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Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style

Brian Henderson

Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2. (Winter, 1970-1971), pp. 2-14.

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BRIAN HENDERSON

Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera StyleGodard has developed a new camera style inhis later period. Its prime element is a long,slow tracking shot that moves purely laterally-usually in one direction only (left to right orright to left), sometimes doubling back (left toright then right to left, right to left then leftto right)-over a scene that does not itself move,or strictly speaking, that does not move in anyrelation to the camera's movement. Examplesof this shot are the automobile trilogy or trip-tych: the backed-up highway of cars in W e e k -end, the wrecked cars piled up in One PlusOne , and the auto assembly line in BritishSounds; most of the studio scenes with theStones in One Plus One; several of the guerillascenes in W e e k e n d ("I salute you, old ocean");and the shot of the University of Nanterre andenvirons in La Chinoise. Before we considerthis shot as part of a stylistic complex and inthe various contexts in which it appears, wemust consider the shot in itself-its structureand implications as shot.

First we must distinguish Godard's trackingshot from other such shots in the history ofcinema. It is not, first of all, forward cameramovement, proving the depth of space, as inMurnau. Godard's tracking shot moves neitherforward nor backward in space, nor in anydiagonal or arc, nor at any angle but 90" tothe scene it is shooting. That is, Godard's tracklies exactly along the 0"/180 line. The scenesor subjects which these shots address lie alsoalong a 0"/180 line, which, furthermore, isexactly parallel to the camera line. This extremeThis is part Of a longer study,"Weekend and History," which considers that filmin its various historical contexts-cinema and dra-matic history, history of the bourgeoisie, humanhistory.

stylization, wherein a plane or planes of subjecare paralleled exactly by the plane of art, iunusual in cinema and gives the shot very mucthe form of a planimetric painting. A partial exception to the rule is the camera's sinuosity ithe traffic jam shot in W e e k e n d , its slight "angling" to left and right as it moves laterally, getting slightly behind or ahead of the scene iis filming, a kind of warp in the shot's evencontinuous space-time. The base line of thcamera's movement remains exactly straighhowever, and exactly parallel to the scene. Morfundamental departures from the lateral tracare the Action Musicale sequence-shot in W e e kend, in which the camera remains in the centeof the scene and turns 360, and the shot iOne Plus One, in which the camera tracks 360around the studio in which the Stones are playing. In the first the camera is at the center of circle, in the second at the periphery, but iboth there is the sense of a circular subjecrendered flat and linear: these shots look likthe lateral tracking shot and fit easily into formats which align them end-to-end with suchshots.

The shot, secondly, is not like Ophuls's tracking shots which-though often lateral and hencformally like Godard's-are essentially following shots. Ophuls tracks in order to follow hischaracters, to give them movement or to attendtheir movement. His tracks center on, are filledwith, derive life and motion from his characters, that is, from individuals. Godard, like Eisenstein, repudiates "the individualist conceDtion of t h i bourgeois hero" and his trackiigshots reflect this. His camera serves no individual and prefers none to another. I t never initiatesmovement to follow a character and if i t pickOne UP as it moves it leaves him behind ahaphazardly (the workers and Wiazemsky in


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the Action Musicale and the shot with JulietBerto in and out, in Weekend). Also-thoughsome may dispute this-Ophuls's tracks are es-sentially uncritical of their subjects, whereasthe essence of Godard's tracking shot is itscritical distance from what it surveys. Also,Ophuls frequently uses the composition-in-depth technique of interposing objects in theforeground, between character and camera.Godard never does this.Thirdly, the shot is not like Fellini's pansand short tracks, though the latter also s w e ypersons fixed in space rather than moving ones,that is, "discover" them in place as the cameramoves. There are two chief differences. First,Fellini's camera uffects his characters, callsthem into life or bestows life upon them. Go-dard$ camera does not affect the reality itunfolds and is not affected by it. There is adifferent camera dialectic in each: Fellini's

