Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [42]
Pauline was intrigued by many of the New Wave efforts; their discarding of traditional storytelling structure greatly appealed to her. But on general principle she was not about to give her wholehearted embrace to any trendy new movement, and was meticulous about examining each of the New Wave films individually, believing that they differed wildly in their merits. To her, Hiroshima, Mon Amour fell far short of being a significant piece of work. She argued against the film in a provocative article called “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” which she published in the Winter 1961–62 issue of Sight and Sound. “I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood ‘product,’ finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism,” she wrote. (She added that she used “large generalizations in order to be suggestive rather than definitive.”) She was instinctively suspicious of the acclaim heaped on Hiroshima, Mon Amour by the American press—notably Esquire’s critic Dwight Macdonald, who compared Resnais with Joyce, Picasso, Berg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. To her, the praise that greeted Hiroshima, Mon Amour amounted to “incense burning.” She was determined to let her readers know that she was one critic not taken in by the repetitive, stilted dialogue, written by the experimental novelist Marguerite Duras, and the movie’s controlled, self-consciously hypnotic tone, which she found not at all profound, merely irritating. Most of all, she was troubled by the educated audience’s reverence for the film: “audiences of social workers, scientists, doctors, architects, professors—living and loving and suffering just like the stenographer watching Susan Hayward. . . . It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both), and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.”
The acclaim for Hiroshima, Mon Amour disturbed her as much as the mixed reception for the film that she considered to be the best of the New Wave group: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), the story of a young, amoral Parisian hood (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who goes on a crime spree while trying to get himself and his girlfriend (Jean-Seberg) to Italy. Pauline was fascinated by the way Godard had managed to make two characters who cared nothing about anything or anyone both attractive and appealing: They were so detached from the world that impulsiveness was a way of life for them. She found Breathless funny and sexy and playful and consistently surprising. It worked on the audience in a way that was unusual for movies at the time; those who saw the film found that it was almost impossible to regulate their responses to what was unfolding on the screen. This style and technique resonated with Pauline—it was another example of her attraction to “messiness” on screen—and in her KPFA review of the film, it is easy to sense her exhilaration:
The codes of civilized living presuppose that people have an inner life and outer aims, but this new race lives for the moment, because that is all that they care about. And the standards of judgment we might bring to bear on them don’t touch them and don’t interest them. They have the narcissism of youth, and we are out of it, we are bores. These are the youthful representatives of mass society. They seem giddy and gauche and amusingly individualistic, until you consider that this individualism is not only a reaction to mass conformity, but, more terrifyingly, is the new form that mass society takes: indifference to human values.
Godard has used this, as it were, documentary background for a gangster story.... But Breathless has removed the movie gangster from