Styles of Radical Will by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag [Sontag, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781466853584
Google: BYTWAAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0312420218
Goodreads: 52378
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1969-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

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’s work has been more passionately debated in recent years than that of any other contemporary film-maker. Though he has a good claim to being ranked as the greatest director, aside from Bresson, working actively in the cinema today, it’s still common for intelligent people to be irritated and frustrated by his films, even to find them unbearable. Godard’s films haven’t yet been elevated to the status of classics or masterpieces—as have the best of Eisenstein, Griffith, Gance, Dreyer, Lang, Pabst, Renoir, Vigo, Welles, etc.; or, to take some nearer examples, L’Avventura and Jules and Jim. That is, his films aren’t yet embalmed, immortal, unequivocally (and merely) “beautiful.” They retain their youthful power to offend, to appear “ugly,” irresponsible, frivolous, pretentious, empty. Film-makers and audiences are still learning from Godard’s films, still quarreling with them.

Meanwhile Godard (partly by turning out a new film every few months) manages to keep nimbly ahead of the inexorable thrust of cultural canonization; extending old problems and abandoning or complicating old solutions—offending veteran admirers in numbers almost equal to the new ones he acquires. His thirteenth feature, Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (1966), is perhaps the most austere and difficult of all his films. His fourteenth feature, La Chinoise (1967), opened in Paris last summer and took the first Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September; but Godard didn’t come from Paris to accept it (his first major film festival award) because he had just begun shooting his next film, Weekend, which was playing in Paris by January of this year.

To date, fifteen feature films have been completed and released, the first being the famous A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) in 1959. The succeeding films, in order, are:

Le Petit Soldat (1960)

Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman) (1961)

Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live) (1962)

Les Carabiniers (1963)

Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963)

Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders) (1964)

Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) (1964)

Alphaville (1965)

Pierrot le Fou (1965)

Masculin Féminin (1966)

Made in U.S.A. (1966)

plus the last three I have already mentioned. In addition, five shorts were made between 1954 and 1958, the most interesting of these being the two from 1958, “Charlotte et son Jules” and “Une Histoire d’Eau.” There are also seven “sketches”: the first, “La Paresse,” was one of the episodes in Les Septs Pechés Capitaux (1961); the most recent three were all made in 1967—“Anticipation,” in Le Plus Vieux Métier du Monde; a section of Far From Vietnam, the corporate film edited by Chris Marker; and an episode in the still unreleased, Italian-produced Gospel 70. Considering that Godard was born in 1930, and that he has made all his films within the commercial cinema industry, it’s an astonishingly large body of work.

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