Would one blush for the religiously realistic art of the cinema if we were not eaten away by an unhappy desire to change the world? But here artistic creation does not mean painting one's soul in things, but painting the soul of things.
Jean-Luc Godard, 1952.
Breathless boosted Godard to the rank of New Wave leader - along with Truffaut, his prizewinning colleague - by introducing him to critics, audiences, and fellow cineastes as a certified enfant terrible with a taste for the innovative (those jump cuts!) and the offbeat (that ambiguous ending!) rivaled by few others on the contemporary scene.
He quickly started work on The Little Soldier, his second feature. Here he continued his exploration of film-noirt errain, adding a political inflection via its protagonist: an undercover agent combating a left-wing organization during the acutely controversial war for Algerian independence. The drama puzzled many observers with its lack of political coherence, but Godard promptly explained that this was one of its most admirable qualities; his intention, after all, was to depict an ethically confused character in a film meant to seem "like a secret diary, a notebook, or the monologue of someone trying to justify himself before an almost accusing camera, as one does before a lawyer or a psychiatrist." Godard's own justifications are as problematic as the "thriller" itself - among other things, he suggests that to understand the movie one must somehow "sense" his oftenshifting "distance" from the characters - and it is tempting to write off both the film and the self-analysis as honorable failures in a still-young career. Carefully considered, though, the film and the retrospective comments show Godard's growing recognition of how conventional cinema joins other instruments of cultural control - including law and psychiatry, which he specifically names - in producing and reproducing social norms that hinder freedom and happiness. Foucault and Louis Althusser are among the philosophers who have developed this idea, and Godard rings interesting variations on it.
Moving to color cinematography and a radically different genre, Godard then wrote and directed A Woman Is a Woman, a musical shot on studio soundstages. Calling it "my first real film" and "the one I like best," he said afterward that his inspiration had been Charles Chaplin's observation that "tragedy is life in close-up, and comedy, life in long shot." Ornery as always, Godard turned this dictum on its head, attempting to make "a close-up comedy." He claimed after its highly uneven reception that it had been most popular in "countries noted for their wit," not including France, where it "didn't go down well."
His next production was "Sloth," a 15-minute contribution to the 1961 anthology film The Seven Capital Sins. Unfazed by its less-than-gracious treatment from the critical corps, of which he still considered himself an active member, he plunged swiftly into his next project: My Life to Live, the story of a young woman named Nana who becomes a prostitute - the first of several Godard heroines to take this desperate route and meets a tragic end. He began shooting on Paris locations in early 1962 and emerged a few weeks later with one of the most emotionally and intellectually rich achievements in all of New Wave filmmaking.
Before a full discussion of My Life to Live, it is worth taking a closer look at Godard's ideas and working methods in the period after Breathless launched his career. His interests certainly changed in some respects. Although his second feature recalls Breathless with its cars, travel, and skepticism toward bourgeois mores, for instance, its political themes and thriller atmosphere have little of the Beat-hipster spirit about them.
Still, one aspect of the Beat sensibility remained very much in view: improvisation. This was partly a professional tic that Godard had trouble shaking; even his first short movies had been "prepared very carefully" but "shot very quickly," as he described the process. It was also a deliberate way of maintaining the sense of immediacy that had raced through his earlier features. Although his comments on the shooting of The Little Soldier are somewhat vague, Godard appears to have begun the film by writing a partial scenario giving key moments of the story. He also decided it would take place in Geneva, perhaps because this is a "capital city of capitalism," in one critic's phrase, and perhaps because he had visited the city as a child (during stays with his mother's wealthy family) and knew the area well. Other aspects of the narrative were so uncertain that shooting lasted four times longer than the two weeks he had anticipated. Scenes were frequently written the same morning they were to be shot, as Godard wrestled with bouts of "thinking" and "hesitating" brought on by the challenge of exploring longtime interests while avoiding the "anything goes" mentality of his first feature. (Dialogue for Breathless had been dashed off the evening before scenes were shot, an almost leisurely pace by comparison!) One important scene, an interview centered on Anna Karina's character, was shot in a completely improvised style - "she didn't know in advance what questions I would ask her" - inspired by Jean Rouch, an ethnographic filmmaker who became a hero for Godard and other New Wave directors by using spontaneous cinema to explore diverse cultures and personalities. Godard's academic background was in ethnography, and while he has rarely emphasized this in comments or interviews, it attests a longlasting interest in real-time, on-the-spot probing of subjects that have caught his attention. The scriptwriting for A Woman Is a Woman was equally unorthodox. On one hand, Godard started with a "very detailed scenario" and "followed it word for word, down to the last comma." Yet while that sounds very responsible, the writing of specific action and dialogue was more of a down-to-the-wire process than ever, with Godard jotting material at the studio while the performers applied their makeup. Once again he was rediscovering a knack he shared with Kerouac: being able to weave spur-of-the-moment inspirations from a familiar material that had already been bouncing obsessively around his mind. As he described it later, "one only thinks of things [for insertion into a film] one has been thinking about for a long time." Despite his gift for improvisation, Godard realized throughout this period that there is something to be said for writing a movie before directing it. Indeed, he tried to say "never again" to spur-of-the-moment creativity as early as 1961, when The Little Soldier was completed. Since he kept sliding into last-minute shooting patterns anyway, however, he eventually decided to call this his "method" and simply live with it - arranging fiveweek shooting schedules while knowing that the actual photography would occupy only two weeks, so the rest could be devoted to thought and reflection. My Life to Live was shot over four weeks, but the entire second week was a hiatus, giving Godard time to think. This irritated his performers, who disliked hanging around an idle location with no idea when their director would decide to roll the camera again.
What he sought in this film was so unconventional that one doubts a more commonplace methodology would have proved any more efficient. While he wasn't looking for any "particular effects," he wanted to explore some of his most deeply felt themes through an approach he later called theatre-verite. By this he meant a sort of "theatrical realism" that combines the arbitrariness of stage drama - unfolding in continuous "blocks" that cannot be "retouched" by the director - with film's unique ability to capture "chance" events in a "definitive" way.
To this end, he designed scenes that would be shot one time only, in the same order as the story - itself an unusual procedure, since in standard filmmaking scenes are generally shot more than once, in a chronology different from the final movie. Then he spliced the shots together with a minimum of editing. The result of this procedure has a mood very different from the breathlessness of Breathless, the elusiveness of The Little Soldier, and the effervescence of A Woman Is a Woman. Still, the sense of spontaneity remains strong, reflecting Godard's success at making a complex and multilayered "impromptu" film "right off the bat, as if carried along, like an article written at one go." Again he used the Beat-like values of honesty and authenticity to justify his methods. "I didn't know exactly what I was going to do," he reported later. "I prefer to look for something I don't know, rather than be able to do better with something I do know." Karina felt "a little unhappy because she never really knew beforehand what she would have to do," he added. "But she was so sincere in her desire to make the film that between us we brought it off." Perhaps the strongest influence on My Life to Live is that of Bertolt Brecht, whose connection with Godard was briefly discussed in the first chapter. Brecht's spirit had suffused A Woman Is a Woman from its opening moments - when the filmmaker's cry of "Lights! Camera! Action!" rings out over the credits - and here it reaches its first full flowering in Godard's work. Brecht's great breakthrough as a dramatic theorist stemmed from a problem he faced as a politically committed playwright. The more effectively he involved spectators in the flow of his story and the psychology of his characters, he realized, the less likely they were to focus on (or even notice) the sociocultural critiques he was trying to convey. To solve this dilemma, he developed a new form of drama - the epic theater - in which various devices purposely "alienate" audience members from the show they are watching. This is meant to promote active thought instead of passive emotionalism, leading the audience to think about the drama instead of sinking into it. Brecht recognized the value of theatrical conventions, including effective storytelling, for attracting an audience and holding its attention. Therefore he found it acceptable for playwrights to illustrate points by dramatic means - assailing the evils of capitalism, say, by showing an avaricious factory owner laying off a conscientious worker who has no other way to support his hungry children. However, he also knew that if a writer crafted such a scene in a truly spellbinding way, spectators might be so consumed with worry over the worker's fate that the evils of capitalism per se would never occur to them. Hence, the practitioner of epic theater might interrupt the episode with a parade of picketers carrying signs ("The Evils of Capitalism") across the stage, or perhaps the cast would break into a song that spelled out the message in its lyrics. If done too didactically, of course, such shenanigans might alienate the audience clear out of the theater; so Brecht made his "A-effects" as entertaining and stimulating as possible. He also worked out a theory of acting that countered the introspective tendencies of Konstantin Stanislavski's influential "Method" with a "presentational" style, calling for performers to reveal their own attitudes toward the characters instead of psychologically "disappearing" into their roles. Godard had Brecht firmly in mind when he designed My Life to Live as a series of twelve scenes or "tableaux," with a self-consciously "theatrical" feel and a deliberately episodic structure. "I wanted to show the 'Adventures of Nana So-and-so' side of it," he recalled later. The division into separate tableaux, he added, "corresponds to the external view of things which would best allow me to convey the feeling of what was going on inside.... How can one render the inside? Precisely by staying prudently outside."
This is another in Godard's long list of murky clarifications, but it points to an idea that is indispensable in understanding this film and most of his others: that cinema, like painting and other visual arts, is a valuable yet problematic tool for casting light on human beings and the existential reality in which they dwell. Godard recognizes that externals are all the camera and sound recorder can grasp and that such outward signs superficial by definition - may seem sadly inadequate if one is looking for the "inner selves" of psychologically defined characters. Nevertheless, he also rejects "the Antonioni error" that claims "non-communication" is cinema's most natural subject. "I think it is wrong to say that the more you look at someone the less you understand," he said in 1962. The externals captured by cinema can be highly suggestive if one accepts the notion that inner selves are inseparable from the external actions they trace on the world around them. "A painter who tries to render a face only renders the outside of people; and yet something else is revealed," Godard says. "It's very mysterious. It's an adventure." My Life to Live was thus "an intellectual adventure: I wanted to film a thought in action - but how do you do it? We still don't know."
We still don't know, but we have been trying to find out since the early days of cinema. Another of Godard's heroes, American film pioneer D. W. Griffith, stated many times that "movies are the science of photographing thought," and while Godard brings far more philosophical sophistication to his efforts, on a fundamental level he is exploring the same set of problems faced by his illustrious predecessor. It must be remembered, however, that in seeking to film "a thought in action" it is the action more than the thought - that is, the traceable behaviorial activity more than its evanescent psychological content - that Godard takes as his main concern. This is not because he finds psychology uninteresting, but because it is more a hurdle than a stepping-stone on his road to intuiting and embracing the mysteries of being human. He signals this in an early scene of My Life to Live that stands with the most resonant moments in his work. Nana and her former husband are finishing a bumpy but not entirely unpleasant conversation by having a friendly pinball game. He mentions some school assignments that his father has been reading, and says some of them are quite remarkable. The camera makes a small but deliberate movement that isolates Nana in the center of the frame, underscoring her thoughtful attitude as she listens to a quotation from a pupil's essay: "A bird is an animal with an inside and an outside. Remove the outside, there's the inside. Remove the inside, and you see the soul." This summarizes much of Godard's cinematic and philosophical project. All movies consist of "outside" material, that is, visual and auditory records of exterior realities. Movies aspiring to "artistic" status attempt to take things a step further, going "beyond" surface representations to suggest "inner," psychological realities that cannot be directly depicted. Godard wishes to go further still, stripping away psychology in order to expose something more profound and mysterious - a "something else" that can only be approached through oxymoronic genres like theatre verite and eccentric creative processes like the one to which Godard cryptically alludes when he says the film "was made by a sort of second presence."
My Life to Live announces its structure - "a film in 12 tableaux" - at the beginning of its opening credits. True to Godard's opinion that the "greatest tableaux are portraits," it then presents a portrait of Nana/Karina's face, seen in three leisurely shots (left profile, front view, right profile) as credits continue to roll. The lighting is dark, shadowy, sad. More important, Nana/Karina is not posing prettily for the camera. Her face is quiet, yet mobile; still, yet charged with an emotional current that seems compelling even though the film has not defined it yet through word or action.
Accompanying this portrait is the first statement of Michel Legrand's remarkable music score, a series of brief passages played by a chamber orchestra. In conventional films the background score is often used to communicate a character's inner feelings to the audience, and although that certainly happens here - the music reinforces our impression that this is not a happy woman - the psychological effect is deliberately thrown off kilter by apparent mismatches between sound and picture, which seem to be following their own schedules instead of trudging along in Hollywoodstyle synchronization. The music comes and goes at unexpected times, and much of the sequence passes in silence, focusing attention on the visual image with rare intensity. This all amounts to a bold violation of classicalfilm structure - and a highly effective one, since it signals that although this movie will contain familiar elements of ordinary cinema, these will not assume their conventional roles of soothing, distracting, and entertaining the audience. Instead, each will maintain its own aesthetic integrity even as it contributes to the film as a whole. It will be up to the spectator - the active, participating, Brechtian spectator - to perceive their interrelationships and ferret out their meanings.
First tableau: A CAFE, NANA WANTS TO LEAVE PAUL. THE PINBALL MACHINE. In keeping with its strategy of separation and fragmentation, the film introduces each of its twelve scenes with a full-screen intertitle that interrupts the story and announces the main events that are about to happen. Working against traditional notions of cinematic suspense, this formal maneuver seems surprising in conjunction with a story that could have been treated as a thriller or film noir if the director had chosen.
