Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (44 page)

Kael considered the auteurist critics’ emphasis on visual style over subject to be a deliberate search for petty or recondite touches in avoidance of a responsible consideration of a film’s overall artistic merit: “It’s understandable that they’re trying to find movie art in the loopholes of commercial production—it’s a harmless hobby and we all play it now and then. What’s incomprehensible is that they
prefer
their loopholes to unified film expression.”

She blamed the auteur critics for their drive “to exalt products over works that attempt to express human experience,” and she was sure that she knew the difference. Thus she condemned the auteurists’ praise of films noirs (such as those of Samuel Fuller, Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, and Nicholas Ray) as anti-intellectual nihilism:

These critics work embarrassingly hard trying to give some semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless, repetitious commercial products—the kind of action movies that the restless, rootless men who wander on Forty-second Street and in the Tenderloin of all our big cities have always preferred just because they could respond to them without thought. These movies soak up your time. I would suggest that they don’t serve a very different function for Sarris or Bogdanovich or the young men of
Movie
⁷
—even though they devise elaborate theories to justify soaking up their time.

She complained that most of the auteurist critics, who were male, were a bunch of gentle intellectuals looking to pose as tough guys by absorbing and praising cinematic violence and as pocket nihilists by gagging their intellects with cinematic drivel. In so doing, she argued, they were betraying not only their adult responsibilities but also the significance of the French criticism that inspired them:

The French
auteur
critics… adored the American gangsters, and the vitality, the strength, of our action pictures… Where the French went off was in finding elaborate intellectual and psychological meanings in these simple action films…

Can we conclude that, in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence—that period when masculinity looked so great and important but art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also their way of making a comment on our civilization by the suggestion that trash is the true art form? I ask; I do not know.

Kael ignored the fact that the French Hitchcocko-Hawksians lavished praise on the films of Murnau, Eisenstein, Bresson, Ophüls, Rossellini, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Bergman, and other international directors working away from Hollywood and its traditions, as well as such American directors as Douglas Sirk, Stanley Donen, Frank Tashlin, and Vincente Minnelli, whose work had little to do with violent fantasies of cowboys or gangsters. (Sarris too, in his personal “pantheon” of twenty directors, featured many from the same international group, and only a handful from Hollywood.)

More important, Kael entered the movie theater, and the critical arena, with a pile of unacknowledged prejudices, which showed themselves in the vocabulary of her stern reprimands. She blamed the auteurists for their “fanaticism in a ludicrous cause” and set against it her own moderation:

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic. But this does not mean a scrambling and confusion of systems. Eclecticism is not the same as lack of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the best standards and principles from various systems of ideas. It requires more care, more orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a single theory.

Kael selected the “best” standards and principles on the basis of a prior standard, principle, or theory, this one hidden offstage, whether cleverly or
naively. For all of her empiricism and eclecticism, Kael wrote under the unacknowledged weight of an unshakable set of fixed categories: she was sure that she knew art from trash, adolescence from adulthood, simplicity from complexity, dogma from experience, the masculine from the feminine, the immutable laws of genre. She believed that films could be judged insignificant because she so judged the “restless, rootless men” who, she presumed, favor them. When she praised American films, it was as invigorating “kitsch” which she took care not to mistake for art. Because she was certain that she knew “trash” when she saw it, she could not see through the Hollywood conventions to recognize the artistry of artists. Her lines of thought were more rigid, more exclusive, more arbitrary, more dogmatic than Sarris’s—and yet, they were less subject to debate because they lurked invisibly under the guise of her presumed eclecticism and empiricism. The fixed categories of Kael’s thought made her prolific, decisive, and recognizable.

