The Death Of American Films

NEAR THE END of Weekend a woman is chewing on a bone. "It's that pig," an off-screen voice tells her, adding as an afterthought, "with those English tourists mixed in." "The ones from the Rolls-Royce?" she asks. "There must be some of your husband too," the voice answers. She continues eating with no reaction. The word "fin" appears on the screen, enlarged at once to "fin du conte" and then changed to "fin du cinema." The sequence reveals Godard's awareness that in Weekend he destroyed the only cinema he loves--the American narrative ("conte") film.

What originally attracted Godard to American movies was their dramatic and visual design. They were narrative dramas of personal experience and development in which the characters expressed whatever the film's makers wanted to say. The physical and spiritual effect of events on the characters was the means of describing their physical and social environments. (An example of a different sort of drama is seen in Eisenstein. He composed masses of people in images whose dynamics directly express his intended meaning without the mediation--reactions--of individual figures.)

Godard's particular fondness for the films of Nicholas Ray indicates a concern for modern settings in which the characters hold an insecure place. As Godard's or Ray's films proceed, their characters discover more and more about their settings, which are colored by their perceptions--yet finally stand as independent entities. The characters, neither controlling nor controlled by their physical setting, have to solve their problems independently--this is no fatalistic cinema--but the meaning of the film is created in the characters' reactions to, and actions within, their setting.

Godard further made the subject of each film work as its method. Thus Pierrot le Fou is a romance (subject) realized in flowing colors, soaring music, and a hero whose journey through this setting is the motive and organizing force of the drama (method). Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they see. Consequently the film's meaning depends on the audience's reaction to these events and their condemnation of the characters for not reacting.

AN EARLY scene between the principle characters, a married couple, establishes their social and moral passivity. As the woman tells her husband about a sex orgy (also involving money and cars) in which she recently took part, the camera tracks very slowly from one to the other. They sit, scarcely moving, in silhouette--two-dimensional figures whose only reaction to the story (husband's) is to say, "get me excited."

As she narrates romantic music swells and dies, at times covering her speech. The two characters' imperviousness to this, as to the physical beauty of their setting (stressed by the camera's motion), becomes more pointed in a ten-minute continuos track which follows their car as it passes a line of autos stopped on the highway. The horns that assault one throughout the scene act on them only as low-level irritation. When they come on the front of the line and discover that a car wreck (corpses strewn on the bank) is the cause of the delay, they simply accelerate past; the camera's move into high-angle, giving the shot of bloody bodies and smashed cars a mood of tragedy, is ignored by the motorists who drive into the distance. The scene is a brilliant metaphor for bourgeois social relations--the stopped motorists, though unwilling to take any action (collective or individual) about their total situation, react violently when any single person tries to get ahead of them. The central fact is their enmity to each other, realized both in their actions and in the blaring horns that gives the situation its proper background.

This relation of the characters to their social and physical situation persists. Their amoral reactions to setting and other people causes increasingly violent outbreaks. An early sequence beginning with one car scraping another ends in a man shooting at the couple. A girl dressed as Emily Bronte, counselling the couple to pay attention to natural forms (pebbles, grass) to find their meanings, is set afire after she declares "End the daily murder! Cover flowers with flames!" In this sequence--as in sequences where they ignore a figure reading Rousseau, and interrupt a beautiful rendition of a Mozart sonata--the characters are merely destroying the cultural background of their bourgeois society. The beauty of Godard's compositions and camera motions in these sequences in undermined by their violent, petty responses, which begin to pull the film apart. In Godard's other films such scenes give the characters an opportunity to express and develop their sensibilities; here they attack the historical culture on which such sensibilities depended.

A feeling of helplessness results. Without sensibility, Godard's characters cannot possibly cope with their setting; the relation between them and a generally vicious society (filled with burning automobiles and corpses) becomes one of simple conflict. The setting assumes a more independent existence and begins to attack the audience directly, without the characters' mediation. Shocking events come to rule the film, so that it becomes far more singly directed, far less ambiguous, than Godard's earlier movies. And it becomes less personal. With no complexity possible in the meeting of characters and environment through their sensibilities, idealism is slaughtered, characters lose their humanity--and society becomes unrelievedly anti-human.

GODARD then offers and rejects some solutions. After a period of wandering slaughter in which the political basis of their situation ("From the French Revolution to weekends with De Gaulle") is made explicit, the couple encounters two third world revolutionaries. The ensuing lecture on guerrilla warfare is intercut with shots of a wild intellectual who had earlier attacked them for being so bourgeois. The point becomes yet clearer when they are captured by the Liberation Front of Seineet-Oise, a bunch of kids freaked out by bourgeois society. Like the heroes of La Chinoise, they are naive revolutionaries and senseless terrorists, who have brought indoor habits and equipment to live in the woods. They recite and enact the perverse development the capitalism's contradictons have forced upon the romantic roots of bourgeois culture; one of them discusses the horror men inspire in one another and in particular the horror of touching human flesh, explaining thereby love-making as an attraction through hatred. But basically they are as anti-humanist at the citizens they terrorize, and their contempt for other men leads them both into bad romantic politics ("to overcome the horror of the bourgeisie, we need more horror") and immoral actions (cannibalism).

Bourgeois society, having destroyed their sensibilities, must also be blamed for destroying a cinema whose method and meaning depended on those sensibilities. The violent attacks on the audience through presenting raw events, the meaninglessness of characters' actions, the blatant anti-capitalist propoganda of Weekend do not show Godard committing cinematic suicide. His integration of subject matter and approach demand this treatment. To critics who see Weekend as the end of the line, one must mention Les Carabiniers, a film that uses moral imbeciles in just the same way to attack war. Its events are as senseless and brutal; its plot as much as skeleton device that barely holds the film together (the characters' journey through alien rural setting becomes very boring); its characters as much figures for the camera to follow, rather than sensibilities whose interaction with a setting must be described. The lack of personal development makes Les Carabiniers as disjointed and difficult as Weekend. But the broadness of Weekend's subject is cause for alarm. Weekend shows the impossibility for Godard of making films in a society which is destroying its humanity.

* * * * *

SOME DIABOLICAL booking agent selected Bullitt's to open in the Central Cinema One, next to Weekend. It shows as clearly as the latter how essential moral sensibility is to honest American films.

Bullitt's action-suspense plot is to overloaded with references to political authority's abuse and free action's virtue that one must take this, rather than its ostensible police-protection plot, as the film's subject. Steve McQueen plays a detective lieutenant whose chief shields him from an ambitious politician (Robert Vaughan, played for a straight heavy). The script puts McQueen's responsibility for his job in personal terms--his relations to his chief, battles with his own conscience, personal conduct.

But Bullitt's treatment of McQueen is full of abysmal lies. Never seen out of his black turtleneck (a cop?) and sports car, he is played for a sexy and rich youth-figure who is persecuted by Vaughan, an evil representative of the Rotten Police Structure. Whatever McQueen does, the picture condones. His bumbling unfortunately amounts to virtual murder--to which his reaction are entirely visceral. Godard at least criticizes his terrorists; this one is rewarded, and the audience is expected to love him for his incompetence as much as the film. At its end, after he has managed to kill off the last man connected with his case, the film has the effrontery to play him for an existential hero at odds with an unfriendly world. Weekend, deprived of its central motor and direction of characters' sensibility, may well be "wandering in the cosmos." But Bullitt, which betrays sensibility, was certainly "found on the scrap-heap."