I tend to think in what could be thought of as 'circuitous' ways. If there's a straight line way to come at something, I probably won't take it. Not because I don't value efficiency, but because I can 'what about this, what about that' myself to death. And depending on your own style of thinking and store of patience, you might be happy to play along, or, alternately, it might drive you nuts. I know it has driven some nuts in the past.
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| Welcome to my head. Not always this bad, though it can be |
What brought this to mind was recently coming across a paper I wrote many moons ago, during undergrad days actually. Like so many people the Covid close-in meant having the occasion to go through piles of things I hadn't looked at in ages.
Which is when I found this, an essay called "The cubistic element in Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless"(1960), written by me in a previous life, also known as the 1980s.
And this is where the non-linear stuff starts to comes in. Looking back at this paper, and the image of the protagonist Patricia character alongside a Picasso, both presented in profile, I was reminded that it forced a very young me to think in literally figurative ways. In this case how a cubist approach to composition in film. Angular and fragmented. Highly realistic in some ways. Stylized and distancing in others. Here, arguably, the most interesting path from point A to point B is showcased. And even though I was an art history major at the time, until that point I really hadn't thought very much about the philosophy of a particular artistic style residing in more than just one medium.
So why am I thinking/writing about this now? Because coming across this paper coincided with the recent passing of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who moved on to the big naturalistic set in the sky in mid September 2022. For those who don't know, a quick Godard primer: He was a leading proponent of the Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave, a 1960s artistic movement which was all about rule-breaking, norm-shattering, and a DiY approach to making movies. Godard and his filmic counterparts believed the way features were being made had become too set in the ways of studios and stars and structure. Who needs those, after all, when you can just explode all that came before.
My exposure to Godard came before the paper on "Breathless" though. A year or two earlier I remember having my even younger mind blown in another film class, where they had us watch Godard's "Weekend", from 1967.
That long traffic jam tracking shot in particular stuck with me. WTF was that? Whatever it was, I had never seen anything like it on a big screen. And then, a couple of years later came the class where we watched "Breathless" aka "A Bout de Souffle", Effortlessly beautiful Jean Seberg. Suave Euro bad boy Jean Paul Belmondo. The streets of Paris in 1960. What could be cooler.
Actually, I have an answer: The imperfection of a roving handheld camera, the abruptness of jump cuts that at first seem like mistakes. There's that non-linear thing again. All these visual shards forcing our brains to fill in the spaces between, as is the case with so many cubist works.
Or as 4 decades ago me put it, in prose that was clunkier that it should have been:
But why rely only on words written on an IBM Selectric typewriter when you can use other state of the art technology of the time -- a photocopier and a glue stick -- to augment your point about the connection between cubist works of art and Godard's "Breathless".
The passing of the decades has definitely led to a certain amount of cringe as I revisited this paper from decades ago. On top of noticing the more tactile experience of reading typewriter keystrokes on paper, and my little arts and crafts project on the back pages that preceded the bibliography, what struck me is how much better this paper would have been without the superfluous adjectives.
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