Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 9. 1966.
Films — is Godard great?
Films — is Godard great?
Sir,—There is a curious unevenness about Rex Benson's contributions to the latest issue of Salient. His piece on Charlton Heston was relevant and quite well researched, and his discussion of the Roxy's Sunday screenings and the Labour Party club's screenings at the university showed a concern with the realities of films in this country completely absent from his extraordinarily one-eyed consideration of Jeanluc Godard's Bande a Part.
It is interesting to compare Mr. Benson's review with the discussion in the issue of Truth published a few days before. The Truth piece mentioned the important facts about the new wave and its representation in New Zealand which one would have thought no one could avoid mentioning (the other people in the new wave, and how many of their films have been seen here). We can expect no less than this from a writer in other respects so well informed.
Nor should we be satisfied with a review which is headed "Jean-luc Godard" and yet mentions only Bande a Part, presumably because your reviewer has not seen Vivre sa Vie or the episode by Godard in Seven Capital Sins, the only other films by him released in this country. But this is surely the first comment to be made: Godard is one of the most important, most talked - about filmmakers in the world, yet we have seen only three of his dozen or more films made since 1959 (in itself quite an achievement).
I would expect this comment even from Mr. Benson, who finds nothing to admire in Bande a Part, and concludes "If Godard intended this monotonous technique then he can show his films to himself," quite unwarrantedly concluding that this is a representative Godard film although critics have all remarked on the change in style of this film from his others, and it is generally not regarded as one of his best. Apart from the beautiful photography by one of the world's finest directors of photography (Raoul Coutard), the most notable thing about the film is surely its self-indulgent quality. The cafeteria "Nouvelle Vague", the reference in the opening narrative to Truffaut's "La Peau Douce", being made in the same year as this film, the boy in the English class who asks how to say "A big one million dollar film", the minute's silence in the restaurant, the set-piece of the dance sequence, and the apocalyptic final killing; all these show that Godard is amusing himself with "injokes", but ones in which we can share. I cannot see any sense in which this could be described as "reactionary", a word more properly applied to the direction of What's New, Pussycat, Cat Ballou and Lady L. At least Godard is doing something original which is more than can be said for these films.
However, I don't want to indulge in any special pleading on behalf of a film which will very likely be one of the least successful of the new wave (an "eddy". Truth called it); I have written this letter to point out that we are justified in complaining when a film critic gives his public any less than all the important information to hand (all the more so in the case of our lamentable distribution system) and when he concludes that a director is trivial or incompetent on the basis of one film.
I think also that it is not unfair to suggest that this is a far less well-rounded review than we have come to expect from Mr. Benson: he didn't like Muriel much either, but at least he was able to explain why. So Bande a Part isn't a world-shaker. Ok, I was disappointed too, but it wasn't that bad. It is not very informative to assert that "At the film's core lies a stolid blancmange of stagnating non-significant significance", nor to berate the photography for being "predictable". Predictability in itself is neither a virtue nor a liability: it is what is appropriate that matters. Predictability would hurt Help! but it didn't matter in America, America. I accept that Mr. Benson's emotional reaction to the film was one of antipathy, but it is hardly fair to inflict his rationalisations for this reaction on us.
Peter Boyes.
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Capping Controller Doug White, who was elected unopposed. Educated at Nelson College, Mr. White is a part-time law student in his third year at university. He says he welcomes suggestions for improving capping, and is at present considering ideas for a Miss University contest, increased procession grants, post-procession parties for collectors and float-builders, and the introduction of a pre-graduation ceremony procession along the lines of those at Canterbury and Otago.