This nostalgia that permeates Band of Outsiders may also derive from Godard’s sense of the lost possibilities in movies. He has said, “As soon as you can make films, you can no longer make films like the ones that made you want to make them.” This we may guess is not merely because the possibilities of making big expensive movies on the American model are almost non-existent for the French but also because, as the youthful film enthusiast grows up, if he grows in intelligence, he can see that the big expensive movies now being made are not worth making. And perhaps they never were: The luxury and wastefulness that, when you are young, seem as magical as peeping into the world of the Arabian Nights, become ugly and suffocating when you’re older and see what a cheat they really were. The tawdry American Nights of gangster movies that were the magic of Godard’s childhood formed his style—the urban poetry of speed and no afterthoughts, fast living and quick death, no padding, no explanations—but the meaning had to change.
An artist may regret that he can no longer experience the artistic pleasures of his childhood and youth, the very pleasures that formed him as an artist. Godard is not, like Hollywood’s product producers, naïve (or cynical) enough to remake the movies he grew up on. But, loving the movies that formed his tastes, he uses this nostalgia for old movies as an active element in his own movies. He doesn’t, like many artists, deny the past he has outgrown; perhaps he is assured enough not to deny it, perhaps he hasn’t quite outgrown it. He reintroduces it, giving it a different quality, using it as shared experience, shared joke. He plays with his belief and disbelief, and this playfulness may make his work seem inconsequential and slighter than it is: It is as if the artist himself were deprecating any large intentions and just playing around in the medium. Reviewers often complain that they can’t take him seriously; when you consider what they do manage to take seriously, this is not a serious objection.
Because Godard’s movies do not let us forget that we’re watching a movie, it’s easy to think he’s just kidding. Yet his reminders serve an opposite purpose. They tell us that his aim is not simple realism, that the lives of his characters are continuously altered by their fantasies. If I may be deliberately fancy; he aims for the poetry of reality and the reality of poetry. I have put it that way to be either irritatingly pretentious or lyrical—depending on your mood and frame of reference, in order to provide a critical equivalent to Godard’s phrases. When the narrator in Band of Outsiders says, “Franz did not know whether the world was becoming a dream or a dream becoming the world” we may think that that’s too self-consciously loaded with mythic fringe benefits and too rich an echo of the narrators of Orphée and Les Enfants Terribles, or we may catch our breath at the beauty of it. I think those most responsive to Godard’s approach probably do both simultaneously. We do something similar when reading Cervantes. Quixote, his mind confused by tales of Knight Errantry, going out to do battle with imaginary villains, is an ancestor of Godard’s heroes, dreaming away at American movies, seeing life in terms of cops and robbers. Perhaps a crucial difference between Cervantes’ mock romances and Godard’s mock melodramas is that Godard may (as in Alphaville) share some of his characters’ delusions.
It’s the tension between his hard, swift, cool style and the romantic meaning that style has for him (and for other lovers of “unsentimental”—!—American gangster movies) that is peculiarly modern and exciting in his work. It’s the casual way he omits mechanical scenes that don’t interest him so that the movie is all high points and marvelous (sic) “little things.” Godard’s style, with its nonchalance about the fates of the characters—a style drawn from American movies and refined to an intellectual edge in post-war French philosophy and attitudes—is an American teenager’s ideal. To be hard and cool as a movie gangster yet not stupid or gross like a gangster—that’s the cool grace of the privileged, smart young.
It’s always been relatively respectable, and sometimes fashionable, to respond to our own experience in terms drawn from the arts: To relate a circus scene to Picasso, or to describe the people in a Broadway delicatessen as an Ensor. But until recently, people were rather shamefaced or terribly arch about relating their reactions in terms of movies. That was more a confession than a description. Godard brought this way of reacting out into the open of new movies at the same time that the Pop Art movement was giving this kind of experience precedence over responsiveness to the traditional arts. By now—so accelerated has cultural history become—we have those students at colleges who when asked what they’re interested in say, “I go to a lot of movies.” And some of them are so proud of how compulsively they see everything in terms of movies and how many times they’ve seen certain movies that there is nothing left for them to relate movies to. They have been soaked up by the screen.
