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Popu-book, d un-ooliti-sym-leroic pear-iblio-dition ed to n the ok is mpre-Lit not3le—aliticalaboutit can likely r new ind it litical \ may fessor Uni-5 tOOorma-eories ok as mayItsre be-repre-1, the now past.tural income. Tkachev agreed with Yu. G. Zhukovsky that “economic demands govern poli-bor •force declined. The organ izatio-n of workers on a co-oper ative (artel) basis yielded to orIX Jk t i JL CA VA V' w J. A V/ At* kV V^-V- » N. *opment of socialism in Russia (as distinguished from affiliation either with the First Inter-Jr jrone were to cite the most im portant factors in the revolu (Continued on Page S—5)jean-Luc Godard’s Treatise on BreathlessnessBy Jiames Stoller‘ ‘Breathless” (A Bout de Souffle) is Jean-Luc Godard’s odd, fascinating film about a 'Parisian criminal and the American girl with whom he sleeps and by whom he is betrayed. But Godard, though his camera comes in close, is ultimately quite unwilling to concern himself responsibly with any of it. “I was out to attract attention,” he has admitted;I wanted to end -the old tradition in a spectacular way, so I made a gangster film, using la-Tl the effects that were supposed (to be impossible. It’s a film where anything goes.Clearly, he does not want us either to sympathize with or condemn his characters, for that would divert our attention from the style; at the same time, neither does he want his story to be merely ridiculous, like the American gangster films from which it partly takes off. So hetJean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in a scene from ‘Breathless’___xi___i ^ r i____we were riding beside him. Asides are a theatrical commonplace, but who but the Marx Brothers have dared use them in films?that Flow of Life.And thus does Godard turn his trick. If we confine ourselves to those films which begin by aspiring to a surfacesition — precisely what Godard was after—encourages us not to worry about the thing that is apparently not the main point; and does so much more efficiently than some of those American melodramas mentioned earlier, whose unrenounced naturalist pretensions caused both their brutality and their narrative excesses to become at once disgusting and absurd.“Breathless” is not, however, formalist cinema, as “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” with its clocked, calculated beauties, was. That kind of form inevitably imposes its own morality, of which “Breathless” has none t all. It is a cinematic joy-ride.rycxa collection of kicks, gamy and skittish and determinedly sloppy, and its form lies .precisely in its lack of form, and in the big thing it makes of that lack. So ‘'Breathless,” a grab bag work, does what it 'likes, break-j 1ill/\ •
Newspaper Details
New York Columbia Spectator
New York, New York, US
Thu, Mar 16, 1961
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
USA 28 Feb 2020
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