The first scene throws the audience into even deeper Brechtian waters through its disorienting camera work. Nana and Paul, her former husband, are having a long conversation at the bar of a cafe, and everything about Raoul Coutard's cinematography is designed to make their alienation from each other not just a narrative point but a living, discomforting reality for the audience. Positioned directly behind the characters, the camera persistently films the backs of their heads, refusing the psychologically revealing facial expressions that ordinary film grammar would demand at such a moment. Their faces are occasionally visible in a mirror over the bar, but the view is distant and intermittent as the camera moves from one spot to another, often preventing even their backs from appearing together within the frame. Nana's hand touches Paul's head in a fleeting gesture near the end of their talk, and the effect is almost jarring in a scene (and a movie) where physical contact looms as a constant threat (violence, prostitution) while physical affection (caressing, embracing) is largely unknown. By starting with this Brechtian flourish, Godard introduces theatre verite as a means of engaging us with characters who do not fit any of the standard movie categories. On one hand, they are not fully developed figures inviting us to identify with them emotionally; we have little idea who they are (the husband's part in the story never becomes entirely clear) and for a long time we can barely make out what they look like. On the other hand, they are not just abstract embodiments of sociocultural types either; their main concern here - clearing the wreckage of a shattered relationship - is recognizably human and poignant. In any case, if their vagueness makes them seem elusive, our resulting curiosity leads us to focus more closely on whatever clues the scene does offer about them, and thus to enter the world of the movie all the more intently. Most impressive of all is their concreteness, the quality Godard pursued in The Little Soldier, and obviously an important trait for any filmd escribed by a term like theatre verite. Photographed almost as if they were objects that happen to be in the room, Nana and Paul are more like two-dimensional graphics than three-dimensional personalities. This is because they are not "fleshed out" psychologically, and also because of two reasons directly linked to the cinematography: (a) Their images are conveyed partly by reflections in a mirror, and (b) the camera's lateral movements (a gesture Godard will use vigorously in later works) tend to flatten space sideways instead of exploring it in depth. Still, this very two-dimensionality, brooded over by Coutard's obsessive lens, gives them a pictorial presence that effortlessly dominates the scene's black-and-white images, allowing the couple to make up in physicality what they lack (so far) in context and psychology. This is enhanced by the film's use of directly recorded sound, free of the mellifluous mixing that makes Hollywood-type sound tracks at once seductive and inauthentic. The dialogue also contributes to Godard's quest for concreteness. Answering one of Paul's inconsequential questions with a question of her own, Nana asks "What do you care?" and then repeats the phrase several times in a row. At first she might be mimicking Patricia's repetitions ("Of course. Of course? Of course!") in Breathless, and to some extent her role playing is similar; Nana once appeared in a movie with Eddie Constantine, we will learn later on, and still wishes to become an actress, which might help her navigate more effectively through life by projecting a more practiced persona. Her reiterations have less to do with performing, however, than with a desperate attempt to grasp the mercurial meanings she feels within her conflicted self - to understand her turbulent "inside" by projecting it "outside," through words and behaviors that can be held and examined like other physical phenomena. "I wanted to be very precise," she explains to Paul, lamenting the difficulty of holding onto meaning long enough to express it accurately. Paul misses the point, telling her not to "parrot" words, since she's not on a stage. "The more we talk, the less words mean," she says a little later, but the anxiety produced by her alienated emotions ("I'm fed up. I want to die") is equally lost on her companion, who accuses her of "parrot talk" again. Parrot talk it may be, but its purpose is deadly serious. Nana seizes upon the sounds of words in a compulsive effort to possess the meanings they presumably contain, and thereby to reconfirm her own sense of existence, which has been shaken by the destabilizing events in her life. Godard's camera records her plight at once dispassionately and compassionately. This approach might be contradictory in less gifted hands but is made effective by Godard's conviction that cool, attentive observation ("staying prudently outside") is a reliable route to honest concern with Nana's predicament and the social circumstances that cause it. The impersonality of the setting, the distanced placements of the camera, the repetitive rhythms of the dialogue, and the hard-edged realism of the sound combine to amplify the scene's implicit cultural critique; who wouldn't have trouble holding their lives together in such an atmosphere? At the same time they mute the melodramatic undertones that a less Brechtian filmmaker might readily have exploited. The episode concludes with the pinball game, Paul's parable of the soul, and Nana's silent gaze at a world (visible in its wintry bleakness through the window beside her) that is both more absolute and more enigmatic than her sad experiences have prepared her to expect.
Second tableau: THE RECORD SHOP. 2,000 FRANCS, NANA LIVES HER LIFE. Pursuing his agenda of foregrounding the filmmaking process - motivated partly by Brechtian politics, partly by New Wave cinephilia - Godard begins the next tableau by removing all sound during two documentarystyle shots of Paris streets. He then replaces the restless shot-to-shot editing of the cafe scene with lengthy pans, showing Nana at work as a record-store clerk. She seems less alienated here than in the cafe, and the camera's easy movements lend a supple attractiveness to the scene. They almost suggest that unremarkable working-class life might not be a terrible burden if Nana didn't long for something better, symbolized by her movie-acting ambitions.
Her uneasiness is as profound as it is perplexing, however, and her "thought in action" is too intricate and mysterious to be contained by the commonsense experiences of ordinary work in ordinary places. The limits of any merely rational approach to her existential plight (by the character or the filmmaker) are underscored when one of her coworkers reads a lengthy excerpt from a magazine story that includes the cautionary sentence, "You attach too much importance to logic." Rebelling against the prison houses of logic and language alike, Nana is determined to live her one and only life on terms of her own invention - a heroic ambition that cannot be fulfilled in the confines of a middle-class record shop that deals in exactly the sort of prerecorded, predigested sounds that Godard has rejected for the purposes of telling her story. Like the first tableau, the second concludes with Nana in a pensive pose, listening to her colleague's droning voice as Coutard's lens slips past her and focuses on the flow of city life streaming past the store window in all its crisp materiality.
Third tableau: THE CONCIERGE, PAUL. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. The beginning of the next tableau seamlessly joins the distancing of Brechtian stylistics with the psychological suspense of traditional narrative. Nana lives in an apartment complex separated from the street by a forbidding wall. She wants to enter her apartment even though she has not paid her rent, and knows the concierge will not permit her on the premises. We know nothing of this situation as the episode begins, however. Positioned inside the courtyard, the camera shows the gateway to the area, flanked by large patches of shadow cast by the wall. Nana appears in the gateway, making a conventional entrance into the scene, but abruptly turns and hops back through the entryway, disappearing from view. Immediately the same action recurs twice again, exactly as if Nana were not a character but an actress who had stepped within camera range (or onto the stage) before her scene had begun. Only after these false starts does Nana actually enter the space of the episode, where she is promptly accosted by the concierge and forced into a series of quick activities (photographed from an all-encompassing overhead angle) that make up a small catalog of performative maneuvers: a contrite apology, a sneaky grab for her key, and finally submission to her opponents. These adversaries show enough satisfaction in their little victory to remind us of the (Brechtian) point that we might be identifying with them, instead of with Nana, if Nana were not given a privileged position within the narrative.
After a nondescript meeting with Paul, who holds even less interest for her than he did earlier, Nana goes to a movie theater - and no ordinary theater, since it's not only showing a silent film made more than three decades before she bought her ticket, but also displays the film's title (The Passion of Joan of Arc) in huge neon letters, as if this were the only attraction that ever played there. The visual importance given to the title is appropriate, since while Nana seems to approach this as an everyday visit to the movies - complete with a date who seems romantically interested in her - her response to the film is profound and all-consuming, enveloping her in a set of emotions as deep as any she encounters during her story.
In a broad sense, this scene is another sign of the historically minded cinephilia that Godard shares with his New Wave colleagues; he sees nothing odd in the notion that a working-class Parisian would select a religious silent film of 1928 from her local movie listings, and he makes the most of his opportunity to fill the screen with indelible images from Carl Dreyer's masterpiece. Much more is also going on, however, as Godard cuts with a slow, steady rhythm between Dreyer's expressive close-ups and his own close-ups of Nana's transfixed, often tearful gaze.
• The scene plunges us into the heart of Nana's emotional life, allowing us not only to observe but to feel the intensity of her identification with Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who chooses to suffer an awful death rather than renounce her belief that God has a special destiny in store for her. The destiny of which Nana dreams is more modest and secular to be appearing in movies rather than watching them - but it's no coincidence that her onetime acting job with Eddie Constantine was in a picture called No Pity, a title that applies both to Joan's plight and to the fate Nana will meet at the end of her adventures. Nana's tears flow for Joan, for herself, and for a world in which the pitiless have a monopoly on power.
• The pitiless are often men. Although we are still near the beginning of Nana's story, it is already clear that men have offered little to enrich her life. Paul doesn't interest her much, Eddie Constantine is in a different orbit, and few other males appear to have much relevance for her; in later scenes they will provide more harm than help. No wonder she gazes with awe and sympathy as Joan looks into the masculine face of affliction. Ironically, the rigid grasp of this affliction is embodied by a handsome young monk who commiserates with Joan even as he reveals her fate's horrible details. The silence of the scene adds to its power, which culminates when the screen fills with a single word spelled in implacably black letters against a pulsing white background: "La mort," the death that will still Joan's mortal voice and allow her the spiritual deliverance her sufferings have earned.
• The silence of the episode derives from Dreyer's silent film, of course, but it also anticipates a scene near the end of My Life to Live when a minor character will be filmed without sound so that Godard's own postsynchronized voice can be substituted for his, mingling artistic expression with personal confession. The later scene is foreshadowed here, suggesting that Godard's personal feelings about the story he is telling - including its double nature as a theatre-verite fiction and a portrait of Karina, his wife and collaborator - are linked with the cinematic admiration and philosophical wonder that The Passion of Joan of Arc inspires in him.
• The monk, Jean Massieu, is played by Antonin Artaud, a figure of great relevance to Godard's career. A radical French theorist with extreme ideas about the morality and philosophy of art, he wrote voluminously during a long career that included forays into acting and filmmaking. He also underwent recurring bouts of schizophrenic behavior that led to long-term incarceration in an asylum. Among his most influential ideas is his call for an innovative "theater of cruelty" so deeply immersed in humanity's naked suffering that its performances would resemble the contortions of condemned prisoners burning at the stake and signaling through the flamest o onlookers at their immolation. Godard pays tribute to him twice over in My Life to Live: by incorporating his image within the film, and by doing so via the specific scene in The Passion of Joan of Arc where his character informs Joan of the tortures she will shortly have to undergo. The sight of mad, tormented Artaud with doomed, tormented Joan - two figures at once transfigured and nearly crushed by enigmatic revelations - adds greatly to the resonance of this extraordinary moment. (Godard's colleague Jacques Rivette invokes Artaud with a more sweeping gesture in his masterful film Out One: Spectre, the setting of which is identified as "Paris and its double," an obvious reference to Artaud's most famous theoretical work, The Theater and Its Double.)
• Just as Nana's double becomes the threatened and imprisoned Joan, so Karina's double becomes Maria Falconetti, who plays the heroine in Dreyer's film. Dreyer's method of filming Joan's interrogation has become famous (and infamous) in cinematic circles: By taking repeated shots of arduously dramatic moments under physically demanding conditions, he subjected Falconetti to hardships almost as difficult and unpleasant (though of course not so terrifying and interminable) as some of those that were inflicted on the real-life character she portrayed. The result is a performance that partakes, in a small but authentic way, of the awful ordeal it is meant to represent. This is theatre-verite with a vengeance, and Dreyer's comments on his use of relentless close-ups to convey Joan's anguish apply with surprising force to Godard's employment of the same device. "The records give a shattering impression of the ways in which the trial was a conspiracy of the judges against the solitary Jeanne," the Danish filmmaker notes, "bravely defending herself against men who displayed a devilish cunning to trap her in their net. This conspiracy could be conveyed on the screen only through huge close-ups that exposed, with merciless realism, the callous cynicism of the judges" and thereby moved the audience so greatly "that they would themselves feel the suffering that Jeanne endured." Godard's portrayal of Nana as a pawn ensnared by male-generated greed and power shares much with Dreyer's view of Joan as the victim of a power/knowledge network manipulated by men hoping to further certain ideological aims. Another contact point between the two filmmakers is their insistence on the material presence of the images that anchor their stories. Both want to stay in intimate touch with what critic Raymond Carney calls "the accidental and particular .. . the undeconstructable human being with a real body who is at the center of the role, and who emphatically won't be reduced to ... a mere semiotic function of a film'ss ystems of artistic expression." Godard could not have said it more directly. Neither could Dreyer, another thinker with a leaning toward Brecht-like politics and a profound sympathy for the plight of women trapped within patriarchal societies as rigidly as Joan and Nana are trapped by the hard-edged borders of their close-ups.
After the film-within-a-film concludes, Nana shakes off her date, who expresses irritation at this; he paid for her movie ticket, after all. This is a small but meaningful detail, since the man's expectation of a payoff on his investment foreshadows the commercial arrangements Nana will enter as a prostitute. It also shows the ubiquity of a sex-as-commerce ideology - the power of masculine money to command feminine sexuality - in contemporary society.
Still dreaming of a show-business career, she then meets with a man who offers to compile nude photos she can use to market her charms in the movie world; again we see the prevalence of commercial sexuality in the realm of "respectable" business, "popular" entertainment, and "responsible" self-improvement. Nana is interested, but right now she's preoccupied with getting 2,000 francs to pay her rent and get her life in order. The camera follows their conversation in another intrusive variation on "normal" cinematic style - swinging from one side to another as it frames first Nana, then her companion, then both together in a conspicuously long, fluid take. It then lingers on the empty bar after they leave, again stressing the transience of Nana's presence within a material environment that exists quite independently of her activities.
Fourth tableau: THE POLICE, NANA IS QUESTIONED. Nana sits before a window, thrown into silhouette by the glare shining through the dirty glass. Her appearance in silhouette is significant, suggesting that individuality is hard to sustain when one is hauled into an impersonal office and subjected to questioning by a near-anonymous minion of the law.
Responding to the police officer's questions, Nana tells a new tale of sadness. She admits she tried to steal 1,000 francs by placing her foot over a banknote dropped by someone on the street, but lost her nerve under a long, hard stare from the woman who lost it - a mean-spirited woman, Nana complains with fiery emotion, who had her arrested even though she returned the money. The policeman takes down her story impassively, framed by Godard as if his typewriter were more important than he is.
The most interesting visual element of the scene is a framed image, hanging on the police-station wall, showing a few male figuresu underneath what appears to be a giant-sized arm and hand stretched over their heads. This may be seen as literally the long arm of the law, signifying the power/ knowledge complex that makes all the decisions here - following its own dictates and unlikely to care about the social circumstances that have led someone like Nana into her current plight. Alternatively, it may be taken as another Artaudian allusion, this time invoking The Spurt of Blood, a dramatic work published in 1925. In this play a chaotic episode involving a prostitute and a priest climaxes with God's enormous hand reaching across the stage and setting fire to the woman's hair, whereupon she becomes "naked and hideous," bites God on the wrist, and sexually embraces a young man until the arrival of a dead girl who is dropped on the ground, "where she collapses and becomes as flat as a pancake." Godard's film will reach an ending somewhat similar to that of Artaud's scene, etched in terms that are no less abrupt and upsetting, if far more naturalistic in tone.
Also significant is the end of the episode, when the officer asks how she will now take care of herself. "I don't know," she replies. "I... I is another." Nana does not usually slide into sloppy syntax, or into the unconventional language of avant-garde literature - her second phrase is a famous one, written by Arthur Rimbaud in an 1871 letter - so we must think seriously about these hesitant words. On one level, she is manifesting the existential alienation produced by a society that sadly lacks the capacity for guiding, nurturing, and consoling its inhabitants; in such circumstances, one's self may seem almost as alien (an other) as the glaring stranger who hands you to the cops despite the need and desperation flickering through your eyes. At the same time, Karina the actress is showing both her close identification with and critical distance toward the character she plays. She achieves this double state through the Brechtian technique of not burrowing into Nana, but standing alongside her so as to "observe" her actions and "quote" her words - "staying prudently outside" in order to refract "inside" realities. Legrand's music makes a strategic return to render the moment even more dramatically effective. Note too that the purposeful lapse of grammar in Nana's unwittingly quoted sentence ("Je est un autre") again marks Godard's willful resistance of common sense - shared with Rimbaud, who called for a "systematic derangement of the senses" as a pathway to social and aesthetic liberty - as it destabilizes "correct" communication with an openness of which a child, a visionary, or a poet could be proud. Nana turns her face into profile after speaking, and the camera eye zips away into empty space an instant before fade-out. This signals the end of what might be called her "normal life." She will now become a victim of the sexual commerce that she sees as her only escape route from loneliness and fear, which surround her like Joan's rough, uncomforting cloak.
