À Bout de Souffle

Baudelaire says all you get from reading newspapers is dirty fingertips. Michel wipes his shoes with them. This is a very characteristic posture. When Patricia reads Faulkner to him, he improves on the text. A Dalinian posture: "People say there's no such thing as happy love. That's nonsense. There's no such thing as unhappy love."

His nom de guerre is Laszlo Kovacs. His meeting with Tolmatchoff is a tour de force with an oblique reference to Bob le Flambeur. The Harder They Fall crops up. The boulevard walk epitomizes Godard's introduction to Paris and leads to the great middle scene in Patricia's hotel room, where Chaplin's skirt-lifting gag (cited by Agee) is repeated.

A picture by Miró, who created some of the most complicated forms in the twentieth century, "like difficult music heard for the first time," is briefly seen after a Picasso or two, and is a delight for the eyes, a moment of visual repose.

A shot from Altman's Countdown is seen in reverse: a sign the camera moves off. The ultimate provenance of the screenplay is Truffaut's. The punchline of Michel's joke about the condemned man is, I believe, not "In the future..." but "Decidedly..." ("Décidément..."), which, if I am not mistaken, is a Truffautisme, related in this context to the director's comment on filmmaking in La Nuit Américaine.

The great man, Parvulesco, stares Patricia down (he has just said that in France men are not yet dominated by women, as they are in America) and tells her, in her capacity as a member of the American press, what this film is all about: "To become immortal, and then to die." He is played by Jean-Pierre Melville, the director of Bob le Flambeur.

Parvulesco is asked, "Aimez-vous Brahms?" Patricia's look into the camera premiered one month after La Dolce Vita.

Patricia's café date begins on an escalator in a shot which anticipates Kubrick or McGrath. The table by the window is not unlike those tables at the end of Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman.

On a dare, Michel runs from the taxi and creates a famous scene from The Seven Year Itch. At the Herald-Tribune office, after two circular panoramic tracking shots, there is a resemblance between Jean Seberg and Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil.

Michel's architectural commentary appears in Quick Change.

The jump-cutting creates abstraction. The Président's motorcade is seen, but not the Président. Patricia descends a staircase in a shot from Griffith's Abraham Lincoln.
Action is avoided with some strenuousness of cutting, "to take the mickey out of it." (Welles)

They apparently go to see Budd Boetticher's Westbound, a Randolph Scott Western, dubbed in French with dialogue by Apollinaire.

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto is played. Michel likes it, because his father was a clarinetist.

And of course it ends among blackmail and cheesecake, with that peculiar lip-wiping gesture Humphrey Bogart would make when face to face with a pretty fellow or lost in thought... on Patricia's lips.

Berrutti's pistol provokes the disaster, which is filmed like the end of Blood on the Sun.

The Birds is cited briefly early on in a long shot, and there is a certain kinship to Tirez sur le Pianiste. The main characters are Franz (Kafka, owing to Sami Frey's resemblance) and Arthur (Rimbaud, so stated). In view of the credits and a couple of gags, the title comes close to signifying "second unit."

Losey's precision is matched by Godard's imprecision, or rather the desire for freedom evinced by the hand-held camera, which never loses the picture for a single moment. This is the most remarkable achievement of a very great film, but there are other resources: long takes, choreography, and the beautiful geometrical or even Cartesian analysis of forms, all activated by the witty script as image et son.

The results are sometimes surprising, The dance number is an homage to the American musical in passing, but its real intent is precisely what it says it is, to reveal the emotions of the characters, which it does "by exhaustion."

The script, which complements the cinematic ability of Robert N. Bradbury, say, to conjure activity from nothing, compares the little island to the Isle of the Dead and it looks that way, the whole thing amounting to a gag reading of L'Avventura (with its floating camera homage to Hitchcock).

The virtuosic development of Romeo and Juliet in the English class is Shakespeare en français.

The imagined water.

A satire against computers (as Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 is a satire against television), made up of diverse elements: to drive from one city to another by night is a journey to another galaxy, Paul Eluard's Capitale de la Douleur is the key, the computer that runs Alphaville speaks aphorisms in parody of the car radio in Cocteau's Orphée, a programmer's instrument.