Godard's long shot: WEEKEND

camera interacts with reality, touches and istouched, causes as well as registers effects; Go-dard's camera assumes a position over againstreality, outside, detached. Secondly, Fellini'stracks are frequently subjective-in the sensethat the camera eye is a character's eye. In 8%the reactions of characters to the camera aretheir reaction to Guido; the pain we feel whenwe see them is Guido's pain. Because subjective,Fellini's tracks are most often in medium closeor closevp range, sometimes with only facescoming into view; Godard's tracks, which arenever subjective, are usually in long shot, takingin as much of an event and its context as possi-ble. Also, Fellini introduces depth by arrayingcharacters and objects in multiple planes, somevery close to the camera, others at a distance,making for surprise and variety as the cameramoves over them. Godard avoids depth: he ar-ranges his characters in a single plane only-


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none is ever closer to the camera than another.The resulting flatness of Godard's shots, par-ticularly in W e e k e n d , is discussed below.Godard's tracking shot is a species of longtake4, very often of sequence shott, but it hasfew or none of the characteristics in terms ofwhich Andrk Bazin discussed and defendedthe shot and cinematic styles based upon it.In Godard's shot there is continuity of dra-matic space and time, the irreducibles of thelong take (indeed its very definition); but thereis strict avoidance of composition-in-depth, forBazin the essence of the shot-or that of pe at-est value in its use. As mentioned, Godard'sframes are flat, composed in relation to theplane occupied by his characters. Other planes,where present, are used merely as backdrop tothis one. Not only composition-in-depth butthe va1ua.s which Bazin found in composition-in-depth are missing in Godard's version of thelong take (and in late Godard generally):greater realism, greater participation on thepart of the viewer, and a reintroduction ofambiguity into the structure of the film image.It is clear that Godard is no realist: in La

* A single piece of unedited film; of course "long"is relative to "short"--the cut-off would seem to bea shot used for wholly independent effect ratherthan as part of a montage pattern. None of Eisen-stein's early films contains a single long take-suchwas the theoretical purity of his practice; no Godardfilm is without several long takes.A sequence filmed in one take; a one-shot se-quence. A sequence is a series of closely relatedscenes; a scene is a shot or shots that cover a singleand continuous dramatic action. We must bear inmind that Godard's "sequences" are not those of

conventional narrative cinema, hence the concepts"sequence" and "sequence shot" lose the reason-ably clear meaning they had for Bazin. What mean-ings will take their place, we do not yet know. SeeAndre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language ofCinema" (tr. by Hugh Gray), in W h t Is Cinana?(Berkeley,1967), at 23; also contained in The NewWaue, ed. by Peter Graham (New York, 1968),at 25.

NON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLEChinoise he specifically repudiates the realisaesthetic (of Bazin and others): "Art is not thereflection of a reality; it is the reality of thatreflection." Godard's later style does requirethe active participation of the viewer, but noin Bazin's sense of choosing what to see withina multi-layered image and, presumably, makinghis own moral connections within it also. Godard presents instead an admittedly syntheticsingle-layered construct, which the viewer musexamine critically, accept or reject. The vieweris not drawn into the image, nor does he makechoices within it; he stands outside the imageand judges it as a whole. It is clear also thaGodard of the later f i b s is not interested inambiguity-through flatness of frame and transparency of action, he seeks to eliminate ambiguity. Thus Godard uses the long take fonone of the traditional reasons; in fact he re-invents the long take, and the tracking shotfor his own purposes.

A camera moves slowly, sideways to the sceneit is filming. It tracks. But what is the resultwhen its contents are projected on a screen?It is a band or ribbon of reality that slowlyunfolds itself. It is a mural or scroll that un-rolls before the viewer and rolls up after him.To understand the nature of this visual bandwe must go beyond the tracking shot itself. Weencounter here the aesthetic problem of partsand wholes: Godard's tracking shot is but oneelement in a remarkably rich and completestylistic complex or repertoire. I t appears not inisolation, but in formal combinations with otherkinds of shots, and with sounds. In short, thetracking shot cannot be understood apart fromthe varying contexts in which it appears-it hasa different meaning and formal function in LaChinoise, in Weekend, in One Plus One, andin British Sounds, and even at different placeswithin the same film. Moreover, the matter of"context" is not as simple as it might appear.Each of the latter films is built upon a complexcamera/sound conception or donnke, and notwo of these are alike. Our principal concern isthe formal construction of Weekend and thespecific role of the tracking shot in that con-


