A Susan Sontag Reader by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466880788
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Godard

It may be true that one has to choose between ethics and aesthetics, but it is no less true that, whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the end of the road. For the very definition of the human condition should be in the mise en scène itself.

—GODARD

The great culture heroes of our time have shared two qualities: they have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers. But this common profile has permitted two different yet equally compelling attitudes toward “culture” itself. Some—like Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Cage—bracket their art and thought with a disdainful attitude toward high culture and the past, or at least maintain an ironic posture of ignorance or incomprehension. Others—like Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Godard—exhibit a hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they proceed by voraciously scavenging in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art.

From cultural appetite on this scale comes the creation of work that is on the order of a subjective compendium: casually encyclopedic, anthologizing, formally and thematically eclectic, and marked by a rapid turnover of styles and forms. Thus, one of the most striking features of Godard’s work is its daring efforts at hybridization, its insouciant mixtures of tonalities, themes, and narrative methods. Techniques from literature, theater, painting, and television mingle freely in his work, alongside witty, impertinent allusions to movie history itself. The elements often seem contradictory—as when (in the recent films) a collage method of narration drawn from advanced painting and poetry is combined with the bare, hard-staring, neo-realist aesthetic of television (cf. the interviews, filmed in frontal close-up and medium shot, in A Married Woman, Masculine Feminine, and Deux ou Trois Choses); or when Godard uses highly stylized visual compositions (such as the recurrent blues and reds in A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, La Chinoise, and Weekend) at the same time that he seems eager to promote the look of improvisation and to conduct an unremitting search for the “natural” manifestations of personality before the truth-exacting eye of the camera. But, however jarring these mergers are in principle, the results Godard gets from them turn out to be something harmonious, plastically and ethically engaging, and emotionally tonic.

The consciously reflective—more precisely, reflexive—aspect of Godard’s films is the key to their energies. His work constitutes a formidable meditation on the possibilities of cinema, which is to restate what I have already argued, that he enters the history of film as its first consciously destructive figure. Put otherwise, one might note that Godard is probably the first major director to enter the cinema on the level of commercial production with an explicitly critical intention. “I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of Cahiers du Cinéma,” he has declared. (Godard wrote regularly for that magazine between 1956 and 1959, and still occasionally contributes to it.) “The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.

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