Author Archives: Lloydville

HIS TOWN

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In Part One of this report, Paul Zahl, in pilgrimage mode, located, briefly viewed and photographed the former home of the late novelist James Gould Cozzens at the bottom of a hill outside Lambertville, New Jesrsey.  Then he decided to go back up the hill in search of a man he'd been told might have some information about Cozzens during his time of residency in the area.  Paul had been directed to this “man on the hill”, no fool as it turned out, quite by chance, by a woman he'd met who was out walking on the road that ran past the old Cozzens house.  Here, in the pilgrim's own words, is a report of what ensued:

“A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYNHNMS” — Part Two

He was there in his house on the hill, and became a fund of information.  We sat in his gazebo
— you couldn't help thinking of Marjorie Penrose and the scene in the
summer house, recreated well by John Sturges in the 1961 Hollywood
version of By Love Possessed — and he told me quite a bit.  It turns out Cozzens was a
recluse, and kept completely to himself, though he was sometimes
spotted in town doing the shopping with a “short dark woman”.  That was
Bernice Baumgarten, his wife, known in Cozzens's journals as “S”.  My
new and welcoming acquaintance told me more, mainly about the
subsequent history of the house, and also the history of some well
known neighbors.


On the basis of “Bingo!”, I decided to drive down in to Lambertville
itself and take a look around.


That turned out to be a good decision.  This is because Lambertville
leaps, simply leaps, out of the Cozzens novels.  It is a smaller “Brocton” (By Love Possessed), a quieter “Childersburg” (The Just and
the Unjust).




I parked on a side street during a garden club tour of the old houses. 
You can see the town “square”, presided over by a memorial to Civil War
dead, a bandstand, and an old mill.  The Lambertville City Hall (being
nicely restored) [see the photograph at the head of this piece] is across the street, together with a spacious private
house that could stand in beautifully for “Brocton's” “Union League
Club”:




The Episcopal church is one block up the street, a little Gothic gem
that could use some exterior work:

There was a sadness incipient to
this old church building, a feeling shared by the stone cherub weeping
on the ground, just to the right of the main entrance to the church,
the entrance from which, as it were, Judge Lowe and Arthur Winner, Jr. in a scene from By Love Possessed,
who were ushering that Sunday morning, spied Colonel Minton rushing
over to the church to give them a piece of very bad news.




On the way out of town, I photographed a large and archetypal Victorian
mansion, now a retirement home, that is exactly the kind of house that
Cozzens describes on Greenwood Avenue in the same novel.  It is just
such a building that becomes Arthur Winner's destination for his famous
— I think, epic — walk from the Detweiler house to his mother's,
during the final hour of Cozzens's sublime story:

 


About a mile further along, now beginning to approach “Carrs Farm”
again — Cozzens's old house, which I had found, Jumping Jehosaphat! and  to which I was
returning for a last look — the road suddenly turned into “Roylan”.  “Roylan” is the section of homes outside “Brocton” where the doctors
and lawyers of the town in By Love Possessed have built their newer residences.  “Roylan” is
envisaged well in Hollywood's version of the novel and is embodied today
right outside Lambertville:




Then it was back down the hill to non-welcoming “Carrs Farm”.  I
photographed the “Keep Out” signs, as well as a contrasting entrance
shingle to the farm across the road.


Two final notes concerning a successful pilgrimage.  I didn't used to
believe in “karma”, and am still a little hesitant to use the term. 
(This is for religious and even cultural sensibilities that are my
own.)  But “karma” does express a little of what I felt reflecting on
those stark unmistakable “No Trespassing” signs.   James  Gould
Cozzens was a marvelous writer, and a greater thinker.  He tells it
like it is, like it still is, like it always has been, and like it's
going to be be as long as human beings walk the earth. But he didn't
like them, human beings, and it showed in his life — a little less in
his work.




Whatever's going on at the end of Goat Hill Road — and that's no
business of mine, or probably anybody else's — the signal is
unchanged.   The inspired “hermit of Lambertville” wasn't the only
one who wanted his privacy and solitude.  The old place has not broken its spell.


