In thinking of Peter Wollen’s “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est,” I’d like to consider Weekend’s early traffic scene [00:15:15], where Corinne and Roland set off to Corinne’s dying father in hopes of receiving an inheritance, as a means of examining counter-cinema’s relationship to narrative and foregrounding. The sequence lasts for over seven minutes, and although it is certainly engaging, its length is also felt. For me, there were multiple moments while viewing this sequence when I expected a change in location, an additional component of the narrative to be introduced, perhaps even hoped for a cut, but each time my expectations (most likely informed by classical narrative cinema norms) were subverted. This might suggest a connection to Wollen’s argument that the handling of narrative in Godard’s counter-cinema is in direct conversation with classical narrative cinema and therefore must be discussed “in relation to the rest of cinema” (Wollen 426).
Bordwell cites Bazin as “the first major critic of the art cinema, not only because he praised a loose, accidental narrative structure that resembled life but also because he pinpointed privileged stylistic devices for representing a realistic continuum of space and time (deep-focus, deep space, the moving camera, and the long take)” (Bordwell 652). In addition to the long take, the use of the moving camera is arguably the primary mode of conveying “documentary realism” and “character subjectivity” within this scene (Bordwell 652). We enter through a sound bridge of honking cars, suggesting that traffic has been building up perhaps long before we’ve arrived, a gesture to realism where life has and will continue before and after the film. Roland and Corinne drive past the first cars stuck in traffic, ostensibly on the wrong side of the road. The camera moves in unison with their car, picking up pace through the stop-and-go traffic in a tracking shot, until their car drives out of frame [00:15:30].
We pass a red car with its door open, a rather subdued clue into the comic peculiarity that is to come. The camera catches up to Roland and Corinne, but at a pace that makes us, the audience, oddly (as in uncomfortably–another point made by Wollen as a characteristic of art cinema) aware of the camera. This trait of “foregrounding,” a self-referentiality (of course, there are greater moments of overt self-referentiality of the film’s presence, medium, and stylistic techniques later in the film) is one of Wollen’s categories in identifying Godard’s counter-cinema (Wollen 420). Two men play cards on the trunk of their car while a man tosses a ball with a child through the roof of his car. We get a sense that this is somehow terribly normal (within the film) through the banality of the landscape–a relatively unchanging beige field in the French countryside, and the slow and steady pace in which we participate in the gathering of images or “image building” (Wollen 421). In some ways, we are even made aware of the medium of film as a sequence of images by the length of the shot itself, and in the long, landscape quality of the camera movements like a strip of film.
[00:16:08] The camera outpaces the car to give the viewer more information than the film’s characters and reveals the first crashed car turned on its head, perhaps not unlike what Bordwell refers to as, “the game with the narrator” (654). Suddenly, children seem to hatch from behind the wrecked car. At this point, the continuous honking of the cars and their choral effect, become almost ‘normal’ or accepted in that they now make a degree of sense within the senselessness. Just as this happens, music is introduced, but the soft piano fades almost as quickly as it appears [00:16:13]. What might this signify? If the sound of honking horns has transformed into an element of the soundtrack, what new purpose does music serve throughout this scene? Another layer in the chaos? This begs the additional question: how does sound function as erasure, and therefore a foregrounding, throughout the film? What and who is muted or silenced by the interruption of another sound and why? To what effect?
Roland and Corinne catch up to the camera, pull over, and argue with a group of men standing outside of their cars, but as the camera continues to track, we realize it is not just another car, but a truck transporting animals. A literal zoo: lions, monkeys, and a llama (?). Then singing children are added into the mix, and the camera mimics a double-take back towards the animals, but soon enough this too is normalized by the continuation of the tracking shot, as it is then grouped into the everyday’s absurdities. The same red car reappears in the line of traffic perhaps suggesting the relevance of time, the subjectivity of the psychological experience of time, or restating the feeling that we are simply going nowhere.
As the camera continues to track alongside the traffic jam, we see someone fixing their car, a group of people sitting under a tree, and throughout, there is continual arguing. Although, we can’t make out the dialogue from the distance and over the honking, implying that the exact words hold little significance. If “art cinema is less concerned with action than reaction,” at times, might this include the lack thereof (Bordwell 651)? With each new driver or passenger, the camera passes, perhaps the expected reactions of an audience are repositioned, literally moving along by way of the tracking and pace. Our attention, as Bordwell suggests, is on the reaction of the characters to this bizarre or possibly entirely ordinary scenario, and whether their reactions are that of frustration (the insistent sound of honking), celebration (the children singing), anger (the recurring fighting), they are arguably more significant than the actual action of the scene. If we were to simplify the narrative at this moment, there is not much happening in the scene other than a line of cars waiting (for what, at this point, we do not know, other than the prospect of moving forward).
By [00:17:39], music re-enters (for the length of the Shell oil truck–a new unit of measurement) with all of its unanswered questions, the back of a bus, then the title card reads: “13H40.” A reminder of time. Then, “WEEKEND” flashes, a reminder of the film itself, its title, what we are doing and experiencing as an audience. Then, at [00:17:48]: “14H10”–somehow in two seconds, thirty minutes have passed. The camera rushes toward the crowd standing in the traffic jam and towards the horse-drawn cart, perhaps suggesting the clashes of industry, technology, mechanization, and once again, time. Bordwell stresses, “art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkages of events. These linkages become looser, more tenuous in art film” (Bordwell 650). The camera continues tracking, passing another wrecked car, and a new man and child playing catch from the roofs of their cars. If we are to think of art cinema’s rejection of the sequential cause and effect coherence, then are we to interpret each instance/car/animal/child/game as a collection that is being gathered? Wollen proposes, “Godard, like Eisenstein before him, is more concerned with ‘image building’ as a kind of pictography, in which images are liberated from their roles as elements of representation and given a semantic function within a genuine iconic code” (Wollen 421). And I would have to agree–although these images hold associations, the cinematic and stylistic choices intrinsic to art cinema allow them to free themselves from their representational confines. This provides the audience with an entirely different “film reading” than that of classical narrative cinema (Wollen 421). The backwards car, another upside-down car, the couple playing chess on the road–everything is absurd until nothing is, and a new expectation arises, an authorial expectation in which, “the text becomes a composite structure, like that of a medieval macaronic poem, using different codes and semantic systems” (Wollen 422).
Roland and Corinne continue to inch their way past the line of traffic, aggravating most. Then the camera follows a different car that pulls out of the line of traffic and reveals the first bloody body splayed in the dried grass. The group of children walks past the corpse, like everyone and everything else. The entirety of the wreckage is displayed with the entrance of music and more severed victims of the crash that has held up all of the cars and the audience in this incredibly long sequence. The police whistles and gestures cars through, including that of Roland and Corinne. They drive through with more conventional normalcy than the entire sequence, but somehow this moment feels the most absurd of all. What is Godard asking us to question here? The car drives out of the frame and the countryside fades to black.
What are some of the ways in which the audience is affected by unanswered questions and feelings of ambiguity within “a survey form of narrative” (Bordwell 651)?
How might art cinema’s “multiple diegesis” and “plurality of worlds” be functioning within this scene and in relation to the greater film (Wollen 421, 422)?
References:
Weekend. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Athos Films, 1967.
Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 649-657.
Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 418-426.