An Invention without a Future. James Naremore
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to participate in an investigation of Hollywood’s past. As a result, whereas the movies were an invention of modernity, all film culture and all writing on film since the late 1950s has had something of a postmodern character. One irony of this situation is that while cinephiles today often call themselves students of film, most of them are students of teletheory, living in a world of recycled images.
Godard’s review also has qualities in common with the account of postmodernism by Andreas Huyssen in his influential book After the Great Divide, which argues that sometime around 1960 a new aesthetic began to appear in Western society, signaled by the Pop movement in American art, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and Leslie Fiedler, and the later architectural writings of Robert Venturi. What all these events have in common is a “break with the austere canon of high modern[ism]” and an “espousal of the commercial vernacular of consumer culture” (187). They involve a sometimes baffling mixture of elitism and populism, and they adopt a critical strategy that was eventually adopted by the academy. As Huyssen puts it, “Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism’s relentless hostility to mass culture” (188).
Huyssen doesn’t mention Godard or Truffaut, but the New Wave belongs on his list of postmodern developments. Godard’s early work is roughly contemporary with Pop and clearly draws inspiration from the American commercial scene. To be sure, there was nothing special about a French intellectual who praised American movies. There was also a quality of old-fashioned enthusiasm in Godard and the auteurists, who were never as coolly detached as Andy Warhol and never so condescending to movies as Leslie Fiedler. Nevertheless, Godard used the language of high art to praise certain “pulpy” Hollywood auteurs, and as a filmmaker he borrowed imagery from such films as Some Came Running (1958), which Vincente Minnelli had designed to resemble what he described as “the inside of a juke box” (I Remember It Well, 325). Several passages of Godard’s criticism could almost be used to define the Pop (or camp) sensibility—for instance, his description of a couple of his favorite scenes from Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957):
Barbara Stanwyck’s brother grabs her to use her as a shield. “Go on, shoot, you dirty coward,” he shouts to Barry Sullivan, who is covering them with his gun. And without hesitation Barry Sullivan calmly shoots Barbara Stanwyck, who crumples up, and then the brother, who falls mortally wounded in his turn. “Stop shooting, you dirty coward,” cries the dying man—Bang! Bang! —“For pity’s sake, stop shooting”—Bang! Bang!—“Stop shooting, can’t you see I’m dying”—Bang! Bang! Bang!
In another scene, Gene Barry is courting ravishing young Eve Brent, making her charming debut before the cameras in an eye-shade borrowed from Samuel. Eve sells guns. Jokingly, Gene aims at her. The camera takes his place and we see Eve through the barrel of the gun. Track forward until she is framed in close-up by the mouth of the barrel. Next shot: they are in a kiss. (62)
Godard is implicitly attacking not only the bourgeois tradition of quality but also certain features of modernism and the avant-garde. As Huyssen points out, “Modernism’s running feud with mass society [and] the avant-garde’s attack on high art as a support system of cultural hegemony always took place on the pedestal of high art itself.” Godard and many of the other auteurists were different. They were opening the possibility for artists to engage in what Huyssen calls an “experimental mixing and meshing” of the old cultural domains (189). There was, moreover, an irony in the French fascination with American cinema: the auteurists’ rise to success as filmmakers was facilitated by the decline of the Hollywood studios, which had dominated the marketplace in the years between the two world wars. In the United States, the major production companies were no longer in control of exhibition, censorship regulations were becoming liberalized, and European art films were making significant inroads in urban art theaters. The French New Wave was particularly well suited to the period because it managed to fuse certain elements of Italian neorealism with a fond, insouciant, distinctively Gallic attitude toward old-fashioned Hollywood genres and directors. In certain American contexts, its name became useful as a marketing strategy.
This doesn’t mean that either the New Wave or auteurism can be reduced to a device for self-promotion. The latter began as a critical undertaking and marked an important change in the history of taste. One of the best sources for an understanding of what the French movement achieved is Jim Hillier’s “Cahiers du Cinéma”: The 1950s, which illustrates the diversity of opinion among the writers of the period and places French debates over American cinema in the context of larger concerns about neorealism, modernism, and the French film industry. As Hillier indicates, auteurism was never simply about American-based directors such as Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, and Nicholas Ray. The Parisian cinephiles were interested in American auteurs, but French writing about Hollywood was tempered by an even stronger admiration for Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais. Nor were the auteurists exclusively concerned with authorship. Particularly at Cahiers, their practice usually implied a contradictory set of theories about the phenomenology and techniques of cinema, and it produced excellent essays on stars and genres. Above all, it generated a relentlessly evaluative kind of criticism, involving a policy of liking some directors and films more than others. Thus if you wrote for Cahiers, you tended to favor Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, and Kenji Mizoguchi over Sergei Eisenstein, John Huston, and Akira Kurosawa; you disliked well-made literary adaptations of Great Books, especially when they suggested a slick, middle-brow attitude toward Art; you had a late romantic, somewhat surrealistic passion for amour fou in pictures like Gun Crazy (1949) and Vertigo (1958); you preferred low-budget films noirs such as Kiss Me Deadly (1955) over Big Productions with Important Themes such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); and you praised wide-screen, color-coded melodramas like Some Came Running instead of Academy Award–winning “little” movies like Marty (1955).
Much of the philosophical underpinnings of 1950s criticism at Cahiers derived from Bazin, the editor of the journal; but Bazin himself, who famously praised the “genius of the system” in Hollywood, was never an auteurist. Although he produced seminal writings on a number of directors (Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, William Wyler, Orson Welles, and the Italian neorealists), he chastised his younger colleagues for their habit of falling into uncritical hero worship and was explicitly disapproving of the “Hitchcocko-Hawksian” tendency in Truffaut’s work. His influence on the younger generation lay not so much in the authors he favored as in his broad historical knowledge of cinema and the arts generally, his ability to take Hollywood genres and technical developments seriously, and his keen understanding of the way style gives rise to meaning. Above all, Bazin imbued the early New Wave with a spirit of existential humanism, which placed great emphasis on the cinema’s ability to view the world from an objective standpoint. (The very word for the photographic lens in French is objectif.) He and the auteurists repeatedly favored “realistic,” “democratic,” or untendentious uses of the camera; as a result, Cahiers in the 1950s was preoccupied with wide screens, the “ethics” of mise-en-scène, and with directors who used invisible editing, long takes, or sequence shots rather than dialectical montage. Sometimes this aesthetic ideology was joined with a belief that the best American auteurs were existentialists avant la lettre. In his 1960 review of Fuller’s Verboten! (1959), for example, Truffaut describes the director of the film as if he were an action painter making instinctive or primal decisions about what should be put on the screen: “This is direct cinema, uncriticizable, irreproachable, ‘given’ cinema, rather than assimilated, digested, or reflected upon. Fuller doesn’t take time to think; it is clear that he is in his glory when he is shooting” (The Films of My Life, 108).
There was nevertheless a tension between Truffaut’s existentialist ideas, which made him sympathetic to an “open” cinema of the kind practiced by Renoir and Rossellini, and his equally strong love of genre directors like Fuller and flamboyant stylists like Welles. One of the things that attracted Truffaut to the Americans was their sense of fairy tales or pure artifice. As Leo Braudy has pointed out, Truffaut and Godard were part of a movie-obsessed generation who were hyperaware of the conventions of the medium and who “showed their involvement with the special aesthetics of film most