On the other hand — and this I owe to my “walker” friend — another
detail came out.  I told her that James Gould Cozzens was an avid
gardener, a serious student of roses.  Who doesn't like a gardener? 
She replied: “Well, that's interesting.  Every year about this time I
always see a rose of uncommon beauty blooming along the fence in front
of Carrs Farm.  It's not like any other rose I have ever seen.  I say
to myself, why don't you pick it?  After all, it comes back year after
year and is covered with vines and overgrowth anyway.  Why don't you
pick it?  (I never do.)  But,” she continued, “I always wonder, where did
that rose come from?”

[Above, the shingle across the road from the perpetually “posted” property of Carrs Farm.]


I made a left off of Goat Hill Road, under a huge electric pylon, by
the way, which would have caused Cozzens and his wife to move away in
exactly five minutes.  They did, as it turned out, in 1958, after the
writer was done near to death by the “New York critics”, as he saw it. 
But I turned homeward happy, happy that I had found Carrs Farm, and “Brocton”, and the story of Cozzens rambling rose.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 29 MARCH 1999

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Now that Spring is here, the days of bright sunshine seem to unfold
with greater authority, no longer a promise but an actual downpayment
on the summer.

The vacation motels along Thompson Avenue, with names suggesting an
intimacy with the beach (an intimacy which is betrayed in fact by the
unseen barrier of the 101 Freeway) look brighter, too — the neon
“Vacancy” signs, merely pathetic in February, now have the quality of
confidant, if insincere, smiles.

Yesterday I decided to spend one of these bright days inside a movie
theater, watching The Mod Squad — a mistake I hope others will not
make. Depressed by the spectacle of such wonderful actors mouthing such
dull-witted dialogue I came out into the late afternoon on Main Street
and my spirits were instantly restored.



The ocean peeked back at me from the end of Chestnut Street, the
slanting light made the small-scale buildings of downtown Ventura look
like toys. As I walked to my car I passed the old Ventura Theater,
where the last evening of the Monster Swing Weekend was already in
progress. The Rumba Bums were on the bill, but I heard no music, just
squeals and cheers from a crowd inside, like the innocent echo of
lighthearted evenings long past.

I had the sensation of being on a movie set, but the feeling wasn’t
alienating, because it was my movie, set on the streets of my little
town, Ventura . . . an imaginary location somewhere on the coast of
California.

RIVER OF NO RETURN

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If one wanted to deconstruct this film visually, the task would not be hard — it practically deconstructs itself while you're watching it.

There are six types of images in the film, all radically different from each other in terms of how they were created:

1) Location shots, with unmanipulated images, including shots inside sets built on location in which you can see the actual location outside the doors and windows:

2) Studio interiors in which you can't see outside the door and windows, and which thus don't require false exteriors:

3) Studio exteriors, with artificially constructed “natural” settings:

4) Shots of people supposedly traveling on a raft down a river filmed against backscreen projections, with the foreground raft in the studio moving on gimbals:

5) POV location images looking forward from the moving raft shot on smaller-format cameras than the ones used for the rest of the film and blown up to fill the Cinemascope screen.  (These are identifiable by their strikingly different grain structure from the other shots in the film.)

6) One single shot from a location on the river with a town on the shore of the river matted optically into the frame.

It's extraordinary that audiences of the time processed these disparate types of images as a coherent visual whole, but they clearly did.  Contemporary reviewers of River Of No Return remarked on the spectacular location scenery and the exciting action scenes on the river without noting that the former were unmanipulated images and the latter tricked up in a studio.

What makes the contrasts between these disparate types of images starker than they might be is the stunning nature of the location shots.  They are beautifully composed, give an impression of deep space, and often go on for considerable amounts of time in which complex and difficult actions occur on screen and which not infrequently involve elaborate camera moves.

All of these aspects of the shots made on location were characteristic of the director Otto Preminger's mature style and made him a darling of the Cahiers du Cinema set in the Fifties, influenced as it was by André Bazin's celebration of long takes and deep focus, as opposed to montage, as the primary and most potent tools of cinema.

Quite apart from theoretical considerations, Preminger's location images in River Of No Return are among the most beautiful and exhilarating in the whole history of Westerns.  They are images that drawn you into the spaces of the scenes, imparting a sense of actually inhabiting them.

Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe, the stars of the film, don't have a lot of screen chemistry, and Monroe delivers one of the stiffest and most awkward performances of her career, but when the two have a long magic-hour conversation by a campfire with a river rushing behind them, filmed in a single long take, performance hardly seems to matter.

