It was quite refreshing last week to read Truffaut’s treatment for Breathless and then to watch the film within the larger context of
Astruc’s essay La caméra-stylo. What became immediately apparent in
comparing the treatment to the film is that everything that is interesting,
fresh and original in the film originates
from the camera itself. Almost as
if channeling Astruc’s ideas, Godard took what was a fairly bland treatment and,
with his camera, wrote something
wholly otherwise which rejected the common practice of effacing the unique
qualities inherent to film in order to function merely as a visual means for
representing literature. Breathless could not be approximated by any other medium and, because of this, made apparent all the ways that film
differs from every other form of art.
By writing with the camera, Godard destroys the insistence on the
invisible (editing) and brings the facticity of the form to the
foreground. How do you write a
treatment for a film when the main character is the camera-stylo itself?
Chris,
ReplyDeleteAccording to Richard Brody, a number of French critics at the time made explicit or implicit reference to Astruc's "caméra-stylo" in their reviews of A BOUT DE SOUFFLE. One critic claimed that the film was "the first work authentically written with a caméra-stylo." Another describes Godard as "a young man who writes authentically everything that he is thinking directly in images." (See EVERYTHING IS CINEMA, p. 73.) I will assume here that the reference to authenticity has an existentialist basis. We will discuss this aspect in relation to VIVRE SA VIE.
Sam