New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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What else to do in insanely expensive New York than take advantage of the French films available in the video store next door to my daughter’s apartment. She lives in the 90s on the upper east side of Manhattan and I visit her erratically and we try to share visionary experiences between the mundane realities of her day to day job as an office manager and my endless poverty and pathos as a hopelessly unknown, unacknowledged writer. We’re both living in a hyper universe of romantic illusions. Goddard’s “Breathless,” supposedly the founding film in French “New Wave Cinema,” is itself a film about living in a hyper universe of romantic illusion. The movie is slick—slick in black and white—the way the entire beat generation is slick. The way jazz is slick. It’s perfect. Everybody is dressed to the nines and smokes constantly and talks about life and sex and the rest of the human condition as if they were discussing whether or not the salmon was over or under cooked and whether or not they ought to finish it or pay for it or make a fuss about it or just eat it, pay the bill and walk away. I don’t know my facts here but either Belmondo is reading James Dean into “Breathless” or Dean became the "Rebel without a Cause" after he saw “Breathless.” The symbiotic relationship between French angst and American independence is the central force in all the great films of both countries.
And Derrida the inscrutable late 20th century French philosophe comes across in the documentary made about him by the American film maker, Amy Kofman, as Belmondo’s (and James Dean's) father. When asked in the film which philosopher he could imagine or would want his mother to be, he says he cannot make such a choice because he can only conceive of philosophers as men. His mother, he surmises would have to be a post deconstructionist philosopher because philosophy is essentially phallocentric. At least until he, Derrida himself, deconstructed it. In other words, philosophy is about men facing their own mortality and trying to get as much sex and show as much courage in the face of their own despair as possible. Derrida is clearly uncomfortable before a camera wielded by a woman and reveals himself (though in a very charming way) to be the fraud –as philosophe—that he has always been and that he believes all his predecessors in the history of philosophy have been as well.
Albert Camus, another inscrutable French philosophe, died in his 40s in a car accident around the time that “Breathless” was being made. Two of the most striking images associated with his work are his use of the myth of Sisyphus to indicate the ambivalence of futility and hope in the human condition and the companion image with which the myth of Sisyphus begins in which Camus suggests that the only serious philosophical question is whether or not life is worth living. Camus, Derrida and Goddard, all roughly from the same generation, the generation that came of age during the German occupation of France during WWII all seem to carry the same mark of Cain on their foreheads. There was nothing they could do about the injustices they witnessed. There was nothing they could do. But their lives and their works of Art and Philosophy were works of courage or at least works about the exploration of courage in the face of utter despair. America’s trials have just begun. But the French, whom Americans in general despise, offer many instructive profiles in courage. Many of France’s greatest post war intellectuals have tried to face their despair head on. To look life in the face. To look despair in the face. And go on. Who is doing that here in America?
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----Larry Lafcadio Dill
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com