In the process, Kael flattered her readers: in considering a film as “experience,” she insured that the viewer’s own preoccupations and pleasures remained at its center. Thus, whatever a film’s significance as art or information, its principal purpose was to provide a favorable experience—to entertain. Kael offered the literary apotheosis of this view. Her supreme virtue as a critic was her ability to write persuasively of her own experience at the movies as it related to her experience of life in general. Kael was largely a first-person essayist who made use of movies to write brilliantly of the times and of herself; she was, in effect, a New Journalist in disguise. Her performance was essentially literary, and its cinematic import was often enough incidental; if she resisted auteurism in the cinema, it was in order to practice her own flamboyant authorship as a critic. Indeed, throughout her career, she wrote brilliantly about all aspects of the cinema—from the acting and the set design to studio politics and social trends—except the art of the director.

Moreover, Kael came up with a critical doctrine that went far beyond her claims to eclectic empiricism and justified her self-centered approach to film with a stark metaphor: “If a lady says, ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’ that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.”
⁸
In a pleasure-seeking era, she wrote to justify her own search for pleasure, and to justify the reader who sought the same; thus, except to the extent that Kael was the Tom Wolfe of film criticism, she was its Helen Gurley Brown, liberating the partisans of traditional taste without liberating them from it.

K
AEL ENERGETICALLY PRAISED
some of Godard’s early films and ultimately recognized his singular importance. However, in the early and
mid-1960s, when Godard’s works were still seeking a foothold in the United States, she praised most highly those films of his that were modeled on “mindless, repetitious” American action films:
Breathless
and
Band of Outsiders
. In her 1964 essay “Zeitgeist and Poltergeist,” she relegated
Vivre sa vie
to the category of “art-house films,” dismissed it as “confusing,” and scoffed at any “existentialist point” that she might be missing in its ending.
⁹
She scoffed even more vehemently at Bresson and at what she called the “left-wing formalism” of Resnais and Antonioni. She did not like “
The Married Woman
” [
sic
], asserting that there Godard “seems to settle for arbitrary effects,” and later stated that she simply “would not recommend” it.
¹⁰

In 1968, Kael was hired as film critic for
The New Yorker;
she attributed her hiring to her writings about Godard. Her articles in praise of some of Godard’s films, she said, caught the attention of William Shawn, the editor of
The New Yorker
, who, she said, “realized that there was something to Godard. And I had been writing very lovingly about Godard.”
¹¹
She had indeed been writing lovingly about his films, albeit intermittently and belatedly, starting in 1966, and her run of enthusiasm would be short-lived.

Paradoxically, it was Kael who, in blinding herself to the work of some of Hollywood’s real artists, such as Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and Otto Preminger, found herself backed into defending the mere competence of industrial skill against the heroic virtues of art. In the long run, Kael became an ever more staunch defender of ever more banal Hollywood movies, like
Fiddler on the Roof
or
Yentl
. Sarris, far from being the adolescent nihilist of Kael’s surmise, came off as the true classicist, swaying the visionary subjectivity of the downtown film scene toward an appreciation of the highly organized art of a Hitchcock or a Hawks.

T
HE
L
INCOLN
C
ENTER
for the Performing Arts opened on the West Side of Manhattan in September 1962. In 1963, its leaders, recognizing the ferment in the world of cinema, established the New York Film Festival for the purpose of showing masterpieces of contemporary cinema from around the world which had not yet been seen in New York. Amos Vogel of the New York ciné-club Cinema 16 was asked to organize the festival. Richard Roud, an American who had been programming the London Film Festival since 1957, was invited to program it. The festival was to be relatively small and would offer no prizes. It was intended to be a “festival of festivals,” not necessarily the place where films would premiere, but rather a selection of the putative best in a given year.

Roud was a Francophile who had come to know Henri Langlois during
the late 1950s while working for the British Film Institute. He was keenly aware of the New Wave’s importance in sparking enthusiasm for the cinema in New York and the rest of the world. Nonetheless, the first festival, which took place from September 10 to 19, 1963, did not feature a particularly strong dose of the New Wave. It did include such important films as Bresson’s
The Trial of Joan of Arc
, Resnais’s
Muriel
, Chris Marker’s
Le Joli mai
, Luis Buũuel’s
The Exterminating Angel
, and Ermanno Olmi’s
The Fiancés
. The only film of Godard’s to be shown was
Le Nouveau Monde
, included in
RoGoPaG
, and it was booed. The festival as a whole, however, was a great success: most of the films were well received, and the audiences were large, unusually young, and hip—especially striking for an uptown venue like Lincoln Center.