Fifth tableau: THE BOULEVARDS, THE FIRST MAN. THE ROOM. The camera tracks down a Parisian boulevard. Then we see Nana making her way down the sidewalk, and we view the neighborhood's prostitutes through her curious eyes. A man picks her up; they enter a sad-looking little room; and we observe the details of their preparations - including Nana's uncertainty about her price, which turns out to be 4,000 francs - in a long scene with quick, almost clinical editing. The tableau ends with one of the film's most agonizing scenes: another Dreyeresque close-up, as the camera moves in for a relentlessly long take of the client's attempt to kiss Nana on the mouth. She resists by swinging her face frantically from side to side, vainly trying to evade the intimacy her new trade will force on her until the end.
Sixth tableau: MEETING YVETTE. A CAFE IN THE SUBURBS, RAOUL. GUNSHOTS IN THE STREET. Nana has a sidewalk conversation with her friend Yvette, filmed from a vantage point behind Nana's head; we don't see their faces until Coutard's camera belatedly swings around when the scene is well under way. Moments later the camera makes an equally conspicuous gesture when it moves from the women on one side of a cafe to a young man named Raoul on the other, where he's pumping away at a typically Godardian pinball machine. These are elegantly Brechtian visuals, contributing to the film's narrative intelligence while discouraging facile immersion in its emotional and psychological levels. Back at their cafe table, Yvette tells Nana the story of her unhappy marriage and her entry into prostitution; the camera focuses mainly on Nana as she sympathetically listens. In an unexpected shift of tone, the film then makes a strikingly explicit statement of the existentialist viewpoint that Godard brings to this story and the issues it raises. Responding to Yvette's claim that life is depressing but it's not her fault, Nana states her belief that
we're always responsible for our actions. We're free. I raise my hand, I'm responsible. I turn my head, I'm responsible. I am unhappy, I'm responsible. I smoke, I'm responsible. I shut my eyes, I'm responsible. I forget I'm responsible, but I am. I told you, there's no escape. Everything is good. You only have to take an interest in things. . . . After all, things are what they are. A message is a message. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life is life.
It is clear from this speech that existence still precedes essence in Godard's work, and our selves are still determined by our behaviors. Nevertheless, we should not take Nana's words as a manifesto by the filmmaker, since she is expressing what might be called a pop-culture version of existentialist thought. Stated in repetitive, ritualistic phrases that frame its meaning in terms closer to religious rhetoric than logical argument, her litany has the sophistication of, say, a self-help manual or a greeting card. Godard's decision to focus on her ideas in this way reflects his perennial skepticism toward logic itself, even when logic might bolster the philosophical views to which he feels closest. The scene also renews our sense of Nana's vulnerability, revealing her need to convince herself oi her liberty even as she preaches freedom to her companion.
Left out of her statement, of course, is any hint of political awareness, with which Godard is becoming increasingly concerned as the 1960s progress. Nana may feel she bears responsibility for the conditions of her life, but the seductions of Raoul the pimp and the realities of Parisian prostitution - about to be revealed in a documentarylike scene full of facts and figures - will soon show how easily the illusions of individual choice can be shattered. Bearing out this theme, Yvette chats with Raoul while Nana listens to a foolishly romantic pop song about the simple pleasures of the poor. Happiness is a matter not of socioeconomic status, its music and lyrics suggest, but of having an attractive lover to cuddle up with between shifts on the assembly line. The illusory nature of Nana's supposed freedom is underscored by the next incident in her story. Raoul administers a "test" to determine whether she is a "lady" or a "tramp," and although she "passes" this exam laughing instead of bristling when Raoul showers her with insults - her response verifies his view of human nature as a matter of stereotypes and categories. (He starts his insults, incidentally, by accusing her of "parroting" his words - recalling the charge of artificiality and unoriginality that Paul made against her in the first tableau.) If she were truly a free agent, moreover, Nana might end her relationship with Raoul after glimpsing the book in which he records the accounts of his prostitutes, reducing them from full humanity to the degraded level of mere numbers in a ledger; yet she makes no move to reduce her involvement with this sleazy new acquaintance. It is during her glance at this book that the awful sound of gunfire bursts into the cafe from the street outside, magnifying the implicit violence of Raoul's dehumanizing trade into the explicit violence of a whole society steeped in antagonism, exploitation, and commodification of bodies and souls. The mayhem is as random as the action of Raoul's pinball machine, as inevitable as the markings on his account sheets; yet lingering naivete makes Nana as blind to its deeper meanings as the victim who staggers into the bar with blood smeared over his eyes. As if compensating for their tragic inability to see, Godard injects the gunfire's horror into the very fabric of his film, blasting frames out of Coutard's rapid pan shot in a display of jump cutting whose likes we haven't seen since Breathless. Nana makes a panicky exit as the material world closes suffocatingly in and the cinematic world blows explosively apart. Raoul will later say "some political thing" caused the madness. He will be correct.
Seventh tableau: THE LETTER, RAOUL AGAIN, THE CHAMPS-ELYSEES. Seeking a better place to ply her new trade, Nana writes to the madam of a nearby brothel. Godard uses the occasion to reinforce the link between his improvisatory theatre-verite and the human lives - fictional (Nana) and nonfictional (Karina) - that are its subjects. Peering over Nana's shoulder as she composes her letter, we witness not only the continuation of the film's story through the words she writes, but also a documentary account of Karina's physical movements as she performs an activity whose very ordinariness blurs the line between acting and simply being. Behind her, a huge photomural of the Champs-Elysees underscores the photographic nature of the scene, at once emphasizing its realism (like the photo, this movie is a lifelike account of Paris in 1962) and complicating our attempt to read it literally (this is not reality but a construction, with its own agendas and priorities).
Raoul walks up and speaks with Nana, placing her into more of the categories (ladies and tramps, profitable and unprofitable hookers, etc.) that organize life for him. "The classic letter," he says of the page she has written, relegating her carefully composed words to the lowly status of tried-and-true cliche. She asks his opinion of her, and he says she is "very good," with "great goodness in [her] eyes." She expresses surprise at this "Catholic" answer to what she thought was a simple question, but her feelings of security and authenticity have grown so shaky that she encourages Raoul's judgmental views and the social pigeonholes to which these assign her. She asks what "category of women" he places her in, and he announces that there are "three types of girl," depending on the number of "expressions" they have.
Godard films this conversation in accord with the movie's generally Brechtian tone. The camera starts with left-to-right movements from a position behind Raoul, whose head sometimes hides Nana from view. Then it changes to a position at the end of their table, shifting from one side to the other until Raoul asks Nana to smile. The camera views both of them as Nana protests and maintains her thoughtful expression; then it swings excitedly toward her as she breaks into a sudden grin. Her happiness is short-lived, as she quickly resumes her pensive look and gazes at Raoul with apprehension. They leave the cafe in a jaunty mood, though, playfully exchanging a puff of cigarette smoke during an affectionate kiss. Nana asks when their new business arrangement will begin, and Godard cuts from the photomural's daytime Paris to a shot of the city at night, enticing and forbidding in its suggestion of unknown possibilities.
Eighth tableau: AFTERNOONS, MONEY, WASHBASINS, PLEASURE, HOTELS. This tableau's title names pleasure as nothing special - just one in a series of everyday nouns, and near the end of the list at that. The tableau itself consists largely of a faux documentary on the subject of prostitution in Paris, showing places, objects, and gestures used in the trade. Bodies also appear, filmed in bits and pieces to reflect (among other things) the dehumanizing effects of impersonal sex. The busy montage is accompanied by an "informative" commentary, but rather than invoke the "objectivity" of traditional "voice of God" narration, Godard structures the voice-over as a series of answers to Nana's curious questions. One might call this a catechism for the capitalist age, especially since Nana's recent religious allusion (responding to the "Catholic" remark) is still fresh in memory.
Ninth tableau: A YOUNG MAN. LUIGI. NANA WONDERS WHETHER SHE'S HAPPY. Just as the eighth tableau consisted largely of information that most narrative films would exclude for being too dry, this one is full of Brechtian digressions that nudge us out of the story, allowing room for thought and portraying some of the uneventful "dead time" that occupies real life far more than it occupies conventional movies. We wait with Nana at a bar while Raoul confers with a friend. We wait some more while a young man fetches her a pack of cigarettes. We follow her as she dances to jazz on a jukebox, hovering near her body, and sometimes look through her eyes at the men who stare at her.
The scene's most outlandish digression takes place when Luigi, a minor character, does a comic impersonation of a child inflating and exploding a balloon; while this is an apt metaphor for Nana's ultimately tragic naivete, it is presented as a sort of vaudeville routine that deliberately postpones the story's development and again foregrounds its artificial, performative nature. Spectators may well find this frustrating, and of course that is the point. Godard's satisfaction with such devices is demonstrated by his repeated use of them - a poem delays an execution in Les Carabiniers, a lengthy joke interrupts a dramatic scene in Alphaville, a comedian's routine delays the climax of Pierrot le fou, and so on. Even the jazz that prompts Nana's dance is riddled with brief pauses (momentary rests built into the music, much as printed intertitles are built into this movie) that reinforce the film's interruptive strategy. Beneath its artfully composed shots and carefully recorded sounds, My Life to Live is built on a foundation of absence: the absence of tones during the silences in the jazz piece, the absence of words during the Joan of Arc sequence, the absence of images during each tableau's introductory title, and finally the absence of Nana, toward which the entire tragedy is wending its way.
Tenth tableau: THE STREETS, A BLOKE, HAPPINESS IS NO FUN. Nana is hooking on the street, more settled into her profession than before. Smoking, surveying the scene, and waiting for trade, she stands before a wall covered with ragged posters; a fragmented phrase directly over her shoulder reads "le zo," evoking the Greek root meaning "life." We may see this as an accident of the shot's composition, but since Godard often fills his frames with carefully selected words and syllables, we may also see it as a reference to the movie's title, and a sign that one particular "life to live" has now enveloped Nana, excluding other possibilities that may once have been available to her. Depending on our interpretation of her story, we may feel she has selected this life with her own individualistic will ("We're always responsible for our actions. We're free") or that it was subtly imposed on her by an alienated, materialistic society. Supporting the second hypothesis over the first, the fragment "zo" also suggests "zoo," a place where animals are confined for the enjoyment of other, more privileged creatures. We may also note another poster alongside Nana, promoting Hollywood star Paul Newman in his popular movie The Hustler (L'Arnaqueur), a sardonic allusion to the tenacity of hustlers and hustling in her daily round.
In any case, we observe Nana in her "cage" as she socializes with other prostitutes, and we visit a typical session with a client, watching her smoothly negotiate the price and make the rounds of nearby rooms when he asks for an additional woman. (The sound track momentarily drops away as he makes his request, weaving another subliminal silence into the texture of the film.) Arbitrarily ignored by the client, who evidently prefers the new member of his menage, she again sits in silhouette before a window as Legrand's mournful music swells. This may be considered a Brechtian interlude, undermining melodrama by pushing its conventions (sad music, romantic pose) to the breaking point; but it might also be seen as patently, even desperately heartfelt, using cliches of the Hollywood "woman's picture" to sympathize with Nana over how easily her contentment can vanish into puffs of lonely cigarette smoke. Either way, Godard is honoring two Hollywood giants here: Alfred Hitchcock, whose masterful profile shots in Vertigo and Psycho could have inspired Nana's pose, and Douglas Sirk, whose use of glass to separate isolated individuals from the plenitude of nature (as in the 1955 All That Heaven Allows) prefigures her place before a window revealing an inviting but unreachable world.
Eleventh tableau: PLACE DE CHATELET. A STRANGER, NANA THE UNWITTING PHILOSOPHER. Rapid tracking shots capture people walking down city sidewalks. Music and ambient sounds come and go. Nana enters a booth in a cafe, sees a man reading and smoking in an adjoining space, and asks if he'll buy her a drink. "Why are you reading?" she asks after a little small talk. "It's my job," the philosopher matter-of-factly answers. Nana admits that she suddenly doesn't know what to say - a recurring situation in her life - and we remember the first tableau, when she repeated a phrase many times instead of developing a thought at length. This prompted Paul's "parrot talk" insult and her own conclusion that "the more we talk, the less words mean."
As a man of words, the philosopher - played by Brice Parain, a respected scholar - would probably not agree with Nana's earlier statement about talking; but she is interested in another side of the question now, and she raises it with him. "I know what I want to say," she observes. "I think about whether it's what I mean ... but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it." The philosopher responds with a rambling account of Porthos's death in Alexandre Dumas's novel Twenty Years After. Here the dullest-witted of the Three Musketeers lights the fuse on an explosive, starts to flee, but suddenly begins wondering how it is possible for the human body to coordinate the activities used in moving; paralyzed by the paradox of unconscious action translated into conscious thought, he stands transfixed and becomes the victim of his own bomb. "The first time he thought, it killed him!" the philosopher summarizes. "Why did you tell me that story?" asks Nana with real anger. "No reason," he replies, "just to talk." This begins a lengthy conversation about the nature and purpose of language, in which certain observations and exchanges clearly reflect Godard's current preoccupations. One is Nana's repetition of her point that "the more we talk, the less words mean," coupled with a wish that people could live in silence. The philosopher says this is desirable but unattainable, for two reasons: "We must think, and for thought we need words.... To communicate one must talk - that is our life." He goes on to elaborate his notion that speech and silence are two different states of being, with the former a result (or even a rebirth) of the latter. "We swing between the two because it's the movement of life," he says. "From everyday life, one rises to a life we call superior: the thinking life. But this life presupposes one has killed the everyday, too-elementary life." Thinking and talking are basically the same - "one cannot distinguish the thought from the words that express it" - and both inhabit a separate plane from ordinary existence in the world of things. This does not mean, of course, that thought or language is isolated from falsehood and error. "Lies too are part of our quest. Errors and lies are very similar," says the philosopher; and Nana adds a bit later that "there is truth in everything, even in error." Godard certainly likes this idea, which he used to justify the "touching" confusions of The Little Soldier. Still, persistent effort and existential responsibility are needed to locate truth-through-error and benefit from it. "One must speak in a way that is right, that doesn't hurt," the philosopher goes on, adding (as Nana stares directly into the camera, signaling Godard's fascination as well as her own) that it is best if one "says what has to be said, does what has to be done without hurting or bruising." Again one hears a plea for goodfaith integrity - one of the few human qualities that can help us through the raging absurdities of our existential condition. The conversation keeps rambling along, very much on the philosopher's terms - a sentence like "Leibnitz introduced the contingent" probably means little to Nana - but spurred and sustained by his companion every step of the way. "What do you think about love?" she finally asks, as music hauntingly returns to the sound track. "The body had to come into it," the philosopher replies, and when he veers off into a series of references that Nana can only find obscure, she steers him back to her wavelength by asking, "Shouldn't love be the only truth?" No, he responds, arguing that love cannot be dependably "truth" since it is not dependably "true" but rather a matter of "bits and pieces" and "arbitrary choices"; still, with maturity one can hope to be "at one" with a lover (the words "at one" imply equality, not possession or control) in a way not possible when one is young. "That means searching. This is the truth of life," he concludes. "That's why love is a solution, on condition that it is true." It is well that the scene ends here, since the philosopher appears to be growing more pretentious and self-involved as he goes along, and Nana lacks the verbal facility to debate him effectively, much less debunk his more dubious notions. What she desires from this conversation is less the philosopher's wisdom, however, than the opportunity to journey through her own thoughts by speaking the words that embody them. She wants to test their truth by hearing their sound, and by watching them register on one of the rare acquaintances who (unlike Raoul and her clients) will listen to her seriously. What the scene offers to Godard is different but no less valuable: another chance to blur the boundaries between reality and artifice, joining fictional and nonfictional "characters" in a setting at once invented (Nana's narrative) and discovered (Karina's discourse with Parain). "We must pass through error to arrive at the truth," says the philosopher, and it would be hard to convey the rationale behind theatre-verite more concisely.
