An Invention without a Future. James Naremore
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The particular avant-garde with which Godard’s review has affinities is surrealism. Although Positif had direct connections with the surrealists and sometimes attacked the critics at Cahiers, the two groups were in many ways similar. Both were fond of American films, particularly of B movies and film noir, and both sometimes used a lyrical, almost swooning language—as when Godard tells us that A Time to Love and a Time to Die sets his cheeks afire. It’s no accident that at one point in his review Godard alludes to the surrealist Louis Aragon, and it’s almost predictable that he should proclaim A Time to Love and a Time to Die (next to Le Plaisir) as the “greatest title in all of cinema.” At this point in his career he seems a dreamer of mass culture, looking for what André Breton had called “moments of priceless giddiness” (quoted in Hammond, 20). His review seems also to have a quasi-surrealistic conception of authorship, as when he tells us that the power of A Time to Love and a Time to Die rises out of Universal-International’s mercenary decision to change the title of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. By this means, Godard suggests, the studio unleashed a ghost in the machine, giving the director an opportunity to set beauty and delirium in motion.
I don’t want to overstate the connection with the surrealists; my point is simply that Godard’s writing is made up of a mixture of familiar attitudes and can’t be identified completely with any of them. It blends the voice of high culture with movie reviewing and blurs the boundaries between romantic aestheticism, modernism, and the historical avant-garde. It reminds us of things we’ve heard before but also sounds different and new. In some respects, Godard in 1959 resembles what we would nowadays call a postmodern critic.
“Postmodern” needs to be used guardedly because it suggests a quite un-Godard-like disavowal of a philosophical “center.” Even so, it helps to indicate an important fact about the auteurists’ place in film history. The classic cinema’s technology and modes of production had grown out of the period when oil replaced steam and coal as a primary fuel, when “Fordism” became the chief means of industrial organization and when mechanical inventions proliferated at a dizzy rate. (One of the Lumières’ first movies showed a train arriving at a station, as if the most important machine of the new era were paying tribute to its predecessors.) Auteurism, by contrast, emerged in the declining years of the studio system, at the dawn of the television age. Although the auteurists and their earliest followers in Britain and America nourished their cult enthusiasms at revival theaters and museums, they belonged to a generation that would begin to use TV like a cinematheque, viewing films in no historical order and regarding the classic cinema as something distant or dying. Over the next decade, widespread academic study of film was prompted partly by auteurism and partly by the easy accessibility of old movies on TV—a phenomenon that enabled everyone to participate in an investigation of Hollywood’s past. As a result, whereas the movies were an invention of modernity, all film culture and all writing on film since the late 1950s has had something of a postmodern character. One irony of this situation is that while cinephiles today often call themselves students of film, most of them are students of teletheory, living in a world of recycled images.
Godard’s review also has qualities in common with the account of postmodernism by Andreas Huyssen in his influential book After the Great Divide, which argues that sometime around 1960 a new aesthetic began to appear in Western society, signaled by the Pop movement in American art, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler, and the later architectural writings of Robert Venturi. What all these events have in common is a “break with the austere canon of high modern[ism]” and an “espousal of the commercial vernacular of consumer culture” (187). They involve a sometimes baffling mixture of elitism and populism, and they adopt a critical strategy that was eventually adopted by the academy. As Huyssen puts it, “Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture” (188).
Huyssen doesn’t mention Godard or Truffaut, but the New Wave belongs on his list of postmodern developments. Godard’s early work is roughly contemporary with Pop and clearly draws inspiration from the American commercial scene. To be sure, there was nothing special about a French intellectual who praised American movies. There was also a quality of old-fashioned enthusiasm in Godard and the auteurists, who were never as coolly detached as Andy Warhol and never so condescending to movies as Leslie Fiedler. Nevertheless, Godard used the language of high art to praise certain “pulpy” Hollywood auteurs, and as a filmmaker he borrowed imagery from such films as Some Came Running (1958), which Vincente Minnelli had designed to resemble what he described as “the inside of a juke box” (I Remember It Well, 325). Several passages of Godard’s criticism could almost be used to define the Pop (or camp) sensibility—for instance, his description of a couple of his favorite scenes from Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957):
Barbara Stanwyck’s brother grabs her to use her as a shield. “Go on, shoot, you dirty coward,” he shouts to Barry Sullivan, who is covering them with his gun. And without hesitation Barry Sullivan calmly shoots Barbara Stanwyck, who crumples up, and then the brother, who falls mortally wounded in his turn. “Stop shooting, you dirty coward,” cries the dying man—Bang! Bang! —“For pity’s sake, stop shooting”—Bang! Bang!—“Stop shooting, can’t you see I’m dying”—Bang! Bang! Bang!
In another scene, Gene Barry is courting ravishing young Eve Brent, making her charming debut before the cameras in an eye-shade borrowed from Samuel. Eve sells guns. Jokingly, Gene aims at her. The camera takes his place and we see Eve through the barrel of the gun. Track forward until she is framed in close-up by the mouth of the barrel. Next shot: they are in a kiss. (62)
Godard is implicitly attacking not only the bourgeois tradition of quality but also certain features of modernism and the avant-garde. As Huyssen points out, “Modernism’s running feud with mass society [and] the avant-garde’s attack on high art as a support system of cultural hegemony always took place on the pedestal of high art itself.” Godard and many of the other auteurists were different. They were opening the possibility for artists to engage in what Huyssen calls an “experimental mixing and meshing” of the old cultural domains (189). There was, moreover, an irony in the French fascination with American cinema: the auteurists’ rise to success as filmmakers was facilitated by the decline of the Hollywood studios, which had dominated the marketplace in the years between the two world wars. In the United States, the major production companies were no longer in control of exhibition, censorship regulations were becoming liberalized, and European art films were making significant inroads in urban art theaters. The French New Wave was particularly well suited to the period because it managed to fuse certain elements of Italian neorealism with a fond, insouciant, distinctively Gallic attitude toward old-fashioned Hollywood genres and directors. In certain American contexts, its name became useful as a marketing strategy.
This doesn’t mean that either the New Wave or auteurism can be reduced to a device for self-promotion. The latter began as a critical undertaking and marked an important change in the history of taste. One of the best sources for an understanding of what the French movement achieved is Jim Hillier’s “Cahiers du Cinéma”: The 1950s, which illustrates the diversity of opinion among the writers of the period and places French debates over American cinema in the context of larger concerns about neorealism, modernism, and the French film industry. As Hillier indicates, auteurism was never simply about American-based directors such as Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray. The Parisian cinephiles were interested in American auteurs, but French writing about Hollywood was tempered by an even stronger admiration for Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais. Nor were the auteurists exclusively concerned with authorship. Particularly at Cahiers, their practice usually implied a contradictory set of theories about the phenomenology and techniques of cinema, and it produced excellent essays on stars and genres. Above all, it generated a relentlessly evaluative kind of criticism,