Stylistically a distant relation of Mr. Arkadin, and a forerunner of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over and above its satirical import, it's a setting of Eluard's verse. The general milieu is that of The Trial (Welles). Image et son are the script, which first of all mounts a terrific analysis of the synthetic "mind" of a computer (it lacks conscience and tenderness, and cannot "save those who weep"), as you might say, with consequences for a society become "slaves of probability" ("No-one has lived in the past. No-one will live in the future." This is the dictum of Alpha 60, which is as much the model for HAL 9000 as Alphaville is the major ground-plan of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and then the powerful selectivity of the cinematography that renders a view as from the Outerlands of many commonplaces of the modern world, but more than that, it answers the script's requirement of legend in view of life' s "oral intransmissibility," and all of this is couched in a French Philip Marlowe's science-fiction adventure.

The long sequences between Lemmy Caution's hotel room and the lobby are perfectly evocative of a hotel stay, thanks to the assiduity and freedom of the hand-held camera.
There is a brief allusion to La Dolce Vita, and Alpha 60 is sometimes represented not as an electronic eye but a mysterious fan, an image that has become ubiquitous. Passing down a corridor, rooms announce themselves as "Occupé" or "Libre".

Alpha 60 quotes Borges, and is confounded with an enigma (a gag later used in the original Star Trek series).

Je Vous Salue, Marie

Banned in Rome, screened in New York and Los Angeles before being picketed off by certain sodalities. Not since L'Age d'Or in Madrid, perhaps…

The work is of supernal beauty. Galilee has not looked better since the feet of the Master trod upon it. The charming philosophical disquisitioning, if you will, is capped with a finale more Biblical than De Mille, even.

It is true, for the benefit of the fellow who asked me if Night of the Living Dead has any naked females in it (because his wife would object), there is some nudity. "I would like," says Dali, "to know what the Virgin's ass hairs would have looked like."

This Cantata for Simone Weil has three main advancements. It exhibits a refinement of grammar to the degree that one can speak of punctuation in half-a-dozen places, and even distinguish a period, a comma, an exclamation mark, etc., articulating a virtually seamless, ideally fluid editing, above all of the sound.

Grammar and sound editing; third is a vast or ample reserve of quotation brought to book in three ways: the direct attributed quote ("I don't seek, I find." "Picasso?" "Picasso."). Next, the unattributed quote, from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Husbands, say. Finally, and most remarkably, the tacit or vacated allusion, as to Frankenheimer (The Train) at the outset, much later to Wilde on American cities, and running throughout a variant of Eliot:

…I rejoice, having to construct somethingUpon which to rejoice.

"Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile" (cp. Borges on Whitman), even at the service entrance of a history bought or cajoled from experience.

What is suggested by the color sequence ("pushed" digital video) is, at first, 2001: A Space Odyssey, then more clearly films that have another association (Passion, Through a Glass Darkly, and the television series As Time Goes By). This sequence, which by the principles of Citizen Kane syntax is also not a flashback, though it takes place DEUX ANS AUPARAVANT and IL Y AVAIT DEUX ANS DÉJA (something like Pinter's Betrayal), could be said to affirm the central thesis (love as a structural principle); it throws a dash of salt spray into the wounds.

The rehearsal scenes are an homage to Woody Allen. The Theory of Love presented is akin to the stance of the poet and the Emperor of China. The three ages pose an interesting void (young and old being the subject of a Spielberg & Associates, Inc. takeover, adults remain unaccounted for). Text and song are distinguished, rather as the end of The Conversation expresses itself. The swamp of Yugoslavia is sketched impressionistically. "It's interesting that History has been replaced by Technology, but why Politics by Gospel?" The modern-day Esther exposes herself in front of the Hotel Inter-Continental. René Revel, Gardien de La Paix laid low by the Nazis, is rememorated (provoking a shorthand résumé of Godard's position on individuals in wartime, comparable to his vision of the Holocaust as an affair of railroad typists), as well as Étienne de la Boétie's Discours sur la servitude volontaire. The Confrérie de Notre-Dame…

A battered rowboat christened LA FRANCE LIBRE recalls Fellini's E La Nave Va. "Washington is the real captain of the ship," says an American diplomat named Sumner Welles, "Hollywood is the steward."

The discussion of Americas is a blind to obscure the real question: Which America is real, the regime, the commercial presentation, or that other one?

"America has no history, and so it seeks those of others: Vietnam, Sarajevo." This is a theme of recent fiction (see William Golding).

A short piece of film appears to be Adolf Hitler examining concentration camp bodies.
Sight and picture. "A picture, the only thing capable of denying nothingness, is also the sight nothingness has of us."

The Orchestre Rouge. ARCHIVES DE L'AMOUR. Origines et Péguy.

France in the European Union? It belongs with Britain and the United States.

"Rompez, vagues!"

"The measure of love is to love without measure" (St. Augustine).

The Salon.com reviewer said, "Godard has run out of things to say."

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002