by Susan Sontag
6
Jean Cocteau has said (Cocteau on the Film, A Conversation Recorded by André Fraigneau, 1951) that minds and souls today “live without a syntax, that is to say, without a moral system. This moral system has nothing to do with morality proper, and should be built up by each one of us as an inner style, without which no outer style is possible.” Cocteau’s films may be understood as portraying this inwardness which is the true morality; so may Bresson’s. Both are concerned, in their films, with depicting spiritual style. This similarity is less than obvious because Cocteau conceives of spiritual style aesthetically, while in at least three of his films (Les Anges du Peché, Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, and Procès de Jeanne d’Arc) Bresson seems committed to an explicit religious point of view. But the difference is not as great as it appears. Bresson’s Catholicism is a language for rendering a certain vision of human action, rather than a “position” that is stated. (For contrast, compare the direct piety of Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis and the complex debate on faith expounded in Melville’s Leon Morin, Prêtre.) The proof of this is that Bresson is able to say the same thing without Catholicism—in his three other films. In fact, the most entirely successful of all Bresson’s films—Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé—is one which, while it has a sensitive and intelligent priest in the background (one of the prisoners), bypasses the religious way of posing the problem. The religious vocation supplies one setting for ideas about gravity, lucidity, and martyrdom. But the drastically secular subjects of crime, the revenge of betrayed love, and solitary imprisonment also yield the same themes.
Bresson is really more like Cocteau than appears—an ascetic Cocteau, Cocteau divesting himself of sensuousness, Cocteau without poetry. The aim is the same: to build up an image of spiritual style. But the sensibility, needless to say, is altogether different. Cocteau’s is a clear example of the homosexual sensibility that is one of the principal traditions of modern art: both romantic and witty, langorously drawn to physical beauty and yet always decorating itself with stylishness and artifice. Bresson’s sensibility is anti-romantic and solemn, pledged to ward off the easy pleasures of physical beauty and artifice for a pleasure which is more permanent, more edifying, more sincere.
In the evolution of this sensibility, Bresson’s cinematic means become more and more chaste. His first two films, which were photographed by Philippe Agostini, stress visual effects in a way that the other four do not. Bresson’s very first film, Les Anges du Peché, is more conventionally beautiful than any which have followed. And in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, whose beauty is more muted, there are lyrical camera movements, like the shot which follows Hélène running down the stairs to arrive at the same time as Jean, who is descending in an elevator, and stunning cuts, like the one which moves from Hélène alone in her bedroom, stretched out on the bed, saying, “I will be revenged,” to the first shot of Agnès, in a crowded nightclub, wearing tights and net stockings and top hat, in the throes of a sexy dance. Extremes of black and white succeed one another with great deliberateness. In Les Anges du Peché, the darkness of the prison scene is set off by the whiteness of the convent wall and of the nuns’ robes. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, the contrasts are set by clothes even more than by interiors. Hélène always wears long black velvet dresses, whatever the occasion. Agnès has three costumes: the scant black dancing outfit in which she appears the first time, the light-colored trench-coat she wears during most of the film, and the white wedding dress at the end.… The last four films, which were photographed by L. H. Burel, are much less striking visually, less chic. The photography is almost self-effacing. Sharp contrasts, as between black and white, are avoided. (It is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color.) In Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, for instance, one is not particularly aware of the blackness of the priest’s habit. One barely notices the bloodstained shirt and dirty pants which Fontaine has on throughout Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, or the drab suits which Michel wears in Pickpocket. Clothes and interiors are as neutral, inconspicuous, functional as possible.
