Word: plotlessness
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...third dominatic figure in the New Wave, Alain Resnais, has explored the possibility of entirely plotless films. His Hiroshima Mon Amour treated time and memory in the same evocative manner with which Faulkner treats them. Hiroshima included a large amount of newsreel footage, a technique also favored by Truffaut, to give yet another impression of time--that between the shooting of the film and an actual event...
Typically plotless, Ohayo derives theme, story and soul from the easy rhythm of middle-class existence. If it has heroes, they are two ebullient rebel schoolboys (Koji Shidara, Masahiko Shimazu), whose chief concerns are watching TV at the home of disreputable neighbors ("who loll around the house in Western-style nightgowns," a mother complains), resisting parental authority in any form, or eating pumice stone because they believe it helps them to break wind voluntarily, an achievement esteemed by their peers. The boys' innocent vulgarity is rooted in a world of gossipy housewives, aged parents clinging to tradition, working fathers...
...Plotless," "pretentious," and "pointedly avant garde" are all perfectly accurate epithets for The Married Woman, and I only wish I could find equally concise words of praise. "Pure" comes closest to what I want, but it refers to so much in Jean-Luc Godard's technique and attitude that the one word alone is hardly an adequate rejoinder. Godard's work stands so disconcertingly on the borderline between genius and charlatanism--his detachment and suggestiveness shading imperceptibly into the shallow and ostentatious--that, whatever I say, you may well find The Married Woman and its heroine narcissistic bores...
Zazie and Hallelujah remained plotless, but Theodore Flicker, who made The Troublemaker, constructed his parody film around the story of a naive chicken farmer named Jack Armstrong who comes to New York to open a coffeehouse. Jack's refusal to pay off the various authorities was meant to echo Marlon Brando's fight with the Longshoremen's Union in On the Waterfront. The touch is far too heavy, and what could be somewhat effective humor gets bogged down in weary detail...
Though filled with plot-happy cartoon Commies, Flora is strangely plotless. A stammeringly angry young Red (Bob Dishy) sweet-and-sour-talks a guileless fashion illustrator (Liza Minnelli) into carrying a card. When she surprises him with a half-undressed, wholly unabashed, free-love enterpriser (Cathryn Damon) and discovers that the chip on his shoulder is his head, she rips up both card...