Twelfth tableau: THE YOUNG MAN AGAIN, "THE OVAL PORTRAIT." RAOUL TRADES NANA. Sitting in an apartment, the young man who fetched Nana's cigarettes in the ninth tableau holds a volume of Edgar Allan Poe's complete works, the book covering the lower half of his face. Nana is before the window. He lowers the book to converse with her - but instead of hearing their words, we read the conversation in subtitles as Legrand's ever-mournful refrain fills the sound track. They discuss trifles, revealing the comfortable nature of their relationship. Then we hear a voice as the man, apparently Nana's boyfriend now, reads from Poe; at first the screen is darkened, and as the image fades in, we again see only the upper portion of his face over the book he holds. "I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before," he reads. "It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly and then closed my eyes."
The extraordinary thing about this moment in My Life to Live is that we are hearing Godard himself - not the young actor on the screen, whose mouth is invisible behind the book - speak Poe's words by reciting the passage into a microphone outside the camera's range. "The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl," he continues. His words are accompanied by Karina's immaculately framed image, as if the movie were taking its cue directly from Poe's words. "It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner," he goes on, as Nana poses in silhouette before the window. "The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague but deep shadow of the background. As a thing of art, nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself." Nana now gazes toward the camera in close-up, with only a plain white wall behind her. "But it could have been neither the execution of the work nor the immortal beauty of the countenance which so vehemently moved me. Least of all could it have been that my fancy had mistaken the head for that of a living person. At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed. I had found the spell of the picture in a lifelikeness of expression." Nana is now in profile, sharing the frame with a small portrait reproduction tacked to the wall (not unlike Patricia's decorations in her Breathless apartment). "Is that book yours?" asks Nana, and the man - still speaking in Godard's off-screen voice - repies that he just found it in the room. Then, in an act of ventriloquism that is startling even by Godard's audacious standard, the filmmaker speaks directly to his actress-wife through the young man's persona, as if the latter had no other reason for appearing in the scene. "It's our story," he says to Nana/Karina, "a painter portraying his love! Shall I go on?" She answers affirmatively and he continues, Poe's words now transformed by their new meaning in the film-and-life that Godard and Karina share. "And in sooth, some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well." Becoming increasingly obsessed with his work, Poe's narrative goes on, the painter "turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him." When the painting was complete "save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the body again flickered up as the flame of the lamp. And then the brush was given and then the tint was placed, and for one moment the painter stood entranced before the work he had wrought. And in the next while he gazed he grew tremulous and aghast, and cried with a loud voice, 'This is indeed life itself!' and turned suddenly to regard his beloved. She was dead." Nana slowly fades to black as melancholy music swells once more.
Film critic Angela Dalle Vacche has detected a strain of "iconophobia" in Godard's work, suggesting that his obsession with images and their power results from fear and dread as well as devotion and respect. His lengthy quoting of "The Oval Portrait" supports this diagnosis, as does the silent, subtitled conversation that now resumes between Nana and the young man. A request, "I'd like to go to the Louvre," is answered with, "No, I don't like looking at pictures." An aphorism, "Art and beauty are life," is answered with a change of subject.
Turning from the arts to a more immediate concern, Nana agrees to break off with Raoul and move in with her young boyfriend. The next scene then fades in on an outdoor location as Raoul roughly pushes her across the pavement, criticizing her for not accepting "anyone who pays" as a client. "Sometimes it's degrading," she protests, still clinging to her elusive dignity. They drive off, and we see some of the places they pass from the window of Raoul's car. One is a movie theater showing Truffaut's romantic Jules and Jim, which prompts someone in the car to complain that there's always a queue when you want see a film. Another is the cast-iron sign of a business called Hell & Sons (Enfer et ses fils). As before in Godard's work, no scene is too serious for a joke to disrupt its mood and delay its outcome. The film's last joke is the ironically named Restaurant des Studios, in front of which the story ends. After a long, static shot of the street corner, the camera pans with Raoul's car as it swings into view. Coutard then positions the camera some distance from the curb to allow for smooth lateral movements, filmingt he action in a single shot marked by the flattened out, sideways space that Godard has started to favor in his cinematography. With horror, we realize that Raoul has arranged to sell Nana to another pimp. He pulls her from his car and pushes her in the other man's direction, receiving a packet of cash in return; but the money is short, and he pulls Nana back, refusing to be cheated on the deal. Deciding to destroy the merchandise if he can't drive away with it, the prospective buyer aims his gun at Nana, whose terror is conveyed with poignant force by Karina's barely controlled voice ("No! No!") and harrowingly expressive gestures. His gun fails to fire, and with a tough-guy casualness that borders on caricature ("You shoot. I forgot to load mine") he orders his lackey to finish the job. The thug's bullet smashes into Nana, and a subsequent gunshot - this one from Raoul - ends the little life she still has left to live. Raoul drives off, leaving Nana's corpse alone within the frame. Godard's camera makes a final abrupt gesture, moving sharply downward so the cold, empty street fills the lower portion of the screen. Nana's lifeless body is thus elevated to the upper portion - a faint, materialist echo of the heavenward journey that Joan of Arc might have expected from the God she faithfully served. Nana shared Joan's tears at an earlier point in this story, but Godard's final portrait of her is less redemptive (not to mention inspirational) than the opposite camera movement - upward to a finer, loftier realm - that ended Dreyer's film. Nana has passed through error, but the philosopher's words notwithstanding, it is far from clear that she has arrived at truth.
My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie). 1962. D, S - Jean-Luc Godard; P - Pierre Braunberger; Ph - Raoul Coutard; E - Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan; So - Guy Villette, Jacques Maumont; M - Michel Legrand; C - Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre-S. Labarthe, Peter Kassovitz, Laszlo Szabo. Les Films de la Plei'ade. 35mm. 85 min.
David Sterritt/The Films of Jean-Luc Godard/ Seeing the Invisible/ My Life to Live
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE © Cambridge University Press 1999
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by Roberta Fornari William S. Burroughs wrote Blade Runner, a Movie in 1979. Although this short novella does not represent a turning point in his career, it is exceptional for the sharpness of its apocalyptic vision and the novelty of its presentation technique. Critical works and essays on Burroughs’s corpus, however, have not often mentioned Blade Runner, despite the fact that its futuristic vision provides an unusual showcasing of Burroughs’s political engagements, which often remain buried in other texts. From this point of view, Blade Runner is a good example of how (science) fiction goes beyond the writer’s simple presentation of facts and enters the realm of social commentary. The book/film projects the raw facts of the contemporary American political and health care systems into a possible future, in which uncontrolled diseases, overpopulation and the breakdown of law and order provide the context for a struggle for freedom. In this future, middle class, bourgeois lifestyles are attacked by anarchic values that often become individual or collective violent interventions against an established rule; violence appears as resistance to social control and as a means of liberation for both masses (selforganized groups or gangs) and individuals in order to give human beings a chance to achieve a radically new form of freedom. In this essay I will present the background and history of Blade Runner as an example of an innovative fiction-movie form and discuss the political, social and ethical implications of Burroughs’s presentation of violence, which will be shown to be highly ambivalent, both stylistically and in terms of actual political content. Stylistically, many of the descriptions of violence in Blade Runner make use of divertissement,1 a technique of textual variation that tends towards playful purposes and mockery, aiming to subvert the reader’s expectations of conventional and stylistic clichés. The informal collective violence presented in Blade Runner is often resolved through comedic slapstick interludes that invoke divertissement. These scenes, in which disorder prevails, rather than any logical, political and ideological opposition aimed at changing social values, also provide the clue to Burroughs’s ‘politics’ in Blade Runner. I argue that Burroughs’s purpose is to present a revolution that is not oriented toward the establishment of a new form of the State or society, but one that is against established social order per se, as a precondition for a radically new form of freedom and independence. The target of revolt is therefore not simply the prevailing social order, but also all forms of coercion and discipline, all forms of superimposition and moralistic values that undermine individual freedom. This critique of order and control, a key feature within all Burroughs’s works, is complemented by a strong utopian element, signaling a sometimes-tense interplay between his radical individualism and his recognition of the urgent necessity for humanity to find new methods of emancipation. The tension between these elements is also present as a stylistic feature in his refusal to use linear order and traditional storyline, so that the prominent meta-textual theme, exemplified in the ‘characters’ quest for freedom, comes to reflect, in various ways, the author’s own struggle against control.2 In Blade Runner, much of the violence and the struggle for freedom involves social forces implicated in global change, including the attempted superimposition of oppressive laws and arbitrary order and the chaos engendered by such impositions; therefore the book also functions as a prophetic announcement of the emerging conflicts surrounding globalization and its critics. BLADE RUNNER, A MOVIE: HISTORY AND BACKGROUNDWritten in 1979, in the form of a screenplay and definable as a ‘fiction film’, Blade Runner utilizes Burroughs’s typical satirical style and addresses the problems of health care, medicine distribution and the transformation of the urban social environment into an anarchic zone, as a result of the government’s inability to deal with social problems and needs. Following three defeated Health Care Acts in the early 1980s, social riots erupt as a consequence of the administration’s mistakes in coping with the problems of an overpopulated New York. Violence and social conflicts give rise to the future scenario within which the story takes place: New York looks like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—‘Whole areas in ruins, refugee camps, tent cities. Millions who have fled the city will not return. New York is a ghost city’ (BR 6th section). Beginning with the first lines of the story, the extra-diegetic narrator tells the facts to a projected character, B.J. (a ‘character’ also featured prominently in The Ticket that Exploded), in the immediacy of the present tense. He explains that this film is about different aspects of human life and social systems, and in particular about ‘overpopulation and the growth of vast service bureaucracies. The FDA and the AMA and the big drug companies are like an octopus on the citizen’ (BR 1st section). The narrator then turns to his ‘listener’, B.J.: [Y]ou are asking me to tell you in one sentence what this film is about? I’m telling you it is too big for one sentence—even a life sentence. For starters it’s about the National Health Insurance we don’t got. (BR 1st section) The distinctive performative voice in Burroughs’s novels, together with the cinematic quality of the prose, transforms the text into a series of metamorphic images of an imminent reality not far from our own. The use of cinematic technique in one of the only Burroughs works presented directly as a film script has to be understood in the context of his other experiments with such imagery. There are many features in Burroughs’s texts that have a cinematic influence and create a cinematic impression: the use of the present tense (a rhythmic verbal device typical of script descriptions and offscreen voices); the particularized descriptions of movements and acts that are veritable close-ups and long-shots (the shooting scenes in The Place of Dead Roads, the riots in Blade Runner which remind us of the similarly depicted riots in Naked Lunch); and the continuous back and forth focus on different single parts of the body, as if a camera eye was the observer and the writer only the ‘recording medium’ in the process. Through fragmentation and montage-like associations, these cinematic devices translate into words and give movement to the stillness of written language. Burroughs worked directly with film as well as with sound recording in various media projects during the 1960s. These experiments shed light on his work with verbal language as well as on his interest in the relationship between images and words. Burroughs’s work with Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville and Antony Balch in London and Paris led to the short features Bill and Tony, Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups and William Buys a Parrot, based to some extent on his written works (‘Towers Open Fire’ from Nova Express). The written works created in those years are understandably the most difficult to read in terms of linear order, but they are also the most cinematic in terms of the immediacy of their imagery and the resulting dreamlike effects. The Nova trilogy and The Wild Boys, written with the cut-up method, blend science fiction and utopian fantasy with repeated images of violence, challenging conventional moral codes and requiring the reader to ‘take sides’ in the wild boys’ conflict. The use of cut-ups interrupts the process of easily connecting episodes and story lines, forcing the brain to create new connections and associative lines—as in a movie with a hectic montage. The coupling of cinematic style and technique with a satire of social conventions is well exemplified in Blade Runner, which is very loosely based on The Bladerunner, a mainstream science fiction novel published in 1974 by Alan Nourse. In an interview, Burroughs declared: ‘The idea of the underground medicine was in the book, and I got the idea from that. Then I got in touch with Nourse and he said he would be glad to have the name used because he considered it good publicity for his book’ (Skerl 1980:116). Whether the operation is a postmodern recycling process of sci-fi material or ‘solidarity between two writers’ is not important here. It is relevant, though, that Burroughs used the idea developed by another writer, transforming the story into a form that is not a movie and not exactly a script; it works as fiction but, as is often the case in Burroughs’s stories, the fiction’s political elements and implications are dreadfully similar to reality. Nourse’s book, as well as many other science fiction works (Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson, for example), deals with the future of medicine and health care as a dystopia. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, public authorities establish a system to limit population growth. National health care is free on the condition that people affected by illness agree to be sterilized. Many people reject these draconian measures and an illegal medical system is created; doctors and nurses perform underground operations. The central character of Nourse’s story is Billy, the bladerunner, who smuggles medical tools and equipment and serves as a vital connection between doctors and the people who need operations because they have been disenfranchised from the officially sanctioned system. In Burroughs’s version, the idea of underground medicine is drawn and transformed into a piece of avant-garde art and pamphlet-style divertissement, which calls attention to the general condition of humanity. The setting is New York, transformed into a sort of Interzone after riots erupt in the early 1980s against the Medicine Acts; New York City is divided into areas either patrolled by police or left, in their absence, to gangs or less-organized groups of local citizens. The first sections of the screenplay describe the background for the events of the text in 2014, the year in which the movie would supposedly take place. Events previous to 2014 generate the postatomic setting and are described by a voice that seems to emerge, by its language and rhythm, from a media broadcast (a more literary than cinematic device of telling a story): ‘This film is about America. What America was and what America could be, and how those who try to stifle the American dream are defeated.’; ‘This film is about cancer and that’s a powerful subject.’; and ‘This film is about a second chance for Billy the blade runner, and for all humanity’ (BR 1st section). The use of the metropolis as the setting for the film narrative has interesting parallels. