Ethics and Aesthetics of Post War France

The social ferment of the Industrial and the French Revolutions overlapped historically, and together combined to dethrone the royal and aristocratic classes that had ruled the country without serious opposition for generations. Although the Revolution was cut short by the despotism of Napoleon and the eventual dominance of the new bourgeoisie, from that time the intellectual and creative currents of the past were continually and dramatically challenged by a variety of radicals in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

By the end of the 19th century writers like Emile Zola and HonorT Balzac had made dramatic innovations in the traditional novel by focusing their sensibilities with an unrelenting realism on the social conditions of the industrializing French state. The Impressionists then had their day, followed in confusing profusion by a plethora of artistic movements from Cubism to Fauvism to Futurism to Dada to Surrealism.

The two World Wars devastated France and destroyed much of the erstwhile legitimacy of the authoritarian cultural establishment. Writers like Louis Ferdinand CTline

denounced the hypocrisy of a state that could allow the flower of its youth to be destroyed in a meaningles

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, and Dziga Vertov did much to educate his fellow critics at the Cahiers, whose loving enthusiasm for film before long led them to trade their role of critic for that of filmmaker. The writers at the Cahier du cinema understood clearly the new expressive power of the cinema. As Bazin wrote in "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" in his What is Cinema?, "Through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator" (In Mast and Cohen, p.127, 1979). Godard was a conspicuous innovator who dispensed with many of the conventions of cinema. In their place he introduced the style of Bertold Brecht's theatrical works, which were designed to challenge, provoke, and even alienate the spectator, with the presumed purpose of breaking down his or her complacency and thereby presenting a window of opportunity to change bourgeois attitudes. I have seen several Godard films, and although I have always been impressed by his originality and the boldness of his innovations, the experience of sitting though his movies is about as pleasant as pulling teeth. I would make an exception for Breathless, his first feature, the
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