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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 11. 1966.

Film reviews again attacked

page 9

Film reviews again attacked

Sir,—Mr. Benson writes obstusely and immodestly on Jean-Luc Godard. It is surprising that he should miss so much of the substance of Bande a Part. Not to be interested in the film's ideas might leave him bored enough to spend the last third guessing camera shots, but it is odd that he should make his first complaint that 'the characters are doing nothing interesting or involving for the audience.' Isn't the matter in the simplest terms of high interest: the relations of the three, robbery, betrayal, death, flight? Yet the treatment of this is the great concern, and it is the disappointment of his notice that Mr. Benson writes on the film without giving any sign of his attitude to the meaning. as he conceives it. It makes his opinion hard to discuss.

He writes in a purposeful way of the action as 'aimless drifting . . a morass of irrelevancies . . . superfluous meanderings' but not of his idea of the direction from which this deviates. Does he see the story of Odile, Franz and Arthur as a critical narrative of people living in fantasy and overtaken by real life: their involvement in B-film style and attitudes as causing Arthur's death; the shooting scene as the point of tragic convergence of the two elements in the action, the imagined and the real? Certainly they lose control of their plan . . . 'they couldn't put the brakes on now.'

Yet Arthur's death is also a moment of paradoxical triumph. He has been through this before in reel one and does not succumb now in an ordinary way to the forces of the world, out dies fortified by the style of his life. And that his death is to a certain extent heroic and tragic, and that Odile's and Franz's sailing away given a sense of happiness won, however precarious, and of resilience and continuity Tin our next episode we shall show the life of Franz and Odile in the tropics'), all claims that their life is justly triumphant. There is nothing merely arbitrary in this ineluctable ending tone. Final sympathies conflict with an 'objective' view of the action because the point of the film is its exploration of reality. The fluid nature of reality is the question and meaning in every situation, and involvement for the audience must take the form of continual fine discrimination.

'What's not clear is the part I'll be playing,' says Arthur. M. Godard has made an unequivocal statement about the band: 'Ils sont plus honnetes avec euxmemes que les autres. Ce ne sont pas eux qui sont a l'ecart due monde, c'est le monde qui est loin d'eux.' The film is not so simple. 'Les Autres' are not a substantially realised presence but rather implicit as the received notions brought to bear on the film. What Is the world, and how are we oriented? 'Franz did not know whether the world was becoming a dream or a dream the world.'

The words are Godard's. and his commentary is a controlling element of the presentation. Through it the B-movie manner becomes explicitly a part of the film's art—and the joke that 'classique modern comme disait le grand poete Eliot' offers one kind of justification for that. The narrator also extends the films reality to a straight poetry of description which orders the suburban confusion of the setting in the same way that the characters' art gives shape and meaning to their lives.

As critic and interpreter of his film Godard disposes the possible attitudes so that they play off against each other with the effect of an irony which is not reductive but which presents a witty humility before the limitations in any way of looking at the world.

Franz and Odile, however, survive this uncertainty and paradox in life to go off together at the end 'with a happiness that knew neither limits nor contradictions.' The virtues which come through the test are in Franz's case an understanding of the nature of the difficulty; his story from Jack London is about the problem of trying to indentify the truth. Odile is carried through the flux by her immense womanly sympathy; her moment in the film is her song in the Metro, where her response to the lonely and unhappy people is 'je suis semblable a vous. One of the radiant transformations of reality at the heart of Bande a Part is the appearance of Odile's sensitive idealism as the tough and viable attitude to life. It is Arthur, not a cynic but a romantic, who becomes the sacrifice of art. His name is Rimbaud, 'comme mon pere.'

One of the final remarks of Franz is on how rarely people come together: 'ils restent separes, mefiants et tragiques.' Against this is Arthur's dying thought of Odile as 'the legendary Indian bird which is born without feet and never stops flying . . it has long transparent wings which when closed will fit into the palm of your hand.'

'The shadow of a considerable indifference' is lifted. How could Mr. Benson not be interested in this film?

Peter Robb (1964)

Mr. Benson in reply

Mr. Robb is obviously an adherent of the Professor Munzian "literary merit" school of criticism. Apart from a few overt references and the fact that we arc "in the know," it would be a difficult task to determine whether he is discussing a film, a play, or a novel. Such is the curse of most film criticism from The Listener to Sight and Sound. The film is treated as some kind of adjunct of the literary arts and those qualities which render it an independent and individual (albeit eclectic) form of expression are ignored.

No matter how much "literary merit" Mr. Robb finds in Bande a Part, and no matter how many subtle meanings he divines from its script and action (or nonaction), the fact remains that as a film (dare I use the word?) it is pretty hopeless. Even if one is generous and credits Godard with good intentions, his lazy and unimaginative direction in Bande a Part cannot be excused.

Sir,—Mr. Benson has, no doubt unwittingly, distorted the import of my criticism of his review of Bande a Part, in his reply published in Salient for July 29. Please allow me to set the record straight.

My principal concern was with the fact that we cannot consider the work of a man like Godard in the same context as a writer for Sight and Sound or Film Quarterly, because we see so few of his films, and this fact is worthy of comment when one writes a review of the second full-length Godard feature to reach New Zealand. This is an entirely different matter from whether or not I accept the auteur theory: I wish to point out that Mr. Benson was going beyond the evidence available to us living here in a cinematic vacuum. Because he prefaced his review with a quote from Peter Brook eulogising Godard, he invited a reaction from those who. likeme. are prepared to believe that there is probably a reason for Brook's adulation. This lact does not worry Mr. Benson, who is quite happy to damn a director on the basis of one film. I suggested that Bande a Part is probably Godard's least successful film, and that we should wait till we see Breathless, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou (the censor has prevented us from seeing Une Femme Mariee), before we pass judgment on the director. I hope this clarifies what was obviously not clear from my previous letter.

As for the auteur theory, it would be as well to make my position on this clear, so as to obviate further charges like those levelled at me by Mr. Benson. Auteur theorists have erred in applying their theory to American directors, because it is often impossible for an American director to fulfil the criteria for being an auteur. but I would maintain that very often the theory is applicable to European directors such as Godard. Fellini and Bergman.

An auteur is simply a director who has full control over the making of his film, and of course has something to say in the film. It is far more common for this to be so in Europe than in America, where the creative functions of the director are often given to other people. A film is such an enormous enterprise that it is easy to appreciate how this happens: it may be in the casting, it may be in the script, it may be in the preparation of the sound track, or even in the editing, that the decisions are taken away from the director and given to technicians, or perhaps supervised by the production staff or the producer. Orson Welles has suffered from this process: he has said that only two of his films are truly Welles films (Kane and The Trial), because all the others involved other people's work. Thus it is crazy to talk about Hawks or Dmytryk or Preminger films, as if they always exercised full control over them.

Peter Boyes

[Abbreviated.—Ed.]