The sheer cinematic beauty of the shot infuses itself into the actors, the dialogue, the narrative moment, the whole story of the film, so that we can accept these characters as people fated to become lovers, simply because they have inhabited this passage of sublime cinema.  Aesthetic excitement is transmuted into emotional power.  We believe that the characters will remember this moment forever, simply because we will.

Such scenes carry us through the backscreen passages, the artificial cave and the forest with the artificial trees.  The latter become like dreams within the dream, and the dream of that actual fire beside an actual river at an actual sunset becomes the film's enduring reality.

HERMITAGE

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Following his passion for the work of novelist James Gould Cozzens, Paul Zahl recently made a pilgrimage to Lambertville, New Jersey, where the reclusive Cozzens lived and worked and hid out from the world.  Here is the first part of Paul's report from a country he has named in honor of one of the strange lands visited by Lemuel Gulliver in his travels:

“A VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYNHNMS” — Part One


James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) admired Jonathan Swift beyond almost all other writers.  He also agreed with Swift's view of human nature.  Like Swift, though not as extreme as he, Cozzens was a misanthrope.  [Swift's Gulliver, it will be remembered, preferred the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, to any of the more human creatures whose lands he visited.]  He was also a hermit.


In 1957 a Time magazine cover story called Cozzens “The Hermit of Lambertville”.


Because I like Cozzens' novels, among them By Love Possessed, Guard of
Honor, and Men and Brethren, I decided to see if I could locate the
house, outside Lambertville, New Jersey, in which the great one, who
didn't like people, wrote these books. 


Because Cozzens' literary reputation took a nose dive in 1958, and has
not risen again, there is little to go on.  Matthew J. Bruccoli
published the sole biography of the man in 1983, and in it there is a
photograph of the Lambertville house, known then as “Carrs Farm”, in
which Cozzens and his wife lived from 1933-1958.  But I could find
nothing more — no address nor further specifics, of any kind.


Therefore, on June 12, 2010, I took the opportunity of being in
Princeton to borrow a car and drive the 40 minutes or so over to
Lambertville in search of Carrs Farm.  I knew it was about three miles
outside of town, on a country lane called Goat Hill Road.  Calls to the
Episcopal rector of Lambertville and to the Hunterdon Country
Historical Society had been returned but no one seemed to know anything
about Cozzens nor the 25 years the once famous writer had been living
in their community.


Or almost no one.


Early on a misty Saturday I drove the back roads from Princeton through
Lawrenceville then through more or less soft and hilly country, to the
end of Goat Hill Road.  Several large houses, with spacious lawns and
well kept gardens, were hidden from the road.  I did carry a photograph
of Carrs Farm, fortunately, taken from the Bruccoli biography:




But everything was too hidden away to see.


Then, behold: a nice lady taking her morning walk.  I stopped the car
and asked after my man.  She said, well, if you  mean the fellow who
wrote a novel about World War II, I've heard he lived somewhere along
this road.  I think it's the house at the bottom of the hill, on the
left.  Furthermore, a half mile or so the other way, at the top of the hill, you may find a
gentleman at home who has lived here for many years and knows
everything.


And so it was!  My walker was right.  Right at the bottom of the hill was Carrs Farm.


When I got out of the car, I noticed that “Keep Out” and “No
Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs were pointedly posted at the
entrance to the farm.  Was there a regular army of Cozzens-enthusiasts
I didn't know about, who had disturbed the peace of the current owner? 
(I later found out there were other reasons for the signs.)  But I
slipped in anyway, prepared to be the nice interested clergyman that I
hope I am, if an owner came upon me.  The owner didn't, but the owner's
friend did, who did not know about Cozzens but warned me to get out
of there fast.  I took the one photograph of the exterior, on the run; and
it sure is the house:




That's for sure.  And almost completely unchanged, but for a metal rail
at the steps and the boxwoods cut differently.  Cozzens himself would
not have welcomed visitors either, as he apparently lived only to write
and think, albeit happily married to his wife, a literary agent who
commuted Monday through Friday into Manhattan.


Oh, and Cozzens would write in the mornings and garden in the
afternoon.  Like his characters Arthur Winner, Jr. and Arthur Winner,
Sr. in By Love Possessed, the man cultivated roses, antique roses, to
be specific, with dedication.


After breathing a sigh of relief, for one had found what one was
looking for, and had not been beaten away with brooms, I decided to walk up in the opposite direction and pay
a call on the man on the hill.  He was, as it turned out, no fool.

[Click here for the second part of this report, in which our intrepid pilgrim meets the wise man on the hill, who imparts knowledge, and ventures into Lambertville itself, searching for traces of the small town its famous hermit once knew.]

RAMBLING BOY

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Sometimes I think about my rambling days — the late 60s and early
70s.  Then, when it was a “damp, drizzly November in my soul”, I
wouldn’t, like Ishmael, sign on for a three-year whaling voyage — I’d
get a lift to the nearest Interstate, stick out my thumb, and . . . go.

I might have a vague destination in mind, or I might not.  I wouldn’t
have much money on me — that’s for sure.  Ten or fifteen dollars stuck
in the toe of my shoe.  I just threw myself on the mercy of the world,
and chance.  The world and chance never let me down.

It was madness, of course, in practical terms.  God knows what might
have befallen me on such journeys.  But people were infallibly kind and
generous, and interesting.  The world seemed a sweeter and safer place
than it has ever seemed since — when I had more to lose.

When you’re homeless in this world, then you’re home.  When you’re on
the road, you’re at journey’s end.  When you’re lost, you’re found.

How many of us, in our rambling days, have known this . . . and
forgotten it?

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 6

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[Be warned — this and future posts in my tableau-by-tableau march through Godard's Vivre Sa Vie contain spoilers which might affect your enjoyment of the film if you haven't seen it.]

In the sixth tableau of Vivre Sa Vie, Godard introduces a third line to his cinematic fugue.  In the opening credits, he had dedicated the film to B-movies.  Now B-movie elements will enter the film.

In a Parisian suburb, Karina meets an old girlfriend.  They have a drink at a café.  The friend tells of being abandoned in an unfamiliar city by her husband and turning to prostitution to support herself and her children.  She imparts this information matter-of-factly.  A guy in the café who knows the friend asks to meet Nana.  We get a sense that the friend and this guy are checking Nana out as a prospect for a prostitution ring.  There are hints that the guy is a pimp.

Nana tries to talk to her friend about her philosophy of life, her idea that we are responsible for everything we do but also that life is what it is and there's not much we can do about it.

Towards the end of the scene, when Nana is left alone for a moment, Karina re-emerges from the character and stares directly at the camera in silence.  It takes a moment to readjust our attention from the character she's playing to the actress, to the star.

Suddenly there is machine-gun fire from the street.  Outside the windows of the café we see a shootout in progress, though we can't tell who's fighting whom.  A wounded man staggers into the café.  Nana for some reason runs outside into the danger zone in order to escape, and the tableau ends with an image of her fleeing, as the police arrive.

Earlier, in the story the friend told about being abandoned, she added a postscript — she saw her husband later acting in an American movie. . . co-opted as it were, seduced from his responsibilities, by Hollywood.  Now, as elements of B-movie violence and suspense enter Vivre Sa Vie, a new tension arises.  Still wondering what kind of a movie this is going to be — an essay on cinema, a sociological drama about prostitution? — we are given a third possibility, pulp crime thriller.  Or all three, perhaps?

Godard, the juggler, has put a third ball into the air.  Is Godard going to sell out, go Hollywood, prostitute himself and his film to make a commercial thriller?  It's hardly likely to be that simple with Godard, of course, but his willingness to have us question his own mercenary motives is more than a witticism, or one more level of thematic irony — it's an indication of his moral sympathy, or identification, with his lead character and his moral seriousness about the film itself, his questioning of its right to make judgments.

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 5

[I will continue my tableau-by-tableau review of Vivre Sa Vie after a break of a week or so.]

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 5

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[Be warned — from this point on in my tableau-by-tableau march through Godard's Vivre Sa Vie there are spoilers which might affect your enjoyment of the film if you haven't seen it.]

The film's fifth tableau is titled “The boulevards — The first man — The room”.  It begins with shots, from a moving vehicle and on tracks, of streets where prostitutes are plying their trade.  Nana, walking along one of these streets, is approached by a man who asks if she's available.  She says yes and takes him to a cheap hotel room.

She closes the curtains of the first-floor room, which looks out onto the street, and prepares to have sex with the man.  Nana has committed herself to a life of prostitution.

The room is shabby but clean.  The man is not unattractive and behaves well at first, giving Nana more money than they've agreed on because she doesn't have change for his 5000-franc note.

But then, when he embraces her, he tries to kiss her, and she resists this, withholding the one intimacy prostitutes traditionally refuse to sell.  (This reminds one of Goethe's great line — “The kiss is the ultimate sexual experience.”)

The tableau ends with Nana's struggle against the kiss still in progress.  She has been cool and businesslike up to this point — now she looks disgusted and afraid.  This dynamic is part of Nana's character as presented in the film.  She seems a bit dim, a bit cold about selling herself, but also pathetic.  The pathos is all the more powerful for this — she's not a whore with a heart of gold, just a rather ordinary woman of no special distinction, beyond her good looks.  She seems incapable of estimating where her path in life will actually lead her, morally and emotionally.  This enables us to preserve our pity for her.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 6

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 4

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 4

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The fourth tableau of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie presents a crucial episode in the life of its protagonist Nana — a turning point in her story.  She is giving a statement to the police about an incident in which she saw a woman on the street drop a 1000-franc note and tried to steal it.  The woman caught her and Nana returned the note, but the woman pressed charges anyway.

In the course of this interrogation, we learn that Nana has lost her apartment, is staying with friends when she can and has no resources, having already borrowed from her place of employment against future wages.



The scene plays out in close-ups — on Nana, silhouetted against a window, and on the middle-aged police clerk asking her questions and typing up her replies.  As usual when Godard wants us to concentrate on the character Nana, he obscures the face of the actress playing her.  We are being asked to look past the beauty of Anna Karina into the soul of the fictional character she's presenting.



Godard elicits sympathy for Nana through the clerk, who seems to pity her and feel concern for her welfare.  Karina herself delivers her lines softly and hopelessly.  At the end of the scene, she starts a sentence she can't finish — “I . . .” and then adds, “is someone else.”  At this moment she turns her profile to the camera, her face is illuminated, and we are meant to ask, “Who has she become?”

Godard has shown us how Nana uses her charm on customers at the shop where she works.  He has shown her hustling men for small favors, and breaking up with a man most probably because he isn't rich enough.  He has suggested that she has slept with men in return for a place to crash, and that she will pose for nude photographs in the hopes of “selling” herself to the movies.

She is about to take a further step along the road of trading her charm, and her body, for money.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 5

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 3

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 3

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The third tableau, or chapter, of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie is primarily about the cinema.  It begins with a transitional scene connecting it to the preceding tableau which showed us the protagonist Nana's working life.  She returns home but cannot get the key to her apartment from the concierge, because she owes back rent.  We know from the preceding tableau that Nana has lent 2000 francs to a co-worker, who wasn't at work that day.

Cast adrift in the city, Nana meets a friend by chance on the street, the guy she was breaking up with in the first tableau, who shows her some pictures of his child, apparently a child he had with Nana.  Her only relationship with the child now seems to be through these photographs, through images.

Nana refuses an offer of dinner from her ex because she wants to go to the movies.  She goes to see Carl Dreyer's silent film La Passion de Jeanne Arc at the Jeanne d'Arc theater.  She's sitting with a date, who has his arm around her, but she is utterly absorbed in the film.

Godard shows us a relatively long passage from the film, cut into his own film — in other words we don't see this passage as images playing on the movie theater screen, which is never shown in the shots inside the theater.  Thus, when Godard cuts from Dreyer's extreme close-ups of the suffering Joan about to meet her death to a close-up of Nana reacting emotionally to the images, a kind of equivalence is suggested, on two levels.

Nana is identifying with the character Joan . . . but Anna Karina, playing Nana, is also mirroring or doubling the actress Falconetti, playing Joan.  Karina is entering the history of film as an image.

After the film, Nana ditches her date, whom she's apparently just hustled for the admission price to the movie, and goes to meet another man at a café.  We've seen Nana “servicing” a male customer at the record shop — now we've seen her trading a little groping for a movie ticket.  In the first tableau, her boyfriend accuses her of breaking up with him because he doesn't have enough money — and she doesn't exactly deny it.  Godard is establishing the idea of her persona, especially her sexual persona, as a marketable commodity.

Nana and the new guy she meets sit beside each other at the café bar, like Nana and her soon-to-be ex in the first tableau, but they face each other, and we can see their faces.  The camera tracks back and forth between them nervously, mostly keeping them in a two-shot but one that's constantly reconfigured.

This nervous, apparently unmotivated tracking makes us conscious of the camera, even as Nana and the man discuss photographs he's going to take of her to help her break into the movies, which is her dream.

The ironies grow elaborate.  Godard has already put Karina into the movies, into this movie among others, and suggested an equivalence between her image and some of the most iconic images in all of cinema — but the character Nana is somewhere far behind the actor playing her.

Curiously, this dissonance doesn't disrupt either our sympathy for the character or our delight in Godard's abstract aesthetic gambits.  The two levels of meaning play against each other in a logical and beautiful way, like two counterpointed lines in a Bach fugue.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 4

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 2

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 2

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The second tableau or chapter of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie consists of a single very complex shot.  It opens on a counter in a record shop where the film's lead character, played by Anna Karina, works.  She is servicing a customer, checking to see for him whether the shop has albums by various artists in stock.

At one point she has to move to some bins on a lower level of the shop and the camera pans and tracks with her as she does.  In the course of this she chats with two of her co-workers, asking about another employee who's absent from work and who owes her money.

She finds the record the customer wants and returns to the counter as the camera pans and tracks back to the original shot and then tracks along further in the same direction to the cash register, where the transaction is completed by the cashier.  The camera tracks and pans back the other way, losing Karina, revealing now a shop window across the street.  Continuing to track and pan the camera comes to rest on a view of a busy Paris street seen through the doorway of the record shop.



The whole scene gives us a vivid image of the character's boring work life, her position of deferential service to the customers — a man in this case — as well as a vision of her as someone entirely boxed in by a world of commerce.  The camera, panning and tracking, gives us something close to a 360-degree view from her work station, in a single shot.  The presence of merchandise and commercial activity wherever the camera looks makes a social statement about the world she inhabits, but the unbroken continuity of the single shot makes us feel it as an oppressive reality.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 3

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 1

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 1

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After the extreme, iconic close-ups of Anna Karina in the credit sequence of Vivre Sa Vie, Godard launches into the first of the film's twelve tableaux, or chapters, by conspicuously hiding her face from us.  He shoots her from behind as she sits at a café bar facing a mirror behind the bar, in which we can barely make out her reflection.

She is having a conversation with a man who's also sitting at the bar, out of frame.  When Godard finally cuts to the man, isolated in his own frame, he is also seen from behind, but his face is not visible in the mirror.

Karina's character is breaking up with the man — Godard's visual strategy echoes their estrangement, of course, but hiding Karina's face also directs us to what she's saying, to the character's story, and away from the iconic status of his alluring star.

The woman asks the man if he wants to play a game of pinball — the camera is on his back when she proposes this and her hand comes into the frame to rest on his shoulder.  Having shared the same frame at last, they move to the pinball machine, in a shot where they are both visible, their faces revealed to us partially in an angle that's still from behind but more to the side.

Though sharing the same frame, their concentration is not on each other but on the pinball machine, and our attention is divided between them and a view of Paris outside the window behind them.  The man describes an essay by a child about animals, in which the child writes that birds are made up of an outside and an inside.  The child says that when you take away the outside, the inside is left, and when you take away the inside the soul is left.  As the man describes this essay, the camera pans left to isolate Karina in the frame.

The essay echoes the dynamic of Godard's film — in which he pits Karina's outside, her beauty and her cinematic allure, against her character's story, her character's inner struggle, and suggests that, or wonders if, when her story and struggle are concluded, there will be some kind of revelation of a soul, one which will perhaps reconcile the actor and the character — that is, a soul which both share.

This is less a statement of Godard's purpose than a question he is asking us to think about as we watch the film — and in some sense a question he is asking of cinema itself.

Previously:

VIVRE SA VIE — CREDIT SEQUENCE

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 2

VIVRE SA VIE — CREDIT SEQUENCE

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Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie, from 1962, is divided into twelve tableaux, or chapters, each introduced by a title card.