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the metropolis has been the protagonist in many movies, a place of alienation and political control (Metropolis; Fritz Lang 1927), a postmodern locus of mysterious implication (Blade Runner, Ridley Scott 1982; Brazil, 1984 and 12 Monkeys, 1996, both by Terry Gilliam) and a virtual creation for total control over human bodies and energy (The Matrix, Andy and Larry Wachowsky 1999). Although we cannot be certain if these directors read Burroughs’s work, they were undoubtedly influenced by the pervasiveness of the zeitgeist that he tapped into. Blade Runner’s New York becomes the ‘world center for underground medicine, the most glamorous, the most dangerous, the most exotic, vital, far-out city the world has ever seen’ (BR 1st section). It is the ‘real’ city, after all, that is not very different from the idea and stereotype we receive from movies: New York is a place where ‘everything is possible’, a city that has always presented its events (fictional and real) as absolutely exceptional, and Burroughs is certainly aware of the overlapping strains of fiction and reality. The difference is that in Blade Runner, the disenfranchised population of New York City possesses a clear narrative rationale for the riots and revolts: these events are precipitated by the discontent that follows the legalization and government distribution of heroin. What Burroughs calls the ‘United States Health Service’ took over distribution through government clinics, and built up an intricate bureaucracy of corrupt police and investigators, so that ‘“[m]any people who were not addicts got on the program and made a comfortable living selling off their allowance”’ (BR 4th section). In Blade Runner’s fictional world, any attempt to regulate or impose ‘order’ marginalizes a social group, making the National Health Act as dangerous in its social effects as any other Act: Ironically, the high death rate was largely due to the government’s efforts to forestall the outbreak by strict weapon-control measures. The National Firearms Registration Act of 1982 debarred anyone with a criminal record or any record of drug addiction or mental illness, and all those on the welfare rolls, from buying or possessing any firearms of any description including air guns. This left the disaffected middle-class in possession of more firearms than any other group. (BR 4th section) This situation pushes the Percival’s Soldiers of Christ, a racist and fascist group, to attempt to take over New York and ‘slaughter all ethnic minorities, beatniks, dope-fiends’, etc. As is usual in Burroughs’s texts, warfare and riots give way to a humorous images, in this case of ‘doctors, nurses and orderlies’ fighting against the rioters with ‘scalpels saws and bedpans’ and other ready-made weapons. The Soldiers of Christ are defeated, ‘split into small groups and, abandoning their holy crusade, take to raping, looting, killing in the middle class neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan ….’ (BR 5th section). The result of the battles is a city divided into an ‘anarchic’ lower side where it is possible to be operated on and to find any drug, and the rest of the city, almost empty and abandoned, with ‘shabby open-air markets and vegetable gardens in vacant lots. Some are crowded, others virtually deserted’ (BR 3rd section). BLADE RUNNER, A MOVIE AS POLITICAL COMMENTARYBlade Runner was written while Burroughs was living in New York, and has to be understood within the political context of American society at this time. If we choose to separate these fictional scenarios from the relevant political issues, we would miss the underlying ‘ideology’ of the novel: Blade Runner warns against every attempt to disrupt the ethical value of freedom and individual choice through ‘top-down’ political intervention. The urgent need for liberation and freedom from any superimposition, and above all political control, shows an ambivalence that I will try to follow step by step in its implications. Political control in advanced industrial societies is organized through institutional authority and political structure, which together come to form the State apparatus. In order to govern and administer the public sphere the State needs control and authority over the actions of individuals and groups. The State exerts power (more or less coercive) over individuals on whom rules are imposed, and makes use of bureaucratically organized police, armed forces, public administration, education, health care and environmental management systems. Political control in modern states therefore exhibits strong tendencies toward centralization and bureaucratization, tendencies that are accompanied by increasing diffuseness of authority and operational inefficiency, giving rise to contradictions. In Blade Runner, political control has become so diffuse that its limits and contradictions arouse a disruptive diverse response: ‘grassroots’ groups of people fighting against the Health Care Acts and producing ‘outlaw’ medicine instead of universal health care, a corrupt medical lobby defending its power, and scores of individuals who struggle to survive. Helicopter view of Manhattan … Overpopulation has led to ever-increasing governmental control over the private citizen, not on the old-style police-state models of oppression and terror, but in terms of work, credit, housing, retirement benefits, and medical-care: services that can be withheld. These services are computerized. No number, no service. However, this has not produced the brainwashed standardized human units postulated by such linear prophets as George Orwell. Instead a large percentage of the population has been forced underground. How large, no one knows. These people are numberless. (BR 3rd section) The implication of the term ‘numberless’ is double since it functions first, simply, as an indefinite term (we do not know how many people live underground) and, second, as a political referent: to be numberless implies the impossibility of being cured in a hospital or in any other health care structure. ‘So America goes underground. They all make their own medicines in garages, basements, and lofts, and provide their own service […] All you need is access to the medications’ (BR 1st section). The science fiction setting of underground laboratories, flooded lower tunnels giving rise to an ‘underground Venice’, and buildings ‘joined by suspension bridges, a maze of platforms, catwalks, slides, lifts’ (BR 1st section) is common to many of Burroughs’s works (especially the ‘Interzone’ of Naked Lunch). Such imagery is not so futuristic if we compare it to the appearance of cities in developing countries, or indeed to the emergence of ‘third world’ conditions in modern, capitalist societies. We should remember that the future imagined by Burroughs is the reality of the 1980s Ronald Reagan reforms that dismantled the New Deal and Great Society social welfare initiatives. Burroughs’s fictitious premises fit the reality of recent history: By 1980, pressure had been growing to put through a National Health Act. This was blocked by the medical lobby, doctors protesting that such an Act would mean the virtual end of private practice, and that the overall quality of medical service would decline. The strain on an already precarious economy was also cited. Drug companies, fearing that price regulation would slash profits, spent millions to lobby against the proposed bill and ran full-page ads in all the leading newspapers. And above all, the health insurance companies screamed that the Act was unnecessary and could only lead to increased taxes for inferior service. (BR 3rd section) In his article ‘William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction’, Frank D. McConnell points out that science fiction is the least futuristic of popular genres, ‘attempting as it does a constant purification of the present through the neo-romance landscape of the future’ (1967:97). From this standpoint, Blade Runner represents an attempt to anticipate humanity’s future through the representation of the most dreadful risks in order to provide a ‘second chance’ for mankind to achieve a ‘stateless society’; Burroughs’s political utopia is therefore anarchic and anti-collectivist. In the story, Billy the bladerunner becomes the character who can travel back and forth in time, granting him a chance to correct his mistakes. Aside from any possible interpretation of the screenplay’s literary genre, Burroughs offers an acute and realistic vision. Solving the problems of health care and medicine distribution (especially in developing countries) has become not only a political necessity in terms of the economic satisfaction of public needs, but also one of the main points of contemporary political struggle in Western countries. The welfare state is the organ of a general redistribution of wealth among the population and is, above all, the expression of ‘big government’ that has mutated into ‘a set of despotic instruments of domination for the totalitarian production of subjectivity’ (Hardt and Negri 2001:324, my translation). As explained by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘“big government” leads the great orchestra of subjectivities transformed into commodities and establishes borders of desire and lines along which the work is being divided in the globalized order’ (324, my translation). The activities carried out by bureaucracies, private institutions with public functions and private health care firms, are all exemplars of control structures foisted upon individuals in terms of their obligation to choose only from what ‘the market offers’. But this ‘market’ tends more and more toward monopoly practices supported by big government. In reaction, Burroughs’s extra-diegetic narrator in Blade Runner asserts a supposedly anarchic, hyperbolic position that in fact expresses the values of the traditional small-scale capitalist: ‘Is this freedom? Is this what America stands for? […] We have been taught that if you put a better product on the free market, the superior product will sell’ (BR 1st section). This is not to imply, however, that Burroughs ever intended to offer a classical political position. His anarchic view has always tended to favor forms of rebellion that are far from any acceptable political solution in a sociopolitical context of organized collectivities. His micro-societies (as in The Wild Boys), his rebel groups and gangs, always border on acceptability (depending on the moral code of their opposition)—waiting to be recognized as ‘legitimate’ groups while they are opposed to mainstream society. One of the main problems in analyzing Burroughs’s political concerns lies in the fact that he always denies any political involvement, while at the same time proposing intrinsically political solutions. In his novels, Burroughs was lucidly aware of the sociopolitical landscape of the times. He saw his works not only as literary fictions seemingly detached from reality and intended as ‘hallucinations’, but also as works of futurology, dealing with the political, social and economic possibilities of a world in which individuals’ lives are increasingly controlled through specialized systems. In this evergrowing control system, the imaginative tracks of a story or novel may disturb and subvert the existing order; therefore, for Burroughs, the act of writing is an anarcho-political act. This anarchic position is perhaps a constant point in Burroughs’s views of life, and the quasi-libertarian position represented in the struggle against power and control is a typical American vision (Tanner 1971). It is, indeed, an example of a distinctively American method of disrupting order and continuity in the name of personal and individual freedom, and is reflected in both Burroughs’s style and his theoretical principles: This film is about the future of medicine and the future of man. For man has no future unless he can throw off the dead past and absorb the underground of his own being. In the end, underground medicine merges with the medical establishment, to the great benefit of both. (BR 1st section) When Jennie Skerl asked Burroughs to comment on the idea contained in these lines, he explained: ‘A man has to get beyond his conditioning, or his future is going to be a repetition, word-forword repetition. I would say that for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don’t have a future at all. And it’s only by a sort of break with the past that anything new and different will emerge—which is very rare—a very rare occurrence’ (Skerl 1980:117). VIOLENCE AS FREEDOM—VIOLENCE AS DIVERTISSEMENTGenerally, the search for a new condition in Burroughs’s diegesis passes through the experience of rebellion, and more often violence. The most exemplary works in this respect are Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys and his last trilogy, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. In Blade Runner, the ‘spectacle of violence’ is supported by less serious manifestations, privileging satire and slapstick comedy. Consequently, political concerns seem to be overridden by the intrinsic fictional purpose of the story. Riots and rebellions become necessities in the overthrow of authority; individuals such as the bladerunners and the illegal doctors prefer to live in a destabilized underworld where it is possible to find drugs and weapons, to be operated on and, above all, to be free even if this freedom entails considerable risks of its own: The transplant operation is performed in a subway operating room by a delco plant. The delco is heard throughout this scene, sometimes sputtering ominously as the lights dim. All the equipment is homemade, requiring continual readjustment and tinkering. Billy goes to fetch The Hand, best operating assistant in the industry […] The Hand is a Blues addict. The Blues is a metallic variation on heroin […] Blue is twenty times stronger than heroin. (BR 13th section) The basic political element of rebellion is problematized by Burroughs, as he uses a stylistic divertissement through which ideological subversion is often denied or set apart from the seriousness of the subject matter in favor of a slapstick scene that reasserts the anarchic element essential for any (self) liberation. This ambivalence is the result of a profound political and stylistic anarchy on Burroughs’s part. All his works are rooted in this way of thinking, and denote the struggle against any superimposition of authority. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Jim McMenamin (1987:171–95), Burroughs answered the question of his ambiguous presentation of violence--‘a combination of horror, black humor, grim fascination, maybe even sympathy’—which could be related to the literary experience of both the Marquis de Sade and Franz Kafka as analyzed in The Algebra of Need by Eric Mottram (1971). Burroughs’s response to the problem of presenting violence as an exorcism or a celebration is pragmatic rather than ethical. Nonetheless his fictional world is dominated by a strong moral conception of good and evil: There’s a lot of violence in my work because violence is obviously necessary in certain circumstances. I’m often talking in a revolutionary, guerrilla context where violence is the only recourse. I feel a degree of ambivalence with regard to any use of violence. There are certainly circumstances where it seems to be indicated. How can you protect people without weapons? (McCaffery and McMenamin 1987:176) In Naked Lunch, that ambivalence is exemplified in the words and acts of Doctor Benway, perhaps Burroughs’s best achievement in terms of satirical characterization and black humor. Benway’s psychological violence presents interesting parallels with the reality and fictional representation of violence in advanced industrial societies. Violence exerted by the agencies of the State—the police, the armed forces and other empowered institutions—acquires a legal status, particularly in its ultimate iterations in the forms of capital punishment and the legitimization of war, which allows it to escape the sanctions accorded to acts of violence on the part of non-state agencies. According to Ann Norton, and following Max Weber, we may distinguish four types of violence, further differentiated by two criteria: the conformity of the violent act to extant legal or customary forms, and the individual or collective nature of the act. The first criterion distinguishes those acts that are evidently rulebound, taking place within existing structures. The second criterion considers acts that manifest a conscious participation in collective identity. The types of violence, according to these distinctions, are formal collective, informal collective, formal individual and informal individual (Norton 1993:146). War is a form of formal collective violence, whereas riots and revolts may be defined as forms of informal collective violence with an awareness that ‘all collective action is political for it reflects the participation of individuals in a common, incorporeal, entity’ (Norton 1993:146). From this standpoint we can consider that violence may also be intended as reaction to authority, in the forms of riots or revolts, sometimes limited to groups in unique circumstances. This informal collective violence will be considered ‘illegitimate’ by public or established authorities since the concept and distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ is founded by the same authority that makes the rules. From this point of view, and according to Weber, only the State can possess a monopoly on violence. Weber’s analysis defines the State as follows: ‘A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ (Mann 1986:55). Hannah Arendt, elaborating on this theme, notes that the type of violence exerted by the State or internal police actions, though labeled legitimate, should be subsumed under the euphemistic rubric ‘the exercise of authority’ (1969:4). For fiction, the approach must be different, since language, style, visual appeal and ethical implications are involved. In this context it is important to point out that Burroughs’s approach toward violence as fiction contains a deep imaginary level of fantasy that is opposed to real circumstances. It is as if Burroughs’s texts, and Blade Runner in particular, signal: This is the world we live in, this is the total power that rules our lives—this story is the response, the ultimate attempt to free human individuals. Fictional violence always expresses, in one way or another, the real violence of its social context, including the phenomenal violence reported by institutional media (television above all). The way in which accounts of violence are told and reported can be compared to the way in which violence is experienced and culturally approached. In Screening Violence, Stephen Prince explains how in some cases filmmakers cannot control the reactions of viewers to the graphic violence they put on screen (Prince 1999:1). In the case of textual violence, the impact is less ‘immediate’ and the response is more directly related to stylistic and literary devices. To read a violent scene is to pass through a process of making a mental image of that scene, a requirement that changes substantially in the sharp immediacy of cinema. In addition, movie images may be violent not only in content but also in their graphic representation of the violent act or event, depending on the director’s style and use of the camera eye. Writers often turn to satire and comedy in order to render violent representation more ‘acceptable’, as do movie directors, whose work can be hampered by both censorship and market forces. Since violence is often intrinsic to satire, it is also easier for an author to use satire as a vehicle for violence against established order without the risk of being refused or censored. The main risk, on the contrary, is the danger of misinterpretation or relegation to a genre below that of ‘serious art’. Satirical written works elicit greater acceptance and tolerance of violence because the satirical intent is tempered by a form of cultural mediation that reflects the rebellion against moral conventions. In satirical works violence often uncovers the writer’s beliefs and convictions, especially when the text’s subject matter deals with contemporary problems. Accordingly, there are two aspects to Burroughs’s use of satirical style: the first one aims at attacking arbitrary moral conventions that limit individual freedom in order to show the profound ambivalence of any form of violence, whether legitimate or illegitimate; the second one is that his satirical language can be defined, especially in some passages marked by a pamphlet style, as verbal or textual violence. As Mottram describes, Burroughs uses a language that fits with the world he experienced: [A] loveless world whose control is entirely in the hands of capitalists, doctors, psychiatrists, con men, judges, police and military, whose aim it is to perpetuate mass infantilism, apathy and dependence […] [Nausea] tends to become horror of the obscenity towards which total power necessarily grows. (Mottram 1971:43) In such a condition it is necessary to use violence to resist such totalizing iterations of power in order to recover individuality and independence. The position taken by Burroughs against