Besides refusing the visual, Bresson’s later films also renounce “the beautiful.” None of his non-professional actors are handsome in an outward sense. One’s first feeling, when seeing Claude Laydu (the priest in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne), François Leterrier (Fontaine in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé), Martin Lassalle (Michel in Pickpocket), and Florence Carrez (Jeanne in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc), is how plain they are. Then, at some point or other, one begins to see the face as strikingly beautiful. The transformation is most profound, and satisfying, with François Leterrier as Fontaine. Here lies an important difference between the films of Cocteau and Bresson, a difference which indicates the special place of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne in Bresson’s work; for this film (for which Cocteau wrote the dialogue) is in this respect very Cocteauish. Maria Casarès’ black-garbed demonic Hélène is, visually and emotionally, of a piece with her brilliant performance in Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). Such a hard-edge character, a character with a “motive” that remains constant throughout the story, is very different from the treatment of character, typical of Bresson, in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, and Pickpocket. In the course of each of these three films, there is a subliminal revelation: a face which at first seems plain reveals itself to be beautiful; a character which at first seems opaque becomes oddly and inexplicably transparent. But in Cocteau’s films—and in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne—neither character nor beauty is revealed. They are there to be assumed, to be transposed into drama.
While the spiritual style of Cocteau’s heroes (who are played, usually, by Jean Marais) tends toward narcissism, the spiritual style of Bresson’s heroes is one variety or other of unself-consciousness. (Hence the role of the project in Bresson’s films: it absorbs the energies that would otherwise be spent on the self. It effaces personality, in the sense of personality as what is idiosyncratic in each human being, the limit inside which we are locked.) Consciousness of self is the “gravity” that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is “grace,” or spiritual lightness. The climax of Cocteau’s films is a voluptuous movement: a falling down, either in love (Orphée) or death (L’Aigle à Deux Têtes, L’Éternel Retour); or a soaring up (La Belle et la Bête). With the exception of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (with its final glamorous image, shot from above, of Jean bending over Agnès, who lies on the floor like a great white bird), the end of Bresson’s films is counter-voluptuous, reserved.
While Cocteau’s art is irresistibly drawn to the logic of dreams, and to the truth of invention over the truth of “real life,” Bresson’s art moves increasingly away from the story and toward documentary. Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne is a fiction, drawn from the superb novel of the same name by Georges Bernanos. But the journal device allows Bresson to relate the fiction in a quasi-documentary fashion. The film opens with a shot of a notebook and a hand writing in it, followed by a voice on the sound track reading what has been written. Many scenes start with the priest writing in his journal. The film ends with a letter from a friend to the Vicar of Torcy relating the priest’s death—we hear the words while the whole screen is occupied with the silhouette of a cross. Before Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé begins we read the words on the screen: “This story actually happened. I have set it down without embellishment,” and then: “Lyons, 1943.” (Bresson had the original of Fontaine constantly present while the film was being made, to check on its accuracy.) Pickpocket, again a fiction, is told—partly—through journal form. Bresson returned to documentary in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, this time with the greatest severity. Even music, which aided in setting tone in the earlier films, has been discarded. The use of the Mozart Mass in C minor in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, of Lully in Pickpocket, is particularly brilliant; but all that survives of music in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc is the drum beat at th
e opening of the film.
Bresson’s attempt is to insist on the irrefutability of what he is presenting. Nothing happens by chance; there are no alternatives, no fantasy; everything is inexorable. Whatever is not necessary, whatever is merely anecdotal or decorative, must be left out. Unlike Cocteau, Bresson wishes to pare down—rather than to enlarge—the dramatic and visual resources of the cinema. (In this, Bresson again reminds one of Ozu, who in the course of his thirty years of film-making renounced the moving camera, the dissolve, the fade.) True, in the last, most ascetic of all his films, Bresson seems to have left out too much, to have overrefined his conception. But a conception as ambitious as this cannot help but have its extremism, and Bresson’s “failures” are worth more than most directors’ successes. For Bresson, art is the discovery of what is necessary—of that, and nothing more. The power of Bresson’s six films lies in the fact that his purity and fastidiousness are not just an assertion about the resources of the cinema, as much of modern painting is mainly a comment in paint about painting. They are at the same time an idea about life, about what Cocteau called “inner style,” about the most serious way of being human.
