JHL/JLG: WOMEN AND MONEY

“Two things matter in life. For men, it’s women, and for women, money” says the writer Parvulesco played by Jean-Pierre Melville in Godard's À bout de souffle (1960). It certainly seems to be the case in the Noir B-movies that Godard so admired at the time he was making his first feature, and this tale of money, amour fou and betrayal can clearly be read as a dramatisation of this philosophy of life. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the Poverty Row studio that produced several low-budget noirs such as the wonderful Decoy [Jack Bernhard 1946] (but not Gun Crazy [Joseph H. Lewis, 1949] contrary to what Marc Cerisuelo has written), À bout de souffle is full of references to classics of the genre, from the figure of Bogart to parroted snippets of dialogue from Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer 1945). The issue of Gun Crazy's influence is problematic. Without any explicit reference to Gun Crazy (unlike the Jim McBride remake Breathless [1983] which goes so far as to include a scene in which the protagonists are watching Lewis's film) it's hard to gauge Godard's precise position on the film at the time he was creating À bout de souffle. What seem like obvious allusions to Lewis's film might as easily be references to a myriad of other sources, cinematic and otherwise. Furthermore, there is nothing about Gun Crazy in Godard's prolific journalism before and during that period and he doesn't include it on his 'Ten Best American Sound Films' list of 1964, a list in which the titles seem less important to Godard than is the opportunity to make a chart of the great auteurs of Hollywood cinema. Did he see Gun Crazy as a guilty pleasure? Wasn't Lewis seen as a true auteur in the same way as his compatriots? Two other films with links to the Bonnie and Clyde story, You Only Live Once and They Live By Night, were made by auteurs featured on Godard's list, Lang and Ray respectively.

   Given these speculations, it's even more moving for Lewis and Gun Crazy fans when a clip from the film turns up in episode 3b 'Une Vague Nouvelle' , the chapter of Histoire(s) du Cinéma devoted to the origins of the Nouvelle Vague.

   In Noir films like Gun Crazy, only sex and money offer any hope of transcending the banality of the everyday, of attaining a kind of existential truth that will allow passage out of the lie of the mundane, even if it means many must die along the way. Most often the promise is of sex for men, money for women (hence the incessant betrayals and the prominence in the genre of the femme fatale) and this is echoed in Parvulesco's aphorism in À bout de souffle.

   In Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Gun Crazy allows Godard to hitch his more recent concerns about the End of Art and History, enslaved as they are to the capitalist circulation of money and commodities, to his youthful enthusiasm for Noir and its lessons about women and money. The excerpt from Lewis's film (in a snippet of the famous long take, we see Laurie strike the cop before she and Bart hop in the get-away car following the bank-heist) is preceded by a title 'La Monnaie de l'Absolu' [The Currency of the Absolute] (an iteration of the title of Chapter 3A of the Histoire(s)) and is accompanied by the following dialogue from Solo (Jean-Piere Mocky, 1970) :

[elle :] dans tous les pays où  il y a des hommes
qui luttent pour une société
où on ne serait pas esclave de l’argent
vous ne pouvez pas comprendre ça, vous
qu’on ne vive pas pour gagner de l’argent.
 
[everywhere Men fight for a society
in which we aren't slaves to money.
You can't understand 
living not to make money]

   The Currency of the Absolute! The Gun Crazy clip is preceded in episode 3B by excerpts from Touch of Evil (Janet Leigh dressing), an unidentified porn film, Bresson's Les Anges du péché and Godard's own Hélas pour Moi (featuring a conversation about the properties of truth); is Godard trying to reconcile sex and the sacred or to posit sex as the sacred or as a passage to the sacred? Or to point to the delusional thinking involved in holding any of these positions? He seems to be quarrelling within himself or trying to bring together two broader positions: on the one hand, the lesson of Gun Crazy and Noir: the Femme Fatale may be the exemplary promise of transcendence, offering sex and an otherwise exhilarating hoist up out of the mundane, but sex too is soon revealed to be a currency, of no more value than any other exchangeable commodity: on the other hand, the lessons of a less materialist call to transcendence, summarised by Jacques Rancière (in his interview about Godard) as follows: "faced with the global victory of the commodity, any defence of art, of the image and of meaning is obliged to do so under the banner of the Sacred and of History."

Fergus Daly