By the time of the second festival, in September 1964, the debate over auteurism dominated the cinematic discussion, and even if Sarris lost the rhetorical battles—his earnestly modest style could not stand up to Kael’s belletristic vigor, and he resisted any temptation to respond in kind to Kael’s ad hominem attacks—he won the youth of the city. The new critical discourse left its mark on the festival’s program, which featured
A Woman Is a Woman
and
Band of Outsiders
(along with Buñuel’s
Diary of a Chambermaid
and his 1930
L’Age d’or
, Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1955
The Taira Clan
, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s second feature,
Before the Revolution
). If the selection was somewhat more conservative overall, it was also more inclusive of the American cinema, featuring a pair of Hollywood films (Robert Rossen’s
Lilith
, starring Jean Seberg, and Sidney Lumet’s
Fail-Safe
) alongside the independent films
The Brig
, directed by Jonas and Adolphus Mekas, and
Nothing But a Man
, by Michael Roemer.

Both
A Woman Is a Woman
and
Band of Outsiders
were acclaimed when they were shown at Philharmonic Hall (today, Avery Fisher Hall) on September 25, 1964. Godard came to New York to present the films at a press screening (and then went to watch a double feature of westerns).
¹²
They were extremely well received by Andrew Sarris at the
Village Voice
and by Eugene Archer in the
New York Times
. Before the New York Film Festival, only two films by Godard had been shown in the United States (
Breathless
, in 1961, and
Vivre sa vie
, in 1963); from November 1964 to October 1965, four films by Godard (
A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, A Married Woman
, and
Alphaville
) had their American releases. Susan Sontag’s ecstatic essay “On Godard’s
Vivre sa vie
” had been published in 1964 in a little magazine called
Moviegoer:
¹³
Godard was taking his place in America’s intellectual firmament.

As in France,
A Married Woman
received a particularly positive critical
appreciation befitting its originality and complexity, with Stanley Kauffmann of the
New Republic
lauding it as the director’s “best picture to be seen here since
Breathless
” and praising Godard for having “used his armory of experiment, trick, imaginative innovation for a perceptible and communicated purpose.”
¹⁴
Brendan Gill, in
The New Yorker
, called it simply “the best of the Godard pictures” that he had seen. “In the past, his intrusions often proved a nuisance; here they become a welcome part of the whole.”
¹⁵

But Godard’s trip to New York in September 1964, where his bark was being lifted by the rising auteurist tide, was not merely promotional; he had business to pursue.

S
EVERAL WEEKS EARLIER
, while at the Venice festival to present
A Married Woman
, Godard had read a script that François Truffaut had given him. It had been written by two young American journalists at
Esquire
magazine, Robert Benton and David Newman, and was called
Bonnie and Clyde
. The story concerned the Barrow gang and its two leaders, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, criminals who had rampaged through the South in the 1930s. Newman later recalled: “Back in the sixties, when we wrote
Bonnie and Clyde
, there was something going on about cinema—a word you never hear anymore in the States—that was almost like a religion. Not just for me but all my friends, everyone I knew.”
¹⁶
Benton had been a lifelong lover of movies but considered that his view had been forever changed by the first New Wave films to be shown in New York: “There were other great directors, like Bergman and Antonioni, but the French New Wave was something different, it spoke to us differently”—precisely because its films recapitulated the genres and forms of the American cinema. Although Benton and Newman had known American movies, they had not, so to speak, known the American cinema, at least not as the French New Wave understood it. For this, Benton said, they had Andrew Sarris to thank: