Bergman on Godard

Let me begin by laying my bias on the table. I think Peter Wollen is totally right. For me, he hits the nail right on the head when he writes on page 80 of Godard and counter-cinema, “This is not to say a revolutionary cinema should distract its spectators from realities, but that unless a revolution is desired (which means nothing less than coinciding with and embodying collective fantasies) it will never take place.” In other words, if Godard is solely interested in alienating his audience by pointing out the artifice of cinema, not only will they be ineffective politically by preventing us from caring, but also, as a result of this, boring (a problem I had with “Weekend). It’s fine to be self-conscious about your medium, making a few Barthian myths along the way by adding a second order significance, but it really is not enough to sustain an interesting narrative. Also, if you are concerned enough about the limitations of your medium to the point where that is your whole subject matter, it may behoove you to consider a different form of expression.

The question Wednesday’s lecture opened up for me is what is at stake in Godard’s investment in alienation. Wollen suggests on page 75 that, “Godard’s cinema…is within the modern tradition established by Brecht and Artaud, in their different way, suspicious of the power of the arts – and the cinema, above all – to ‘capture’ its audience without apparently making it think, or changing it” [emphasis mine]. It would appear then, that what is at stake for Godard (at least in Wollen’s conception) is how to make the audience think. He apparently does not think Hollywood cinema is capable of it. This is interesting enough assumption about how politics work (as in, what is required to effect change is thinking), but more to the point of the course, this poses a direct challenge to Benjamin’s idea of the distracted critic or the absent-minded examiner. Evidently, he or she is ineffective to Godard’s purposes.

The Corrigan reading, and also Wednesday’s lecture, put forward the post-70’s Hollywood blockbuster (thank you Steven Spielberg) as the ultimate alternative to the nouvelle vogue or avant garde. And when I sit through a movie like “Transformers,” it is interesting for me to consider whether or not that movie, so utterly devoid of thought that it becomes a vacuum, is actually more thought provoking than a film like “Weekend” which, with its smug self-satisfaction at being clever, simultaneously closes itself off to the viewer while offering not much in the way of new ideas. At least with “Transformers,” I can see a largely unself-conscious account of the state of mass culture and consider it.

I think Bergman’s right about Godard: “[A] fucking bore.”