Onward to the
next 60s Godard film on my list, Made in USA. Again, ambiance figures
very highly; there is charming Japanese guitar song (Kyoko Kosaka), walks round patios and
garden-shrubbery; the ubiquitous swimming-pool/fitness routines (from the Alphaville
massacre); a long sequence in a garage featuring an old-fashioned
squawk-box playing polemical left-wing recordings.
There is a type
of beauty about that; why is ancient technology often beautiful? Maybe m,ainly
owing to the materials – metal, wood – and the visible mechanics? Set against
gay shrubbery and shambolic walkways plastered with fabulous French posters, it
has a rare beauty.
You tend to
forget you’re watching a thriller, though at least Leaud – from Masculin,
Feminin – is shot by the vengeful Karina in a trenchcoat as Paula Nelson in
“Atlantic City”.
Godard is spawn
of practically European nobility, while Marianne Faithfull is close the Austro-Hungarian
Hapsburgs (and Jewry), so you could say they have that almost a far-right connection!
The film’s content – what there is of it – is almost a spoof of communist
idealism, via the squawk-box. Godard is friendly with Romanian-born pan-European
mystic Jean Parvulesco, whose cameo in Breathless left him with a lifetime
ban from entering the US (your loss!)
On the DVD,
Karina is interviewed (just deceased, so RIP) and comments that Godard’s (whom
she was then married to) “genius” for spontaneity was totally invented and was
only an appearance. This reminded me of Grace Slick’s comments on rehearsal (Hyborian Bridge 67). It’s also Bruce Lee’s dichotomy between
routines and expression; one is practiced, the other is unthought and instant.
If, in fact, there is a cosmic harmonic it is liable to have a
spontaneity akin to music. Godard dislikes what he sometimes referred to as the
American/Jewish predilection for words, over action that is unscripted. He
likes the populist American gangster/noir action and style.
MWK,
Margo Lane and Lamont Cranston
Kull has a quote in By This Axe I Rule that the minstrel’s music
would outlive his rule. The magic of the musical feel of BWS’s The Song of Red
Sonja (#24) I’ve previously alluded to. The feel of figures serenading
through ornamental city gardens is quite similar to the feel of Made In USA
Hyborian Bridge 91
Line, movement, dance, the medieval minstrel that is Faithfull (well, she
has that air!) There’s no boredom in Godard, there is too much of sound or
color or movement going on for that, even if the plot is, like, somewhere else
entirely. He almost staples the ephemeral to the wall for all eternity.
Boredom would be a lifetime of words and nothing ephemeral atall –
modernity. Put another way, where the head plans everything and bodies just go
through the motions. The genius of Godard is that the ephemeral is made to seem
permanent. As in a garden the bees pollinate the flowers without much thought.
The spontaneity of nature is simply instinct, after all. Nothing is purely
random; animals and plants are very well engineered for their use. Such is a
Godard film.
If modern Man lives in the head, so much more so is the transhumanism of
those like Michael Anissimov (prev.) They are the true heirs apparent of Newton,
for whom the brain becomes the body.
They seek immortality, which can only mean the survival of the brain
(electro-impulses) in some other form of body. Where brain and body are one,
the numerical and the sexual also become one, as the psychotic tools of AI (Hyborian
Bridge 99).
They seem to think of themselves as the saviours of humanity but it’s
like the serpent race as a whole; the downsides are too great. Their perennial
optimism hides a sexual lust that is born of physical boredom, the opposite of
rugged romance.
Romance has a dark side that is nothing less than the cyclical
destruction (by the primeval serpent) of the body in the harmonic cosmos. By
seeking to do without destruction, transhumans kill music and myth (which in Alphaville
win the day).
The strength that is ours illuminates the present through the past; we
are not prey to Pied Pipers of futurist brains that claim the body as the tool
of their devious lust; because the physique can’t be denied, the ego
perpetuates the compulsive behaviour of physical boredom that confuses the
numerical with the sexual.
Strength is in the romantic sense that the ephemeral is true and the
stuff of myth. Not blind optimism, but true to the strong arm of righteous
action. True to the maiden with whiskey in one hand; to various hardware in
adventurous terrain; to the harmonic cosmos which harbours the primeval serpent
of destruction.
No lust born of physical boredom; no weakness born of illusion.