[1964]
Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie
PREFACE: Vivre Sa Vie invites a rather theoretical treatment, because it is—intellectually, aesthetically—extremely complex. Godard’s films are about ideas, in the best, purest, most sophisticated sense in which a work of art can be “about” ideas. I have discovered, while writing these notes, that in an interview in the Paris weekly, L’Express, July 27, 1961, he said: “My three films all have, at bottom, the same subject. I take an individual who has an idea, and who tries to go to the end of his idea.” Godard said this after he had made, besides a number of short films, A Bout de Souffle (1959) with Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, Le Petit Soldat (1960) with Michel Subor and Anna Karina, and Une Femme est Une Femme (1961) with Karina, Belmondo, and Jean-Claude Brialy. How this is true of Vivre Sa Vie, his fourth film, which he made in 1962, is what I have attempted to show.
NOTE: Godard, who was born in Paris in 1930, has now completed ten feature films. After the four mentioned above, he made Les Carabiniers (1962-63) with Marino Mase and Albert Juross, Le Mépris (1963) with Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Fritz Lang, Bande à Part (1964) with Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur, Une Femme Mariée (1964) with Macha Méril and Bernard Noël, Alphaville (1965) with Karina, Eddie Constantine, and Akim Tamiroff, and Pierrot le Fou (1965) with Karina and Belmondo. Six of the films have been shown in America. The first called Breathless here, is by now established as an art-house classic; the eighth, The Married Woman, has had a mixed reception; but the others, under the titles A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Contempt, and Band of Outsiders, have been both critical and box-office flops. The brilliance of A Bout de Souffle is now obvious to everybody and I shall explain my esteem for Vivre Sa Vie. While I am not claiming that all his other work is on the same level of excellence, there is no film of Godard’s which does not have many remarkable passages of the highest quality. The obtuseness of serious critics here to the merits of Le Mépris, a deeply flawed but nonetheless extraordinarily ambitious and original film, seems to me particularly lamentable.
1
“The cinema is still a form of graphic art,” Cocteau wrote in his Journals. “Through its mediation, I write in pictures, and secure for my own ideology a power in actual fact. I show what others tell. In Orphée, for example, I do not narrate the passing through mirrors; I show it, and in some manner, I prove it. The means I use are not important, if my characters perform publicly what I want them to perform. The greatest power of a film is to be indisputable with respect to the actions it determines and which are carried out before our eyes. It is normal for the witness of an action to transform it for his own use, to distort it, and to testify to it inaccurately. But the action was carried out, and is carried out as often as the machine resurrects it. It combats inexact testimonies and false police reports.”
2
All art may be treated as a mode of proof, an assertion of accuracy in the spirit of maximum vehemence. Any work of art may be seen as an attempt to be indisputable with respect to the actions it represents.
3
Proof differs from analysis. Proof establishes that something happened. Analysis shows why it happened. Proof is a mode of argument that is, by definition, complete; but the price of its completeness is that proof is always formal. Only what is already contained in the beginning is proven at the end. In analysis, however, there are always further angles of understanding, new realms of causality. Analysis is substantive. Analysis is a mode of argument that is, by definition, always incomplete; it is, properly speaking, interminable.
The extent to which a given work of art is designed as a mode of proof is, of course, a matter of proportion. Surely, some works of art are more directed toward proof, more based on considerations of form, than others. But still, I should argue, all art tends toward the formal, toward a completeness that must be formal rather than substantive—endings that exhibit grace and design, and only secondarily convince in terms of psychological motives or social forces. (Think of the barely credible but immensely satisfying endings of most of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the comedies.) In great art, it is form—or, as I call it here, the desire to prove rather than the desire to analyze—that is ultimately sovereign. It is form that allows one to terminate.
4
An art concerned with proof is formal in two senses. Its subject is the form (above and beyond the matter) of events, and the forms (above and beyond the matter) of consciousness. Its means are formal; that is, they include a conspicuous element of design (symmetry, repetition, inversion, doubling, etc.). This can be true even when the work is so laden with “content” that it virtually proclaims itself as didactic—like Dante’s Divine Comedy.
