Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [73]
Since her writing about the films of Jean-Luc Godard had propelled William Shawn’s interest in having her at The New Yorker, it seemed fitting that two Godard pictures opened during her first year on the magazine’s staff. There were few major directors of the time with whom Pauline felt more inwardly connected; Godard’s jangly, modern tempo was her tempo. She had not liked Vivre sa vie, his 1962 drama with Anna Karina, because she suspected there was nothing much happening behind the heroine’s opaque presence. But his more recent efforts, including Band of Outsiders and Masculin féminin, had pleased her; she considered them “a volatile mixture of fictional narrative, reporting, essay, and absurdist interludes” whose frenzied, pop-art spirit was an ideal reflection of the chaotic times.
The first of his 1968 films, released in March, was La Chinoise, a biting satire of a bunch of young revolutionaries who attempt to use terrorist techniques to pull off a Maoist takeover. La Chinoise was aptly described by the Godard scholar Richard Brody as “less a document of Maoist thought, action, or organization than a collage of Maoist graffiti and paraphernalia.” The movie had been loosely organized, to say the least; Godard admitted to his close associates that he had given little thought to a cohesive story line, instead peppering the film with fast and furious references to figures such as Sartre and Malraux and Rosa Luxemburg, which vexed many members of the art-house audience. But Pauline respected Godard for not making the effort to explain the allusions that flew by so quickly:
We all know that an artist can’t discover anything for himself—can’t function as an artist—if he must make everything explicit in terms accessible to the widest possible audience. This is one of the big hurdles that defeat artists in Hollywood; they aren’t allowed to assume that anybody knows anything, and they become discouraged and corrupt when they discover that studio thinking is not necessarily wrong in its estimate of the mass audience. Godard, like many American novelists, works in terms of an audience that is assumed to have the same background he has.
Unlike so many American filmmakers, who repackaged old genres to make them palatable for a late-’60s audience, Godard was a fresh, original thinker; Pauline found his films “funny, and they’re funny in a new way.”
But it was Godard’s Weekend, released in October, that excited her more than any European film had in years. Pauline believed that by this time, Godard’s craft was so brilliantly confident that he had become the equal of James Joyce among filmmakers. She predicted that Godard would “probably never have a popular, international success; he packs film-festival halls, but there is hardly enough audience left over to fill small theaters for a few weeks.”
Weekend is a study of a greedy, bourgeois French couple (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) who leave on a trip to make sure the wife’s dying mother has provided for them in her will. Along the way they are plunged into a nightmarish traffic jam that leads to complete chaos—including the rape of the wife, portrayed in a disturbing, seriocomic tone. Pauline considered the director’s vision of the true hell of the modern materialistic world to be “a great original work.” There were sequences that excited her so much she could hardly wait to get her reactions down on the page—particularly the wife’s confession to her husband of a heated erotic episode with her lover, and the virtuoso filming of the traffic jam, in which the camera tracks its way through the cars that have come to a standstill, until it comes to the reason for the delay: a horrific, bloody accident that has attracted a crowd of gawkers. The movie’s ending stunned audiences: The couple become prey to a gang