capital punishment is a perfect synthesis of both a violent style of writing and the violence exerted by ‘civilized’ countries. Its satirical intent, however, is not at all symbolic, but quite literal: These sections [in Naked Lunch] are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon. (NL xli–xlii) The experience of being tortured, convicted or punished is significantly absent from Blade Runner; the scenes of violence are represented as riots and revolts in opposition to the forces of law and order. We can therefore read Blade Runner as concerned with the phenomenon of informal collective violence; riots and rebellion that may arise when public authorities, government and institutions are not present as social and democratic markers capable of improving living conditions, but when they are, on the contrary, overly intrusive in public privacy and inimical to individual freedom of choice. Blade Runner therefore addresses an ethical problem: The riots in the novella occur when the citizenry rebel against not only the welfare state and public authority, but also against the sterilization initiatives imposed upon those people who accept medical treatment. The resulting society becomes a chaotic city where power is totally corrupt, and authority has reached the worst of all possible conditions—arbitrariness. The consequence of this arbitrariness is that the average person cannot influence the actions of bureaucrats and doctors, who remain free (a dreadful freedom that Burroughs describes as equally ambivalent) to perform any kind of experiment; the environment is as chaotic as the effect it produces: Room changes and now contains a number of people, ticker tape machines, telephones, TV screens. These are highly-placed officials, bored and cynical. One is doing a crossword puzzle. Two are sniffing coke […] The bureaucrat is leafing through papers. He points to a graph on the wall. Now look at these cancer statistics. We are dealing here not just with an increase in cancer but with an increase in susceptibility to cancer… a breakdown in the immunity system. Why does a cancer or any virus take a certain length of time to develop? Immunity. Remove the immunity factor, and virus processes can be accelerated. (BR 14th section) Burroughs is ambivalent on this point: is it even desirable to want a society where violence is the only way to obtain freedom and independence? What form will a society where everything is possible ultimately assume? Is there indeed as sharp a distinction between reality and fiction as Burroughs’s cinematic writing style implies? Are we really free once we have disrupted the regime of authoritarian order? Burroughs’s ambivalence is perhaps the only viable position to assume in our civilization today, as marked by the postmodern loss of trust toward what Jean François Lyotard (1979) calls the ‘metanarratives’ and the inability to detect and understand the forms of power that regulate our lives. What Burroughs implies with his satirical style is that these forms of power are now decentralized; they have turned into an octopus-like structure disseminated across a globalized continuum. That is why he writes of ‘guerrilla’ action rather than conventional revolution or war, which often possesses a ‘legitimate’ consensus. Guerilla actions are generally illegal, and result from emergency conditions; they are self-organized, violent responses to the ‘legitimate’ violence of authority. Authorized violence, as a ‘non-emergency’ condition, can more easily assume forms that comport to the commonplace scenarios of late capital: weapons, money, media broadcasting. In this scenario of global capital embedded in Blade Runner (as well as in all Burroughs’s works), the underground forces that use informal collective violence—as opposed to formal collective violence represented by the State, the police, and so on—need to be recognized, at least on the page, as a ‘legitimate’ presence with a legitimate right to be free from the imposition of an overly intrusive power apparatus. The freedom of the bladerunner is manifest in his ability to manage and organize his own life, yet his intervention is limited to local situations. His work does not have ‘revolutionary’ connotations; it is, after all, individual intervention, or, in some cases, limited to small groups. The bladerunner is a rebel who follows a personal ethical conviction and fights against imposed order—but he is also alone, waiting perhaps to be followed by a multitude of other individuals. His freedom is also cast by Burroughs as a form of salvation: freedom to associate in ‘underground’ groups, homosexual and/or anarchic communities, and other autonomous networks outside the conservative and established social conventions. At the end of the novel, Billy achieves a meta-consciousness of his existence in a zone between the past and future, where he runs his blade haphazardly in and out of time, representing the possibilities of an undetermined future. In conclusion, Burroughs’s representation of violence forms a multilayered tapestry of sociopolitical expression formulated through disruptive and often satirical linguistic techniques that reflect ambivalence toward the use of violence bound up with the necessity for people to fight against the machination of superimposed order. In Burroughs’s text, the disruption of the standard narrative story line, verbal language and linear methods of event presentation assume a hectic visual power, and the reading process approaches a ‘pure’ cinematic experience conveyed through words: Blade Runner is a novella written in the form of a screenplay, and as such it has the features of a virtual movie. Its scenes should be imagined as movie images, running on a ‘mind screen’ imbued with a capability of creative visualization. Burroughs’s aim, after all, is to free language, structure, and individual experience from any structural superimposition of the ‘reality film’. This project is carried out through the appropriation of film devices, transposed into destructured and meta-fictional narrative, that emerge freely during the production of the reality film. The page becomes a virtual space where ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’, because whatever rules limit conventional narrative are deliberately disregarded. There are no rules that limit fantasy and fictional possibilities. Burroughs’s graphic vision of a future that extends the logic of control to such disciplinary extremes suggests its own antidote in not only the inability of control to become total, but also in the articulation of its possible expansion into the future. Burroughs’s fictional works are a form of resistance against a ‘civilization’ that harnesses human potential to the telos of the exploitation of labor, the alienation of consumption and the control of desire. It is to this concept of ‘civilization’ that Burroughs’s works—and Blade Runner in particular—offer violence as resistance and as liberation. Burroughs’s texts are the legacy of this vision, and in the age of globalization, both a warning and a blueprint. Retaking the Universe/William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization Edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, India Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England It is useless to pretend that human creatures find their contentment in repose. What they require is action, and they will create it if it is not offered by life. - Charlotte Bronte, quoted by Jean-Luc Godard, 1952 Although I felt ashamed of it at one time, I do like A bout de souffle very much, but now I see where it belongs - along with Alice in Wonderland. I thought it was Scarface. -Jean-Luc Godard, 1962 Godard's first feature traveled to English-speaking countries as Breathless, a suitably snappy title for a speedy, jazzed-up picture that hops to the rhythm of gunshots, bongo drums, and the on-the-run life-style of its hero. Its French title, A bout de souffle, points to a different meaning, however: being winded, maybe exhausted, or even at the end of breath, as the hero literally is when he collapses in the street at the end of his ultimately fatal career. Of course it's a jaunty title, but it's also an ironic, ambivalent one. In any case, it helped launch the picture - and Godard's feature filmmaking career - with a roar that still reverberates. Breathless remains his most widely known and frequently seen work. The story is based on a scenario by Francois Truffaut, a few pages long and providing a reasonably close outline of the finished film. The hero is Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a rascally Parisian who makes his living as a stealer of cars, seducer of women, and all-around rogue with lots of connections but few friends on whom he can depend in a crisis. His first act in the movie is to hot-wire a car, then drive off with hardly a backward glance at the woman who helped him pull off the job. Taking a casual joyride through the countryside, he chatters away to himself - and to us, breaking classical film's strict rule against acknowledging the camera - when he isn't playing with a pistol he's found in the glove compartment. Chased by motorcycle cops for speeding, he dodges them by pulling off the road, but gets spotted when he leaves the car to restart its engine. "Don't move or I'll shoot," says Michel, who has a flair for melodrama and a taste for cliches; but there's nothing cliched about the way Godard's camera shoots him shooting the cop: sliding down his arm to his hand, caressing the gun's slowly revolving chamber and implacably aimed barrel, cutting to the cop's falling body just as the shot rings out, then to a distant overhead view as Michel runs frantically away. Michel is clearly a man who breaks the rules when he feels like it - and so is Godard, whose innovative style made its debut with those extreme close-ups of Michel's gun followed by the manic jump cut to his getaway, seen in (alienating) long shot just when an ordinary filmmaker would have used (emotion-filled) close-ups to build the psychological identification that Godard has generally found too easy and manipulative for comfort. Back in the city, Michel gives us further glimpses of his personality and predilections: stealing from another girlfriend while her back is turned, hunting for a pal who owes him the money he needs to get out of town, playing cat and mouse with two Paris cops trying to solve the Route 7 murder he committed. Most important, he goes to the Champs-Elysees and romances Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a young American who studies at the Sorbonne and hopes to become a writer for the New York Herald Tribune, which she sells on the boulevard for pocket money. Michel makes no effort to hide his infatuation with her, but her commitment to their affair is obviously uncertain. They stroll in a lengthy traveling shot while he declares his love, complains about his troubles in Paris, and asks her to move to Rome with him when he collects his debt. She also talks about money, saying she needs her college-student status to keep her family's financial support rolling in; but mainly she banters with her boyfriend and fills the screen with sunny charm. Godard appears to be as entranced with Seberg as Michel is with the character she plays. Still, the atmosphere is not all romance and repartee. Immediately after they part, Michel walks past a movie poster that reminds us of his reckless side: "Live dangerously until the end!" it shouts, underscored by a brassy chord on the sound track. When a pedestrian gets struck by a car nearby, Michel joins the crowd leaning over his body, gazes at him intently, and crosses himself as he walks thoughtfully away, possibly thinking of his own close acquaintance with mortality. "The future. I'm interested in it," he had told Patricia a little earlier, complaining that the Tribune printed no horoscope. His uneasiness and superstition seem justified, given the instability he courts with his criminal ways. During his next date with Patricia he excuses himself long enough to violently rob a harmlesslooking man in the men's room of a club, then regales her with a tabloidworthy tale about a lawless couple. She listens with enough concentration to reveal her own interest in breaking society's rules. She also aims a bit of petty meanness toward Michel, publicly kissing an American journalist who might be valuable to her career. Later scenes reinforce the impressions of Michel and Patricia given by the film's first part. He dodges the police dragnet that closes in ever more tightly; implores Patricia for love, companionship, and sex; and tracks down the money-owing friend he's convinced is his passport to a clean getaway and a better tomorrow. She hangs out with Michel in her apartment; covers a press conference with a famous novelist; does her own detective dodging when the police connect her with Michel; and announces that she is pregnant, seeming genuinely upset when Michel receives the news with a shrug of annoyance. Later she caves in with surprising speed (or maybe not so surprising, after the pregnancy scene) when a cop confronts her and demands her cooperation. Still more surprising is her abrupt decision to phone the police and reveal Michel's whereabouts. Returning to the borrowed apartment they've been hiding in, she tells him of her betrayal, and he responds with a mixture of anger, exasperation, and fatigue. "I'm beat anyway and I just want to sleep," he tells the friend who finally shows up with his money. Soon afterward the detective guns Michel down, and he staggers up the street as if trying to escape - or catch? - the death now looming in his path. Michel expires in the middle of one last misunderstanding, trivial in itself yet important since it makes English-speaking watchers of the movie more confused than the French-speaking characters in the movie. "It's really disgusting," Michel says with his dying breath, using words ("C'est vraiment degueulasse") that clearly refer to the situation in which he and Patricia have landed; yet the film's English subtitles translate his sentence as, "You are .. . really ..., " suggesting a final insult aimed at the woman who caused this tragedy. Patricia has needed help with her French more than once during the movie, and although the word "degeuelasse" has run like a motif through the film's dialogue, she asks a stranger to translate Michel's dying words. "He said, 'You are really a little bitch,'" the stranger replies, taking the meaning from "degueulasse" (as if he had read the misleading subtitle!) that would apply had Michel used it as a noun instead of an adjective. More accurately in this case, the word means "disgusting" and even "sickening," with a hint of the "nausea" that Jean-Paul Sartre evoked in describing his existentialist view of the human condition. Michel is not insulting Patricia alone. He is reviling all that has brought them to this sorry state. The film's ending is a richly ironic coda to a tale of star-crossed lovers with an utter inability to get their signals straight. Michel dies after closing his eyes with his own hand; Patricia gazes into the camera and mumbles, "A little what? I don't understand"; and the screen fades to black as she turns her pertly coiffed head away from us, the filmmakers, and everything that's happened in the past ninety minutes. (Godard originally wanted Patricia to rifle through Michel's pockets, but in a strikingly Patricialike move, Seberg refused to carry this out.) The finale remains rich even with the garbled subtitling, but it has an extra layer of perplexity for moviegoers who share Patricia's imperfect grasp of her boyfriend's lingo. Writing some twenty years after Breathless was released, a critic observed that one of the "remarkable" things about Godard's work had always been "its closeness to the contemporary moment." Although some later films would stray from this principle, it is generally true of Godard's career, beginning with his first feature-length production. Breathless was filmed in 1959, an eventful year for French society. On the political front, agitation continued to flow from Algeria's anticolonial war, leading French President Charles de Gaulle to offer a peace plan based on the prospect of (conveniently delayed) independence if Algerian voters approved it four years after hostilities ended. In mass communications, the number of television sets in France reached 1.5 million, behind West Germany and way behind Britain but still in step with Europe's increasingly televisual culture. Elsewhere on the cultural spectrum, playwright Jean Anouilh finished Becket; or, The Honor of God, contributing to the antiauthoritarian rumbling that would gather strength in coming years. In film, Alain Resnais made his feature debut with the strikingly fresh Hiroshima mon amour, from a script by experimental novelist Marguerite Duras; more important still, Truffaut brought his first major production - The 400 Blows, a loosely autobiographical tale about growing up absurd on the streets of Paris - to the hugely prestigious Cannes International Film Festival, where he walked away with the coveted Best Director award, instantly making himself and his New Wave friends significant players in world cinema. Still, as busy as France was at the tail end of the 1950s, the eyes of Godard and his colleagues were also fixed on the United States, thanks to their ongoing fascination with Hollywood and American popular culture. Without question, 1959 was a noteworthy year on that side of the ocean too. Edward Albee's short play The Zoo Story helped bring avant-garde expressionism to popular attention in theater, just as the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's audacious Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum did in architecture. Robert Rauschenberg gave a major impetus to pop art with Monogram, perhaps the most influential of his collagelike "combine paintings." The sexually frank novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, by British author D. H. Lawrence, reached American printing presses some thirty years after authorities had banned it for obscenity. Even more pungently, Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs completed his Naked Lunch, bringing a radically disjunctive style to drugged-up subject matter that mainstream publishers would have found unthinkable a few years earlier. A more prolific Beat author, Jack Kerouac, virtually flooded the market with significant works, from the Evergreen Review essay "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose" to the major novel Doctor Sax; or, Faust Fart Three, the minor novel Maggie Cassidy, and the epic poetry cycle Mexico City Blues. All the while, directors lauded by the New Wave group were filling movie screens, making expansive use of their mature talents under the new expressive freedom made available by the continuing breakdown of Production Code censorship rules. A few examples will suffice: Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo; Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest; Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life; Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder; John Ford's The Horse Soldiers; Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome and Westbound; new pictures by Vincente Minnelli, Samuel Fuller, and Frank Tashlin; and the extraordinary Suddenly Last Summer by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had been the subject of one of Godard's first articles in the short-lived Gazette du cinema at the beginning of the decade. Godard wrote more about French films than Hollywood productions in 1959, and his ten-best list is French from start to finish. Nevertheless, he did find time to praise Sirk, applaud Anthony Mann, and give Blake Edwards a mild pat on the back in articles for Cahiers and