5
Godard’s films are particularly directed toward proof, rather than analysis. Vivre Sa Vie is an exhibit, a demonstration. It shows that something happened, not why it happened. It exposes the inexorability of an event.
For this reason, despite appearances, Godard’s films are drastically untopical. An art concerned with social, topical issues can never simply show that something is. It must indicate how. It must show why. But the whole point of Vivre Sa Vie is that it does not explain anything. It rejects causality. (Thus, the ordinary causal sequence of narrative is broken in Godard’s film by the extremely arbitrary decomposition of the story into twelve episodes—episodes which are serially, rather than causally, related.) Vivre Sa Vie is certainly not “about” prostitution, any more than Le Petit Soldat is “about” the Algerian War. Neither does Godard in Vivre Sa Vie give us any explanation, of an ordinary recognizable sort, as to what led the principal character, Nana, ever to become a prostitute. Is it because she couldn’t borrow 2,000 francs toward her back rent from her former husband or from one of her fellow clerks at the record store in which she works and was locked out of her apartment? Hardly that. At least, not that alone. But we scarcely know any more than this. All Godard shows us is that she did become a prostitute. Again, Godard does not show us why, at the end of the film, Nana’s pimp Raoul “sells” her, or what has happened between them, or what lies behind the final gun battle in the street in which Nana is killed. He only shows us that she is sold, that she does die. He does not analyze. He proves.
6
Godard uses two means of proof in Vivre Sa Vie. He gives us a collection of images illustrating what he wants to prove, and a series of “texts” explaining it. In keeping the two elements separate, Godard’s film employs a genuinely novel means of exposition.
7
Godard’s intention is Cocteau’s. But Godard discerns difficulties, where Cocteau saw none. What Cocteau wanted to show, to be indisputable with reference to, was magic—things like the reality of fascination, the eternal possibility of metamorphosis. (Passing through mirrors, etc.) What Godard wishes to show is the opposi
te: the anti-magical, the structure of lucidity. This is why Cocteau used techniques that, by means of the alikeness of images, bind together events—to form a total sensuous whole. Godard makes no effort to exploit the beautiful in this sense. He uses techniques that would fragment, dissociate, alienate, break up. Example: the famous staccato editing (jump cuts et al.) in A Bout de Souffle. Another example: the division of Vivre Sa Vie into twelve episodes, with long titles like chapter headings at the beginning of each episode, telling us more or less what is going to happen.
The rhythm of Vivre Sa Vie is stopping-and-starting. (In another style, this is also the rhythm of Le Mépris.) Hence, Vivre Sa Vie is divided into separate episodes. Hence, too, the repeated halting and resuming of the music in the credit sequence; and the abrupt presentation of Nana’s face—first in left profile, then (without transition) full face, then (again without transition) in right profile. But, above all, there is the dissociation of word and image which runs through the entire film, permitting quite separate accumulations of intensity for both idea and feeling.
8
Throughout the history of film, image and word have worked in tandem. In the silent film, the word—set down in the form of titles—alternated with, literally linked together, the sequences of images. With the advent of sound films, image and word became simultaneous rather than successive. While in silent films the word could be either comment on the action or dialogue by the participants in the action, in sound films the word became (except for documentaries) almost exclusively, certainly preponderantly dialogue.
Godard restores the dissociation of word and image characteristic of silent film, but on a new level. Vivre Sa Vie is clearly composed of two discrete types of material, the seen and the heard. But in the distinguishing of these materials, Godard is very ingenious, even playful. One variant is the television documentary or cinéma-vérité style of Episode VIII—while one is taken, first, on a car ride through Paris, then sees, in rapid montage, shots of a dozen clients, one hears a dry flat voice rapidly detailing the routine, hazards, and appalling arduousness of the prostitute’s vocation. Another variant is in Episode XII, where the happy banalities exchanged by Nana and her young lover are projected on the screen in the form of subtitles. The speech of love is not heard at all.
