Word: godards
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...Godard is rapidly losing his constituency. The bourgeois intellectuals that made his reputation in the middle sixties have responded not at all to this latest phase. And the working class among whom he now seeks support have yet to rally around him. Probably, the most encouraging thing about Tout Va Bien is that Godard has begun inching toward popular art. But to make genuinely popular art out of such theoretical experimentation seems an achievement that is many years away...
Those same realistic filmmakers whom Godard so consistently disparages are the ones working in a popular idiom. Admittedly, their active contribution is small, but they at least legitimize much radical activity. From them, Godard could learn the political virtue of beginning with an audience, not just a theory...
THERE IS MORE than a little of Sartre in Godard -- a quirky French naughtiness, a hatred of the conventional above all. You may remember that Parisian farce of a year or so ago, when Sartre decided to have himself arrested. Well aware of the implications of such an act, the government kept hands off, and while demonstrators all around were hauled off to jail, Sartre went untouched. Much frustrated over a period of months, his comments and conduct became progressively more outrageous, until arrest was unavoidable, and a self-satisfied Sartre was dragged off to martyrdom...
...Godard has been playing out the same little drama recently. Once, the more he damned the bourgeoisie, the more bourgeois intellectuals adored him. Now, he has at last earned the antagonism of bourgeois critics, and proudly he points to the general condemnation of Tout Va Bien. But the politics of self-flagellation can go only so far. If you will use the bourgeois's guns, why not use his critics? And why not a plot convention...
...Godard has grown vulnerable recently. He is no longer an object of fashion. In fact, he is now the victim of a new fashion of critical hard-boiledness that fears being put-on more than anything else. It may be that he will soon redescend into private political fantasies and pass out of our attention altogether. In any case, it is more than likely that his present experiments won't succeed; most experiments don't. But I suppose that's what is finally most to admire in Godard: not his path-breaking successes, but his willingness to fail...