Before the first tableau is a credit sequence, with the film's credits superimposed over three close-ups of the film's star, Anna Karina — two profile views similarly framed but shot from different sides and one frontal shot of Karina's face.

The profiles are primarily back-lit, with a small amount of fill on the dark side of the face.  The images are beautiful, almost iconic — Karina is still and composed.  Her face is presented as a kind of landscape we are invited to explore.  When she moves her lips slightly, or swallows, it seems as if the icon has taken on miraculous life.  In between these shots is the frontal shot, fully lit.  In it we can see tears beginning to well up in Karina's eyes — she looks lost and bewildered.

This sequence of shots is a kind of program for the film that follows, in which Godard will celebrate the cinematic presence of his star almost as a work of art, as a predominantly aesthetic phenomenon, and also tell the story of her character, a confused, self-absorbed young woman, who is indeed lost and bewildered, unequipped to navigate the world which will destroy her.

The portrait of the character is alternately judgmental and compassionate, never fully resolved on this level.  The aesthetic presentation of the actress's beauty and exhilarating cinematic presence is consistently celebratory, but also tends to objectify her to some degree.

All of these levels of meaning and their conflicts with each other are summed up in the three shots of the credit sequence.

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VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 1

PURSUED

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Niven Busch was a crucial figure in the development of the Western after World War Two.  He was a New York magazine writer before moving to Hollywood in the 1930s to work as a story editor and screenwriter.  He supplied stories or wrote scripts for a variety of genres, including two conventional Westerns, The Westerner, for William Wyler, co-written with Jo Swerling, and Belle Starr, on which he had a co-story credit.

In the early Forties, Busch began writing novels — his second, Duel In the Sun, set in the Old West, was a bestseller and became the basis for David Selznick's notorious film of the same title.  This was the film that began to change the nature of the post-WWII Western.  Its adult sexuality, which caused it serious problems with the Breen office, its dark Gothic tone and its neurotic or twisted characters marked it as new kind of Western — one more in keeping with the noirish mood of the nation after WWII and Hiroshima.

Busch's own script for Duel In the Sun was discarded, but he was soon at work on an original Western screenplay, Pursued, which many consider the first true noir Western — that is, a Western which deliberately mirrored the themes and forms of the post-war crime thrillers we would eventually call films noirs.  Pursued starred Robert Mitchum, who had made a lot of Westerns but was about to become, with Out Of the Past, a true icon of the classic film noir.  Busch himself had recently done the screen adaptation of James M. Cain's noirish thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Pursued was directed by veteran Raoul Walsh, who had made some fine pre-war crime thrillers, like High Sierra.  These weren't films noirs, exactly, but they were part of one tradition from which film noir emerged (another being the hard-boiled detective thriller.)

Walsh seems to know, though, that in Pursued he's venturing into new territory.  Walsh had a spare, no-frills visual style, but the visual style of Pursued is anything but spare.  It's dark and moody, almost expressionistic at times.  In High Sierra, Walsh's style has a documentary quality — he's looking at a desperate man colliding with a desperate destiny in an almost clinical way.  In Pursued he's trying to get inside the psyche of his haunted protagonist.

Pursued is structured as a series of flashbacks, which wasn't a common device for Westerns but became a very common one in the classic film noir.  The Western landscape in Pursued is not a symbol of freedom and redemption, as it is in most Westerns.  It has an ominous, threatening aspect — like the urban labyrinth of the film noir.

It's almost as though the neurosis and existential anxiety of the urban noir has infected the Western genre — and in truth I think that's pretty much what happened.  The atomic-era crime thriller, what we now call the film noir, was a very popular genre, and Duel In the Sun was a big box-office hit.  There was commercial calculation as well as artistic daring in the move to darker and more adult Westerns.

However, for all its importance as a milestone in the development of the post-war Western, Pursued is not a very satisfying film.  The noirish elements haven't been fully integrated into a consistent tone — as they would be in the later edgy Westerns Anthony Mann made with Jimmy Stewart.  Pursued lurches from mood to mood and style to style, sometimes playing like a standard Western, sometimes like a Gothic romance.  Busch's attempt to tell a tale of dark destiny feels mostly contrived, without the psychological persuasiveness of The Furies, for example, based on another of his Western novels.  Pursued has its moments of perverse power but is more interesting as a stage stop on the way to the genre-bending Western territory that lay ahead.