic once asked why there was so much blood in
Pierrot
. That is not blood, answered Godard, but red. Equally, his films are not stories photographed, but a record of actors playing parts. The focus of his films is the distance between camera and actors and between screen and audience. He involves viewers more thoroughly (and more politically) in a film like
Bande à Part
when he describes the action he is showing than in any of the direct didactic onslaughts.
Les Carabiniers
is still his most political film, largely because he is so stimulated by its specific location—the urban wasteland. He knows only cinema: on politics and real life he is childish and pretentious.

6. It follows that the very thing his films lack is emotion. They deal with moments of cinema and with his jungle of reference, but never with feelings. It is when he photographs Anna Karina, his first wife, that this gap is wistfully admitted. That is what makes
Pierrot
a real tragedy and moments from earlier films with Karina elegies for an unexperienced feeling. Godard’s anger and intellect sit together guarding his cold, empty heart, maddened by it. He is the first director, the first great director, who does not seem to be a human being. It was the discovery that he loved Karina more in moving images than in life that may have broken their marriage. And that rupture shocked his chaste heart even further, into vain protestations of caring for the world.

7. Thus Godard proves that cinema is no more or less than cinema, that art has scant need of reality, that it depends on imagination. He is the inaugurator of a new beauty that is the beginning of modern cinema—uncomposed, but snapped. Movements observed, transformed by being watched.

Godard has not stopped, or reached Fassbinder’s terminus. Nor is his recent work negligible:
Nouvelle Vague
was very beautiful;
Detective
was a rather casual tribute to film noir;
King Lear
had the backhanded virtue of demonstrating how capriciously a film could be contracted, and executed;
Hail, Mary
was banned and berated—that, really, is its claim to fame. But admirers could not escape the pinched, cynical, and misogynist aura of Godard. If he had taught us the absurdity, and even the corrupt iniquity, of making more movies—why make them? There are dead ends that precede death, and show us a morbidity that was not previously apparent.

Whenever I have reviewed early Godard (I mean films from the sixties), they have seemed fresh still, moving, and exciting. But for the moment, Godard has very little audience. It may be that moviemaking of his intensity—both cerebral and emotional—cannot maintain itself very long. There are so many careers for which the peak lasted ten or so years; and so few in which directors came back again, renewed—that is what makes Renoir so remarkable, and Fritz Lang. Godard does require a sense of urgency and occasion, a feeling for political and cultural pregnancy, that has gone now. Thus, the more enduring humanism of Ingmar Bergman begins to loom larger than Godard’s furious essay-making. What’s more, Godard was too brilliant, too rapid: he saw a new way of doing film that is still beyond the generality of directors, and audiences.

But Godard has a frenzied interest in TV and video. If the media changed enough, that could bring him back into our lives. As for the earlier films, they are one of the inescapable bodies of work. They deserve retrospectives—if film proves an art or a force that commands such backwards survey. Will there be a place for retrospective seasons? Or was it a matter of luck to be alive when Godard could not stop throwing out his amazing pictures?

Of course, it was natural that Godard would provide his own retrospective—and sweep up the entire medium.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
is a great catalogue work, worthy of Robert Musil or Walter Benjamin—or Chris Marker. But in its astonishing beauties, and the suggestiveness of its editing, one may still see and feel the Godard of the early sixties. Thus, the
Histoire(s
) reasserted, beyond doubt, that his is one of the great critical yet poetic minds in the medium.

Paulette Goddard
(Marion Levy) (1911–90), b. Great Neck, New York
By 1932, Paulette Goddard was replete with alimony from a first broken marriage, barely blooded in movies, an ex-Goldwyn girl, and now with Hal Roach. She met Charlie Chaplin, contributed herself and her money to
Modern Times
(36), and was his wife from 1933 to 1942. Of all Chaplin’s leading ladies she is the most lively and appealing, as well as the one who seems to have pushed him near a real warmth for women. At her prime she was delectably gay and vivacious—she had the nickname “Sugar”—with an underlying strength and stubbornness that was brought out in her De Mille films.

Her success in
Modern Times
almost won her the part of Scarlett O’Hara, but Selznick used her in
The Young in Heart
(38, Richard Wallace); she was also in
The Women
(39, Cukor)—before he sold her to Paramount. She duly became one of the leading ladies of that studio; opposite Bob Hope in
The Cat and the Canary
(39, Elliott Nugent) and
The Ghost Breakers
(40, George Marshall); her first hoyden, in De Mille’s
North West Mounted Police
(40). She also appeared in Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator
(40).

Throughout the war years, she flourished at Paramount yet she never quite carried a film or laid hands on unequivocal stardom:
Second Chorus
(41, H. C. Potter), with Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith;
Hold Back the Dawn
(41, Mitchell Leisen);
Nothing But the Truth
(41, Nugent);
Reap the Wild Wind
(42, De Mille);
The Forest Rangers
(42, Marshall);
The Crystal Ball
(43, Nugent);
So Proudly We Hail
(43, Mark Sandrich);
Standing Room Only
(44, Sidney Lanfield);
I Love a Soldier
(44, Sandrich);
Kitty
(45, Leisen), a vehicle that didn’t really own the road.

By now, she had married Burgess Meredith, and she appeared delightfully with him in Renoir’s
The Diary of a Chambermaid
(46). Next, she was in
Suddenly It’s Spring
(47, Leisen), a slave girl in De Mille’s
Unconquered
(47), and then Mrs. Cheveley in Alexander Korda’s
An Ideal Husband
(48). Not many actresses could have played those four films in a row so well, and even she couldn’t quite manage the last, although she worked hard to “look like a woman with a past.” Her career began to decline, but never forsook the adventurous:
Hazard
(48, Marshall);
On Our Merry Way
(48, King Vidor and Lesley Fenton); as Lucretia Borgia in
Bride of Vengeance
(49, Leisen); and in the all-white
Anna Lucasta
(49, Irving Rapper). After
The Torch
(50, Emilio Fernandez) she made yet another curiosity, Edgar G. Ulmer’s
Babes in Bagdad
(52). The rest is unworthy:
Vice Squad
(53, Arnold Laven);
The Sins of Jezebel
(53, Reginald Le Borg);
The Charge of the Lancers
(54, William Castle); and
The Stranger Came Home
(54, Terence Fisher). In 1958, she married Erich Maria Remarque and retired. But she made one more film, in Italy,
Gli Indifferenti
(64, Francesco Maselli), and she played a murdered movie star on TV in
The Snoop Sisters
(72, Leonard Stern).

Whoopi Goldberg
(Caryn Johnson), b. New York, 1949
Whoopi Goldberg is a famous American. She has had careers as comedienne, actress, and TV talk show hostess. She seems emancipated, outspoken, a citizen. But when she won the best supporting actress for
Ghost
(90, Jerry Zucker)—a big hit that needed her vitality and force—I was reminded of Hattie McDaniel. Ms. McDaniel played Mammy in
Gone With the Wind
, and on the night of February 29, 1940, she was the first black ever to win an Oscar. When
Gone With the Wind
opened in Atlanta, ten weeks earlier, Georgian sensibilities had had her picture removed from the souvenir program. The actress was advised not to attend the premiere. David Selznick protested the exclusion, but went along with it. And on February 29, at the Cocoanut Grove, he did not have Hattie McDaniel sitting at the
Gone With the Wind
table. She and her husband were parked off in a corner at what seemed like the only table for two. The actress had a long walk to pick up the Oscar.