Auteur Theory and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande a Part

To conduct an appropriate theoretical analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande A Part, it is essential to establish the social context in which the film was made and to what extent this context has influenced the cinematic aesthetics. Bande A Part was a product which emerged out of the Nouvelle Vague, of which the director is or can be argued to be, due to his modernist approach, a defining figure. Thus, it is appropriate to examine the film with close reference to the new wave movement and the various auteurist debates that the movement fuelled.

Bande A Part was not the first of Godard’s new wave films. However, it seems to be, as suggested by Rolando Caputo, the film in which all of the genres features came together in a more fluid or ‘poetic’ unity. Intertextuality, for example, is a key feature that developed alongside all of the new wave’s apparently ‘counter’-cinematic codes and narrative structures. It was a feature that brought two or more texts into alignment, creating a parallel between the work of the new wave film-makers and classic Hollywood cinema. This element of referencing other cinema is something that Bande A Part embraces, to a point were it becomes a preoccupation throughout the entire production. The first scene, for instance, provides us with a direct reference to the American western, in particular Billy the Kid and Man of the West, which becomes the character Arthur’s inspiration during his theatrical dying gesture. Man of the West is subsequently the muse behind Arthur’s final death scene, where the background setting of forest/trees is very obviously borrowed from the western. With this scene Godard was essentially paying homage to the western films he reviewed as a member of the Cahiers group. The film’s fixation with ‘pulp’ culture resulted in it becoming the model for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction whose ‘twist’ dance sequence is a direct reference to the interpretation of the Madison dance in Bande A Part, which in turn is paying homage to the classic Hollywood musical.

The silent era is referred to, not just by the intertextuality between Bande A Part and The Immigrant, which is a silent classic but also by the whole cinematic aesthetics of the final scene when Odile and Franz are setting out on a boat to Brazil. For example, Godard chose film stock that was appropriate for the era and even the character Odile’s acting style is relevant to the silent period when exaggerated gestures were the norm. Moreover the repetition that occurs of shots of the canals and water can be argued to refer to the ‘poetic realism’ as described by Caputo, of many films of the 1930s. The continued referencing of other cinema verifies Bande A Part as belonging to a movement that sought to embrace and capitalise on Hollywood conventions. An essay by Francois Truffaut called ‘Une Certain ten-dance du Cinema’ is thought to be the original manifesto for the movement.

The new modernist approach to film making was seen to be a reaction against the established French film industry and its romantic conventions. However some critics have found a problem in accepting the legitimacy of this reaction, suggesting that its very foundation created a paradox. For example, figures of the Nouvelle Vague, including Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer and Godard, wanted to draw their attention to the auteur and his individual signature in the mise en scene. This ideology, contrary to being reactionary, instead echoed the romantic and conservative aesthetics they were trying to move away from.
‘Paradoxically, given their so-called modernity and innovativeness, this was rather a romantic ideal and conservative aesthetic.’1
Furthermore, the notion of favouring the auteur, as it is discussed by Susan Hayward, causes difficulties because it ‘erases’ context, that is, according to Hayward, history. Despite the criticisms, Godard can be seen as the director to emerge from the Cahiers group who has constantly questioned the ideologies of auteurism, his films, including Bande A Part are equally self-aware.

They worked on the principles of the theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht, who in theatre encouraged the audience to think, not feel and to spectate without identifying. As suggested by Robert P. Kolker in an essay ‘Contesting the Hollywood Style,’ they made films that took their own ‘textuality’ as one of their subjects. This can be seen in Bande A Part when the characters’ pass a Nouvelle Vague nightspot in the city and again during a scene on the metro/ train when Odile and Arthur observe an unhappy looking boy and decide, based on two alternative contexts whether the package he is carrying is a teddy bear or a bomb. These self-conscious elements contribute to the structural denaturalising Godard achieves by exposing cinematic conventions.
The auteur debate, up until the 1950s, had focussed mainly on sociological analysis. However, the Cahiers group, by paying more attention to American mainstream cinema, caused a re-examination of the notion of auteur. Hollywood had been previously rejected in any debates on the grounds that American directors had a limited influence over production. Despite this, the Cahiers group maintained that true auteurs, such as Alfred Hitchcock, were aware of all aspects of film production and as such could retain an adequate amount of influence over them.
‘The reason these critics appreciated the glimmerings of personal expression in Hollywood movies was because they concentrated on this aspect of the cinema and knew exactly how films were made […] and could by dint of knowledge and force of will control all the significant aspects.’2
It is important to examine Bande A Part in relation to where it fits within the evolution of the auteurist debate, for example, the film was released in 1964 when structuralism was already being established, in that, the underlying structures of the text produced meaning along with the central auteur. For Hayward, structuralism formed the second phase of the debate and brought about a positive change to auteur theory.

