tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-478111043202609148.post-47863606411102303912008-05-10T09:12:00.000-04:002008-05-10T09:12:00.000-04:00Vadim – yeah, that line is kind of amazing, isn’t it? It’s tantamount to saying, “I don’t want to deal with this.” Moments like that strongly suggest that the indirection of Godard’s style is born of a psychological aversion to affect. Which isn’t a criticism in itself: I’d say that all style is born of some pre-artistic psychological motivation. Perhaps one can think of Godard’s career as an evolving attempt to find (maybe sometimes to simulate) a connection to the life of the emotions.<BR/><BR/>I actually do like <B>Soldat</B>, though I can go only so far with it. I’m trying on the idea that the gravity of the subject matter doesn’t quite integrate with Godard’s characteristic desire to throw the film to Karina.<BR/><BR/>Last night I revisited <B>Pierrot le fou</B>, which I think has nosed out <B>Vivre sa vie</B> as my favorite Godard, and which recapitulates some of the subject matter of <B>Soldat</B>. Once you start seeing Godard's desire to flatten affect, it jumps out at you everywhere, starting with Belmondo's muted reaction to Fuller's speech (which moved Godard on the set) and continuing to the death scenes at the end. But the film leeches emotion from the periphery: from Duhamel's beautiful score, from the somber poetry in the voiceovers (often set to music), to the lovely colors and compositions.<BR/><BR/>As I thought about the procession of bloody corpses in the film that our protagonists don't react to at all, it occurred to me that Godard's inventiveness with form probably goes hand in hand with his aversion to emoting. Godard famously said about his movie corpses "It's not blood, it's red" - and of course he's right. But maybe this fruitful insight came more easily to a guy who didn't care to react strongly to the sight of blood.<BR/><BR/>One last thought, which attempts to connect this post's two topics: Godard allows Karina so much more emotional reaction ("J'en ai marre!")in <B>Pierrot</B> than he does Belmondo - to the extent that she sometimes seems to be in a movie and he seems to be watching her movie. It's probably generally true that Godard's actresses get to express more emotion then his actors.Dan Sallitthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13136066978329749513noreply@blogger.com