Arts; and his general interest in American film remained strong, as his next ten-best list showed by including Hollywood pictures from Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Donen, and Fritz Lang. Explaining the Cahiers group's predisposition toward American film, critic Jim Hillier cites "the ways in which American cinema was perceived to relate to American society: it was, often enough, socially 'critical,' but critical without being directly 'political,'" a position many French artists found appealing. He also notes film historian Thomas Elsaesser's observation that French intellectuals looked to American culture for "works of fiction that could serve as creative models, representative of their own situation and embodying specifically modern tensions - between intellect and emotion, action and reflection, consciousness and instinct, choice and spontaneity." These were prominent among the tensions that preoccupied Godard, and they were chief obsessions of an American group so journalistically notorious by 1959 that Godard must have been aware of it: the aforementioned Beat Generation, a band of authors, poets, and cultural provocateurs whose influences ranged from American literature and Asian religion to France's powerful existentialist movement and, more modestly, the French movies loved by Kerouac ever since his French-Canadian upbringing in a New England town. I have written about the Beats elsewhere,7 and I invoke them here not to reindulge a personal interest but to suggest that an awareness of the Beat sensibility - a way of thinking, feeling, and being that fascinated European as well as American artists - provides important clues to the making of Breathless and its galvanizing impact on international cinema. Although he has not referred specifically to the Beats in his comments on the film, Godard's sympathy with the directness and spontaneity embodied by their work shines through numerous remarks he made during this period - in 1962, for instance, when he praised American screenwriters for employing "the kind of simplicity that brings depth." American filmmakers "are real and natural," he went on, adding that his compatriots "must find the French attitude as [Americans] have found the American attitude. To do so, one must begin by talking about things one knows.... Filming should be a part of living, something normal and natural," full of "seeking, improvising, experimenting" rather than a "mental departmentalizing [that] also corresponds to a departmentalization of social truths." Like these words, Breathless bristles with the Beat spirit, which had reached a peak of fame and influence at precisely the time when Godard set to work on his film. Of all the writers who developed and promoted that spirit, Kerouac was the one most directly in sync with Godard's artistic personality. I am not suggesting that Godard was directly influenced by Kerouac, and there is no clear evidence that he had read Kerouac's books or articles. However, both were iconoclastic thinkers with a zest for experience and ideas; both were impatient with the 1950s mindset of conservatism, consensus, and conformity; and both sought release from this questionable Zeitgeist in a torrent of creative activity that challenged sociocultural norms with a charged-up mixture of impulsiveness, irreverence, and flamboyant rejection of common sense. Central to this attitude was the concept of improvisation. Kerouac had embraced this in the novel that made him famous two years earlier: On the Road, written on long rolls of paper in nonstop bursts of "bop-trance composition." He had then shown its continuing value with The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums in 1958. Kerouac was so committed to improvisation ("first thought best thought") that he crusaded against all forms of rewriting and revising, even chiding his Beat colleague Allen Ginsberg for correcting the errors made when his fingers slipped on the typewriter keyboard. Behind his quest for spontaneous "wild form" was a conviction that living, thinking, and art making are inseparable from one another, and that only the most unmediated forms of creativity - such as his spontaneous writing and the improvised jazz that often inspired it - can capture the quicksilver flow of lived experience in all its energy, diversity, and mutability. Godard in 1959 was a somewhat more prudent and methodical artist, but his sympathies leaned in similar directions. The production history and the final form of Breathless bear this out. "I improvise, certainly, but with material which goes a long way back," he said in 1962, managing to endorse spontaneity and preparation at the same time. He is hedging his commitment to in-the-moment creativity here, of course, by acknowledging that his material has undergone much thought before being commited to celluloid; yet even this accords with Kerouac's practice, since the Beat author thought obsessively about events prior to his marathon writing sessions.10 Putting things on paper was the continuation of composition by other means. Ditto for Godard, who saw every aspect of a cineaste's life and work as part of the filmmaking process. Before the shooting of Breathless began, Godard supplemented Truffaut's scenario with a fully written beginning - featuring Patricia on her Champs-Elysees paper route - and many notes for subsequent scenes. Still worried about his lack of a completed script, he abruptly decided to rely on speed and confidence alone, reasoning that "in a single day, if one knows how to go about it, one should be able to complete a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead, I shall invent at the last minute." Thinking of this as "last-minute focusing" rather than full-fledged improvisation, he enlisted his cast as accomplices in the experiment but limited their contribution by filming without sound. This allowed him to supply them with their dialogue, written shortly beforehand, by simply calling it out while the camera rolled; their voices were dubbed in later, synchronized with their lip movements. In a medium far more cumbersome and collaborative than the typewritten page, Godard thus approached Kerouac's ideal of spontaneous authorship, literally speaking the film's words through the mouths of his performers. The film's quality of off-the-cuff inventiveness was further enhanced by Raoul Coutard's supple cinematography, using a hand-held Arriflex camera rather than "the usual equipment, which would have added three weeks to the schedule," as Godard later noted. One scene was shot with a camera hidden (along with its operator) in a canvas mail cart, others from a wheelchair in which Coutard was whisked around by the director.13 During the postproduction process another innovative element was added: impetuous jump cuts that replace ordinary "continuity editing" at key moments in the story. Sometimes these propel the action precipitately from one episode to another, denying the smooth transitions afforded by classical films. At other times they wipe out individual frames of an otherwise continuous scene, lending it a jagged energy. The director found his unusual filmmaking process "tiring" and even "killing," but in retrospect he justified it on grounds that recall Kerouac's love of immediacy and authenticity. "One feels that if one is sincere and honest and one is driven into a corner over doing something," he observed, referring to the breathless schedule he had set for himself, "the result will necessarily be sincere and honest." Breathless shares the Beat sensibility in content as well as form. Michel may not be a beatnik, but he has many features of a closely related type: the hipster, defined by a 1950s journalist as "an enfant terrible turned inside out," and by author Norman Mailer as "the American existentialist" who knows that in a culture threatened with extinction by war, oppression, or conformity, "the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to live without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self." This certainly sounds like Michel, who has had an excellent relationship with his rebellious imperatives since long before we met him. He accepts death's terms not in the self-conscious style of a Hollywood hero but in the casual, taken-for-granted manner of a loner whose divorce from society is so complete he may never have realized there was a choice about the matter. Thrusting away the constricting comforts and strait jacketing safety of bourgeois life, he courts instability, precariousness, and the everyday possibility of disaster as fecklessly as any jived-up hustler in any neon-flashing city of the postwar world. Although he talks a great deal, a trait shared by most Godard characters, Michel expresses his ever-shifting states of mind less through words than through gestures, body language, and a general inability to remain still. In keeping with his peripatetic nature, he shares Kerouac's view of automobiles as allies in the self-propelled movement from stifling rootedness to exhilarating liberty. His story can be traced through the cars he steals, uses, and abandons in the naive belief that freedom is a matter of physical transit - if he can just get his money and zoom to Italy, everything will be all right - rather than difficult options like political struggle and spiritual regeneration, which Godard will explore in later works. There is a sad and touching quality to Michel's unexamined faith that a different place will bring a different life. This idea has animated great migrations in the past, but it breathed its last during the 1950s, when unexplored space finally ran out and modern geography confirmed that no location on earth has some exotic property that can transform the self in ways once fantasized by Beats, hipsters, and other romantic go-getters. Michel doesn't realize this ideal is dead, and his ingenuousness helps win our affection, or at least our commiseration, despite his sometimes malevolent behaviors. Something similar goes for Kerouac's roadrunners, who are rarely models of social responsibility, and for some of Hollywood's most enduring characters - Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, who elicits our sympathy through the apparent artlessness of his personality. Michel belongs in their company. So childlike is his pursuit of Patricia's love, so unavailing are his encounters with cops and crooks, so transparent are his efforts to present a cool-and-collected image to his lowlife cronies, that one is tempted to empathize with his misadventures and minimize the very real violence he commits, with a nonchalance that would be bone-chilling if the conventions of his movie's genre didn't smooth its edges. Although he is less bluntly autobiographical than Kerouac often was, Godard also shares the Beat writer's willingness to "talk . . . about things one knows" and invest a story with material familiar from his own life. The tightly wound rhythms and mercurial riffs of Breathless echo Godard's personality as an aggressive young artist who wanted to make "the sort of film where anything goes,"16 and Michel's character - including its more menacing side - draws some of its dark power from the filmmaker's own brushes with this territory. After passing through a "shy and uncharming" adolescence, Godard as late as 1952 was known as a chronic thief (relatives and the Cahiers office were among his targets), a failed homosexual prostitute, and enough of a social misfit to be committed by his father to a psychiatric hospital for what one biographical sketch describes as "a considerable period." Godard had cleaned up his act long before his feature-filmmaking career started - his cameo appearance in Breathless ironically casts him as a nosy passerby who helps the police track Michel down! - but he had lived the downside of hipsterdom that Beat commentator John Clellon Holmes captured when he critically observed (in a quarrel with Mailer's account of hipness) that "the destiny of the nervous system, accumulating Sensation the way Faust's mind accumulated Knowledge, is inexorably violence." To be sure, Godard was never the thug Michel turns into when irritated by the stolen-car dealer he roughs up, tempted by the men's-room visitor he mugs, or - in the explosive moment that thrusts the film into high gear - threatened by the highway cop he kills. However, the filmmaker was neither innocent nor naive with regard to the more sordid possibilities of the free, unfettered life. Breathless acquires its unsettling force from this semi-insider status as well as its freewheeling performances and bold stylistics. Reflecting different aspects of Godard's personality and imagination, Patricia is many things Michel is not: a woman, a worker, a reader and writer, an American with parents back home and prospects for a respectable future. In some ways she is a dead ringer for Michel, however, beginning with her penchant for unpredictable acts and her refusal to be defined or delimited by the people around her. Peddling her papers on sunny Parisian afternoons, enrolling in the Sorbonne so her family's checks will keep on coming, juggling romances with men who couldn't be more dissimilar, she has all the appearances of a self-sufficient spirit freely inventing her identity to suit her changing whims. Still, among the things that distinguish her from Michel is a growing realization of something he grasps only in a fitful, semiconscious way: that thought and behavior are functions of each other and our interactions with the world, not of some inner essence that presides over our lives from birth to death. Common sense generally says otherwise, of course. Each of us has a unique and consistent nature, it tells us, with a coherent set of distinctive properties that last a lifetime, however much they "evolve" and "mature" along the way. We know, however, that Godard is no great friend of common sense, seeing this as a hazy substitute for real analysis and insight; and although he hadn't yet developed his views on this matter in 1959, he had his suspicions. So did some American artists, including social dissidents like Kerouac, who turned to rebellious adventure (e.g., hitting the road) and radical creativity (e.g., bop-trance writing) as escape routes from the traps of consensus-bound thinking. So did some European intellectuals, including existentialist thinkers who aimed particular criticism at the notion of "human nature" as they explored the predicament of sentient beings in a fundamentally absurd universe. Existence precedes essence, they argued, suggesting that our selves are determined by our behaviors - the choices we make and the actions we carry out - rather than the other way around. If we do have a nature, it is not fixed: It is infinitely mutable, precarious, and contingent on the circumstances in which it finds itself. In addition to being two of the most artfully developed characters in Godard's early work, Michel and Patricia are vivid embodiments of his still-coalescing ideas on this multifaceted subject, which was of urgent interest to many people as the conservative 1950s showed their first tentative signs of giving way to the tumultuous 1960s. Testifying to Godard's thoughtfulness about such existential issues is the fact that these characters represent two different perspectives on them. At issue is the problem of reconciling personal will with existence in a world that is at once intricately social, profoundly subjective, and utterly irrational in the long run. As suggested above, Michel has a groping, instinctive approach to this dilemma, whereas Patricia has a still-embryonic but somewhat more alert position. We can tell from our first glimpse of Michel's cocky, rakish persona that he sees himself as a confidently free agent with a swinging city at his fingertips, and that he's proud of his ability to cast aside convention and pursue the gratification that's his primary goal in life. The way he sees himself doesn't necessarily mesh with the way the world sees him, but one of the things Godard invites us to like about him is the fact that he doesn't particularly care what society thinks of his inner self, as long as his outer self can keep dancing through the city and having enough gangster-film adventures to distract him from worries about tomorrow. Michel is the first of many Godardian figures who don't know their own minds, or rather, who perceive at least dimly that knowing one's mind is beside the point. This is because a person's consciousness is as much a result as a cause of the things one chooses to do. Then too, the experiential reality of one's mental life may be just tenuously connected with the existential reality traced on the physical world by one's activities. When his interior and exterior lives appear to conflict in some way, Michel takes for granted that authenticity lies not in his own consciousness - split between conflicting motives and priorities, fond of deluding itself along with others - but in the real-world results of what he actually does and says. To put this in moral terms, truth and fakery are separated by thin and slippery lines, and Michel would rather exploit this fact than think about it. "There's no need to lie," he tells Patricia during their long scene in her bedroom. "Like in poker, the truth is best. The others still think you're bluffing, so you win." Godard seconds this notion by moving his camera from Michel to a drawing mounted on the wall, showing a man (beardless, young) holding a mask (bearded, old) over his face. Continuing the appearance-versus-reality motif a few moments later, Patricia says to Michel, "I want to know what's behind that mask of yours. I've watched you for ten minutes and I see nothing, nothing." She is struck by the gap between her boyfriend's external appearance - hard to ignore, since few faces are more magnetic than Belmondo's in this movie - and the interior psychology that she assumed had shaped this appearance. Indeed, she is beginning to doubt the accessibility and even the relevance of this psychological dimension, at least as a meaningful factor in her relationship with him. Patricia is in a good position to benefit from this doubt, since she has been spiraling toward the realization that her own existence is defined more by her real-world behaviors than by the unreliable stream of consciousness she carries around inside. More intellectual than Michel, and possessing an intuitiveness more refined than his comparatively gross instinctiveness, she is starting to become authentically aware - and more important, ironically appreciative - of the yawning gulf between the abstractions conjured by her mind and the actualities projected into the social sphere by her voice and body. "I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy," she tells the American journalist during their conversation over drinks, signaling a growing sense that her social and individual selves are at once habitually at odds and inextricably bound together, so tightly that they hardly have their own existences. A short while later, she elevates this philosophical glimmer into a behavioral guide. "I stayed to find out if I was in love with you or if I wasn't in love with you," she tells Michel after betraying him to the police. "And because I'm mean to you, it proves I don't love you." Rather than introspectively ponder her feelings - surely the commonsense way of charting one's emotional response to another person - Patricia has acted out her impulses and observed the results with an almost clinical curiosity, seeing the outward manifestations of her behavior as coequal with the "real self" that prompted it. Michel listens to her words with more resignation than rage. These ex-lovers are clearly two of a kind, and in her explanation he hears echoes of his own outlook on life. In addition to their similarities with each other, Patricia