It is not difficult to see how this ‘phase’ has influenced Godard. Primarily, given its scientific approach, it allowed the director to create a film form that rejected romanticism. There are differing opinions regarding the value of structuralism. For example, while Caputo comments optimistically of Godard’s focus on ‘plot skeletons’ and the moulding of American conventions by European aesthetics, Hayward suggests that the aesthetic experience is crushed by the weight of the theoretical framework. Bande A Part, however criticised for its ideological limitations and essentially a-political objectives, undeniably offered the audience pleasure, as described by Pam Cook in The Cinema Book, due to the recognition of its Hollywood codes.
Throughout the film, there is a repeated blurring of the lines between fiction and reality. The film is essentially ‘bookended’ by this theme, to clarify, in the first scene we observe Franz and Arthur play with make believe guns, after which Arthur makes a show of an overly animated death. This animation is mimicked in Arthur’s real death scene so that we, as an audience, are not sure if what we are witnessing is truth or fiction. This theme is more obviously present in the metro sequence where, as described by Caputo, a dislocation of time and space occurs. For example, the sequence begins naturalistically but as Odile starts to recall a song/poem and begins singing, her words start to correspond with a montage of shots that progress from day to night and from the metro to the outside streets. As Caputo suggests, the whole scene has a mythic quality and we get the feeling we have descended into an underworld where time and space are irrelevant. The dislocation of time further places the film, with its experimental style, away from the French film industry and into the Nouvelle Vague. It could also be argued that this sequence, due to its gothic elements, is in reference to the genre of expressionism.

Another element, influenced by the new wave that Bande A Part reveals is the characteristic of the fixation with certain geographic locations. For example, the film depicts scenes in the café, airport and the streets of Paris. These are locations that appear in various other new wave film’s including A Bout de Souffle and La Peau Douce. It has been considered that the locations featured in these films, as put forward by Cook, represent ‘a tourist’s view of France. Furthermore, the film also centres on the relationship between Odile, Arthur and Franz and the dynamics within their triangle. Again this theme is typical of the Nouvelle Vague whose story lines were most often based on the relationships between young men and women.

As a product of its social context, that is, emerging at the time of the Nouvelle Vague, Bande A Part is enveloped by the auteur debate that was developing at the time. It was made by a director who is still considered an auteur, despite varying debates surrounding the validity of the term. For example, Peter Wollen places Godard’s work, as not so much originating from the auteur, but from ‘a set of contradictory relationships between structural elements which interact to produce the author’s world-view.’ Therefore, Bande A Part can be seen as a defining film of the period and as such most appropriately analysed in the context of its features that are driven by the objectives of the new wave. As outlined, the defining features arguably include intertextuality, structuralism, capitalisation of Hollywood conventions and the overall self-conscious tone of the film. The film, although debatably flawed due to its lack of politics, does what it sets out to. That is, pays homage to and celebrates the commercial effectiveness of the American mainstream.


[i]

1 Hayward, Susan pg147 Cinema Studies, The Key Concepts, Second Edition (Routledge: London) 2000

2 Hess John, pg 30 ‘Film Quarterly’ volume 27, no.2, JSTOR Archive (University of California Press)


Bibliography

Cook, Pam. Bernink, Mieke ‘The Cinema Book’ 2nd Edition (BFI: London) 1999

Hayward, Susan ‘The Cinema Book, The Key Concepts’ 2nd Edition (Routledge: London) 2000

Forbes, Jill. Kolker, Robert, P. Kramer, Peter. Edited by Hill, John and Church Gibson, Pamela ‘The Oxford Guide to Film Studies’ (Oxford University Press: New York) 1998

Journals

Hess, John (1973-1974) ‘Auteurism and after: A Reply to Graham Petrie’ in ‘Film Quarterly’ volume 27, no.2, pp. 28-37

Wollen, Peter (1972) ‘Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’est’ in ‘Afterimage’ volume 4 ‘Movies and Methods II, edition Nichols, Bill, Berkeley: University of California Press pp500-509.

Filmography

Bande A Part, France, 1964, d: Godard, Jean-Luc

Extra Features in Bande A Part, France, 1964, d: Godard, Jean-Luc- Exclusive Audio Commentary on fragments of Bande A Part by Caputo, Rolando





Ends.