Godard by Roud Richard;Temple Michael;

Author:Roud, Richard;Temple, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BFI Publishing
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Made in U.S.A.: the sequence as described on pp. 95–6

The sense of the absurd that Godard is seeking is heightened by various extraneous interruptions, like the Japanese girl’s incomprehensible song, Marianne Faithfull’s rendition of ‘It is the evening of the day’, Laszlo Szabo’s imitation of Sylvester and Tweetie Pie which we already heard in Le Grand Escroc .Most infuriating of all to some people, the whole of reel three is devoted to an Hegelian discussion in a bar: ‘The glass is not in my wine, the barman is in the pocket of the jacket of his pencil; the floor stubs itself against the cigarette,’ etc. It does have a point, of course, as the ending of this long litany makes clear: ‘I am what you are, he is not what we are; they are what you are, he has what they have.’ Paula and the police are inextricably linked – they are one, even, because they are both manifestations of a general situation. ‘Right and left are a completely outmoded equation,’ we are told, ‘…one must learn to pose the problem differently.’ And the film ends with Paula’s question: ‘Well, how?’

The main difficulty with Made in U.S.A., it seems to me, is that Godard has chosen to do two things in one film – to push forward his anti-narrative techniques and fragmentation of plot to reach the absurd, and at the same time to set out an exposition of the absurdity of the world in which we live. The two would seem to go together very well. In fact, according to traditional views of aesthetics, it is wholly proper to have the form express the content. But this has not been Godard’s way before, and it doesn’t work too well here. He is at his most effective when the two are working against each other: here they are almost tautologically the same. In his next film, he was not to make the same mistake, if in fact it was a mistake.

Before going on to Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, I should say that I have perhaps been as unfair to Made in U.S.A. as I was to Pierrot le fou. Both films, taken in isolation, are remarkable achievements, and both are visually extremely beautiful. I have doubtless allowed my preferences for the films which immediately succeeded them–Masculin Féminin and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle – to emphasise unduly the weaknesses of Pierrot le fou and Made in U.S.A. Or is it perhaps simply that my general argument applies less to these two films than to the others? I hope not, but it may well be.

Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle is, in Godard’s own words, a sociological essay in the form of a novel but written not with words, but with notes of music. It is much more ambitious than Made in U.S.A., both in its subject-matter, which deals with the whole Parisian region – the ‘her’ of the title – and in its form.

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