and Michel are refracted yet recognizable reflections of the filmmaker who (as noted earlier) speaks through them like a ventriloquist to his audience. "I see no difference between reality and an image of reality," Godard said in 1979. "I always say, 'A picture is life and life is a picture.' And when I make pictures it's making life... ,"19 Godard is discussing the interplay between his private and professional activities, but his attitude is mirrored by Michel and Patricia as they go about their day-to-day lives. Outward signs - images for Godard, actions and behaviors for Patricia and Michel - cannot be separated from the realities "behind" them, since all are interrelated parts of an endless loop. Arbitrary social rules may warp or distort this arrangement, leading to various crises - the difficulty of uniting love and work, for instance - that Godard explores and often weeps over in his later films. The main characters of his first feature are oddly in tune with it, however, and if this fails to bring them happiness (perhaps an impossible commodity in our profoundly flawed world) at least their capacity for spontaneous action lends them a measure of existential energy that merely commonsensical creatures could envy. All of which is to say that Godard and his Breathless protagonists agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald that "action is character" - and, they would add, vice versa. Michel is especially impatient with anything that threatens his extroverted approach to life, including Patricia's occasional efforts at philosophical thought. "Between grief and nothing I will take grief," she quotes from William Faulkner's book The Wild Palms, and then asks Michel which he would choose. "Show me your toes," he less than helpfully replies. It's a funny and revealing moment, and when Patricia presses him again to make Faulkner's choice, he reconfirms his dislike for introverted thinking. "Grief is idiotic," he says. "I'd choose nothing. It's not any better, but grief is a compromise. You've got to have all or nothing." Given this refusal of anything partial or incomplete, it is not surprising that the adventures of Michel and Patricia generally unfold in bursts of concrete activity, choreographed by Godard to reveal character on both individual and social levels. Some of these moments are as broadly melodramatic as one would expect in a movie dedicated to Monogram Pictures, a low-budget Hollywood studio whose lean, energetic productions Godard had admired as a young critic.20 Michel first shows his antisocial streak, for instance, by stealing a car and then abandoning the woman who helps him pull off the heist, and all this is just a prelude to his murder of the highway cop who's been sharp-witted enough to chase him down. Other revelations of character through action are subtle or almost subliminal, however. Consider the car-stealing scene, when Michel's accomplice follows the couple whose sedan Michel is about to take, and all three of these figures - the lookout and the impending victims - walk exactly in step with one another as they make their way down the Parisian sidewalk. This suggests that despite their very different places in this narrative, they are all linked components of the city's violent, unpredictable ambience. Another element linking Breathless with the hipster sensibility is the fact that the city is a vitally important character in it. I realize that calling the city a character is the sort of observation made so often by commentators - the house is a character in Psycho, the ship is a character in Battleship Potemkin, and so forth - that it has become a critical cliche. However, it suits Breathless as well as any movie I know, in part because Godard was heavily under the influence of Italian director Roberto Rossellini during the entire first stage of his career, seeing in the great neorealist's work a model for his own conviction that the relationship between character and environment is as imposing as any subject a filmmaker could hope to tackle. "He alone has an exact vision of the totality of things," Godard said of Rossellini in 1962.21 It follows that Godard's concern with place is hardly limited to the artful depiction of expressive background locations. What interests him is the way people relate to the places they are in, and conversely, the roles environment plays in determining how people move, how they present themselves to one another, how they interact with the physical world as a whole. Writing in 1965 that his sketch film "Montparnasse-Levallois" was "constructed on the actors," he immediately added that what compelled his attention was "fluidity, being able to feel existence like physical matter: it is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them. The camera is on them, but the film is not centred on them." One notes Godard's typical ambivalence as he says his film is "constructed on" yet not "centred on" the people in it. "The film is a district," he adds, "a particular time."22 Sure enough, what it conveys most vividly is not the psychology of its characters but the rhythm of their passage through a specific place at a specific moment. Much the same can be said for Breathless, which gives a similar sense of building upon characters who remain parts of a greater whole - the city they are in, and also the movie through which that city lives and breathes for us. Godard's fascination with the interactivity between individual and environment returns us again to his view of interior (character, personality, psychology) and exterior (action, behavior, image) as shifting points on a loop that defies analysis via commonsense notions of cause and effect. Cinema is an ideal arena for exploring this conundrum since, as Godard noted in 1965, in this medium "the real and the imaginary are clearly distinct and yet are one, like the Moebius curve which has at the same time one side and two, like the technique of cinema-verite which is also a technique of lying."This comment on cinema-verite - a type of documentary that presents real-world material in seemingly direct, unmanipulated form - is not as negative as it may appear, but reflects Godard's view of fiction and nonfiction as interlocked approaches to an existential world in which "truth" and "lying" can never be wholly separate modes of either communication or consciousness. The interface between them is imagination, as Godard indicates near the beginning of a much later film, the 1982 drama Passion. There a movie-director character asks for an explanation of a difficult scene on which he is working - actually a tableau based on a Rembrandt painting - and an associate replies, "It's not a lie, but something imaginary. It's never exactly the truth, but not the opposite either. It's something separated from the real world by calculated approximations of probabilities." This is consistent with Godard's comment, made shortly before Breathless went into production, that "great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as .. . great documentaries tend towards fiction. . .. One must choose between ethic and aesthetic. .. . But it is no less understood that each word implies a part of the other. And he who opts wholeheartedly for one, necessarily finds the other at the end of his journey." Navigating this journey along the Mobius strip of the imaginary is at once an exhilarating adventure and a daunting challenge. "It's pretty disconcerting, to say the least," Godard admitted in 1965. "Doubtless that is why it is difficult to say anything at all about the cinema, since .. . the end and the means are always confused" by a "double movement" that "projects us towards others while taking us inside ourselves." Like many of Godard's statements, the remarks quoted here may seem more cryptic than the phenomena they're meant to explain; but they appear to suggest that by partaking of both reality and artifice - associated with "ethic" and "aesthetic," respectively - film demonstrates the inseparability of our mental lives from our perceptions of the social world we inhabit. Godard's view of ethics and aesthetics as overlapping domains will become an explicit concern in his second feature, The Little Soldier, where the protagonist says that "ethics are the aesthetics of the future," implying that a more enlightened age will make no distinction between the imperatives of beauty and morality. At the time of Breathless, however, Godard is less interested in idealistic projections than in here-andnow experiences. His film techniques mingle the truth of fiction with the fictionality of truth - Michel and Patricia are invented yet realistic characters, Paris is an actual yet poetically expressive setting - while illustrating the power of social images to infiltrate and influence the selves that Michel and Patricia think they are inventing under their own imaginative steam. The fact that Michel and Patricia are not totally free agents is a crucial point. Godard's decision to explore existentialist issues through hipsterstyle characters and Beat-style improvisation might appear to presume that, as some existentialist thinkers argue, individuals have absolute freedom of will and may steer their destinies in unexpected directions. Godard is willing to question philosophical notions as readily as cinematic conventions, however, and he takes issue with this proposition in no uncertain terms. One of his methods is to show how both of his main characters draw key aspects of their seemingly anarchic personalities from the culture in which they live. The opening scene provides an example. It begins with Michel buried in the pages of Paris-Flirt and muttering to himself, "I'm no good. If you have to, you have to." The words catch our attention, but their meaning is vague. Then he lowers the paper and reveals his face, glowering in our direction from beneath a hat brim yanked down so far it almost covers his eyes. In order to see he has to tilt his head backward, which gives him an arrogant air, enhanced by the cigarette dangling from his mouth. Looking directly toward the camera, he surveys the scene around him and lifts his hand to his mouth, rubbing his thumb across his lips in a nervous back-and-forth motion. There's something theatrical about it, and indeed, everything about Michel seems slightly larger than life - the cut of his hat, the jut of his jaw, the burly knot of his necktie, the way he checks out his surroundings without a wasted move. Later we'll learn that his thumbto-lips gesture is borrowed from the tough-guy persona often adopted by Hollywood star Humphrey Bogart, and even now it seems obvious that Michel is performing or at least posing, playing the role of a rough-andready character who either knows every trick in the book or has his weaknesses wrapped in a huge amount of protective armor. In short, he is an actor without a theater - or with one, if we remember that all the world's a stage, especially in a modern city overflowing with potential spectators. Michel may or may not be a genuinely cool character, but his moves are definitely not those of a totally self-possessed personality. They are borrowed from one of the most obvious sources imaginable: the movies. Godard reconfirms this cultural kleptomania when he explicitly shows us that Michel is a Bogart fan. He does this through one of the film's most thoughtfully worked-out episodes, a sort of cadenza that temporarily stops the main action in its tracks. A movie theater is showing The Harder - They Fall, a 1956 prizefighting drama directed by Mark Robson; the stars are Rod Steiger, Jan Sterling, and Bogart as a down-on-his-luck sportswriter who becomes a hard-bitten press agent. Michel stands gazing at the display in front of the theater, and while numerous pictures from the movie are on view, the one that transfixes him is a standard portrait shot of Bogart in a generic movie-star pose. Godard cuts back and forth between the photo and Michel pensively removing his sunglasses, puffing his cigarette - one shot shows the picture with smoke drifting across it - and saying "Bogey" in a quiet voice. This may be childish hero worship on one level, but on another Michel is renewing contact with a wellspring of both his behavioral repertoire and his self-image as a tough, glamorous fellow who has mastered "the American attitude" as thoroughly as one of its most powerful icons. He replaces his dark glasses and moves on, and mirrored in the theater's glass facade we see the two cops who are vainly trying to tail him. The scene ends by irising out on their distant reflections, using a deliberately antique bit of cinematic punctuation to underscore the motion-picture artifice that links Michel's brief epiphany with the movie in which he himself is the star. Another sign that Michel is embedded in a web of social role-playing is his habit of making faces. Three faces, to be exact, always done in the same order: mouth wide open in a gaping yawn, mouth stretched sideways as if saying "cheese," mouth pushed frontward beneath a wrinkled brow. He does this often, teaches Patricia to do it in her bathroom mirror, and uses it for his valedictory gesture to the world in the moment before his death. Facial expressions are essential for everyday communication within a culture, and also for projecting a persona for public consumption. They mean a lot to Michel, and while these particular ones are so stylized that they're nonsensical, it comforts him to carry them around and run through the sequence now and then. He uses the Bogart gesture just as frequently, rubbing thumb across lips with a contemplative look as he thinks of favorite movies, or events of the moment, or perhaps nothing at all. Patricia is no less culturally influenced than her boyfriend. She also faces life through a series of unconsciously assumed masks, and her performative moments are even easier to read. She conspicuously compares herself with an Auguste Renoir painting, angling her head to make the likeness as close as possible. She whimsically mentions Romeo and Juliet as role models for Michel and herself. She play-acts in front of a mirror, addressing herself with a military salute and a brisk "Dismissed!" She even tries out different attitudes in the midst of a decision-making situation. When her journalist friend presumptuously tells her that "of course" she will follow his suggestion and spend more time with him, she repeats the "of course" three times with three different inflections - first mockserious, then questioning, then smugly cheerful - in a sort of vocal variation on Michel's three-part facial tic. What makes these moments significant is the way Godard uses small gestures - often whimsical and offbeat, never particularly meaningful or original - to indicate the contagiousness of the behavioral twitches we pick up from our social surroundings. Michel and Patricia are not self inventing hipsters but are molded or "spoken" by their society in a sort of cultural ventriloquism, obliquely echoed by the ventriloquism that Godard used to control the movie's dialogue. Although they are continually trying on different poses, expressions, and intonations, they must always choose from the options available to them as inhabitants of one specific milieu at one specific point in history. There is some variety within this constraint, of course - Michel has his little-boy facial twists, on one hand, and his tough-guy thumb gesture, on the other - but the constraint is nonetheless real, frustrating would-be free spirits who think they have far more psychological and spiritual autonomy than could ever be available to them. This explains why Michel is in a chronic state of fatigue, and why Patricia fairly pants to throw off her almost-a-gangster status and get into the newspaper business, where adventures are vicarious and the illusion of free will is harder to indulge and therefore far less tempting. "Language is the house man lives in," a philosophical character will say in 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, six years after Breathless. As noted in Chapter i, some thinkers consider that house a prison, and Godard would agree (at least until the later, more spiritual phase of his career) that human thought cannot effectively venture beyond the limitations of the language, verbal and nonverbal, that carries it. Michel and Patricia think they are masters of their fates, but in fact their capacity for spontaneity runs no deeper than the imitative phrases and gestures that compose their sadly circumscribed vocabularies. Try as they might to deny it, their lives are caught in roles that existed long before they arrived on the scene. Michel seems dimly aware of this when he observes that "squealers squeal, burglars burgle, killers kill, lovers love" - a catalog of character types from which he and Patricia have selected during the course of their story. Consistency matters little to them - indeed, Michel reels off that catalog in response to Patricia's hugely ironic statement that she hates informers - but it would hardly make much difference if the opposite were true. In the end, their goal in life appears to have been nothing more lofty than transforming "It seemed like a good idea at the time" from a trite rationalization into a metaphysical principle. The highest compliment one can pay them is to acknowledge that they come precariously close to succeeding. David Sterritt/The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE © Cambridge University Press 1999 by Dejan Stojkovski "The Daughter" comes bearing abstract cred as a free adjustment of Ibsen's 1884 play "The Wild Duck." It exchanges a Norwegian setting for a monetarily dispossessed country town in current Australia while holding the class-cognizant preface of a family shook by the disclosure of long-held insider facts and lies as it sets the favored few against the discouraged regular workers. PlotChristian Neilson (Paul Schneider) arrives home in Australia following a 16-year spell in the US. His dad (Geoffrey Rush) is going to wed maid (Anna Torv) and has requested that Christian be best man. Christian has liquor issues and accuses his dad for his mom's suicide, so it's nothing unexpected when contentions follow. He winds up spending the vast majority of the wedding end of the week hanging out with old youth mate, Oliver Finch (Ewen Leslie). Oliver now lives in a charmingly frail lodge in the forested areas with venerating spouse Charlotte (Miranda Otto), high school little girl Hedvig (Odessa Young) and his dad (Sam Neill), who runs a little creature asylum at the back of the house. Jealous of Oliver's apparently ideal way of life and assaulted by issues in his own particular marriage, Christian swings to drink – with sad outcomes. Old injuries are re-opened, mysteries are uncovered and concordant family life spirals into mayhem. SIMON STONE is now one of the most important playwrights in Australia. During these years he wrote and directed the texts for the most prestigious theater companies, including those of Belvoir, Melbourne, Sydney and Malthouse Theater, at home, and those of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Munich Kammerspiele, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Theatre Basel and the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in Paris, abroad. In 2011, the wild duck adaptation of Henrik Ibsen won numerous awards. In 2013 he participates in the collective film The Turning, presented at the Berlinale, with the short film Reunion, with the help of Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett. The Daughter, which is inspired by the duck wild, is the debut feature film. Screenplay: Simon Stone Photography: Andrew Commis Montage: Veronika Jenet Music: Mark Bradshaw Sound: Liam Egan Scenography: Steven Jones-Evans Costumes: Margot Wilson |
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