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NON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLE

struction; that is, the relation of formal partand whole. We will not understand either as-pect of Weekend, however, until we see thatfilm's characteristic shot in the alternative con-texts of the other late films and understand theformal principles of those works themselves.The use of the tracking shot in the other filmsclarifies its use in Weekend and the formal prin-ciples of the other films put into perspectivethe formal principle of Weekend itself.La Chinoise contains some interesting in-stances of the tracking shot even though thefilm is in no sense built upon this shot, as bothW e e k e n d and One Plus One are. (In the latterfilms, the whole is chiefly a relation amongtracking shots; in La Chinoise the whole is arelation among many kinds of shots, relativelyfew of which are tracking shots.) There are,first of all, the remarkable shots from the bal-cony, in which the action within the apartmentis carefully orchestrated in relation to the cam-era's passage, in various mathematical varia-tions, along the apartment's three windows andtwo walls, and back. There is, secondly, a usageof the shot as a special kind of documentation.As VCronique describes her awakening to socialcontradictions at Nanterre, the camera tracksslowly (from right to left) across the shabby,overcrowded dwellings of the Algerian workerswho live near the university, coming to rest atlast on the modem, efficient buildings of theuniversity complex. The workers' shacks are flatand horizontal, the university buildings highand vertical. but the shot is set UD so that thecamera does not have to move back to take inthe tall, commanding structures-it takes in ev-erything within a single perspective. Eisensteinwould have cut from a shot of the one to ashot of the other, making the juxtaposition forthe viewer, obliterating time and space rela-tions to make a clearcut social relation. Godardobserves the time and space relations and letsthe viewer make the social relation. His shotestablishes the true proportions of extreme con-trast and close proximity. He does this byvirtue of the long take's continuity of dramaticspace and time, which this usage reveals asitself a form of argumentation or demonstra-

tion; the shot has its own internal relations,its own logic. This instance of the shot seemsBazinian but, far from fidelity to the real, Go-dard rips this bit of footage from its groundingin the real and puts it down in the midst ofa highly abstract film essay. Godard impressesthe real into his own service--ignoring the formof the real itself, he subjects i t firmly to hisown formal construct. Besides the .trackingshots, La Chinoise also includes several staticlong takes-the two dialogues between VBronique and Guillaume, the assassination scene-as well as montage (or collage) constructions(It has become a commonplace that modernfilm-makers fall between Eisenstein and Bazinthat they combine editing techniques and longtakes in various, distinctive styles.) The overalformal principle of La Chinoise would seem toto be collage, which is also the formal principleof The Married Woman, portions of Le GaSavoir, and, in certain senses, of Prauda.

The difference between montage and collageis a complex question. Film critics generally usethe term collage without elucidating its meaning nor even its difference from montage. Thereis sometimes the suggestion that the pieces ofa collage are shorter or more fragmented thanthose of a montage, but this does not hold upModern film-makers rarely use any shot shortethan Eisenstein's average shot in PotemkinMoreover, collage as practiced by moderns allows long takes and tracking shots; montage apracticed by Eisenstein did not. It seems cleathat the difference between montage and collage is to be found in the divergent ways inwhich they associate and order images, not inthe length or nature of the images themselvesMontage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized, synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns. Collage doenot do this; it collects or sticks its fragmentstogether in a way that does not entirely overcome their fragmentation. I t seeks to recoveits fragments as fragments. In regard to overalform, it seeks to bring out the internal relationsof its pieces, whereas montage imposes a set ofrelations upon them and indeed collects or creates its pieces to fill out a pre-existent plan


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(This point is discussed further in the compari-son of the collage principle to the visual or-ganization of Weekend and One Plus One be-low).

In Weekend the collage principle all but dis-appears. Intercut titles-showing the day andthe hour, the car speedometer, names of se-quences such as "Action Musicale," "Scenesfrom Provincial Life"-serve as breaks withintakes and between scenes, but all within thefilm's single-image continuum. They do not in-teract with the pictorial images to form mon-tage patterns, as in La Chinoise. Conversely:whereas in La Chinoise the tracking shot is in-cidental, in Weekend it is the master shot: theentire film aspires to the condition of this shot.The cuts are merely connective; once outsidethe Paris a~ar tmen t. he film might as well beL '3a single, fixed-distance travelling shot along thehighway and across the provincial landscape.Weekend indeed approximates this ideal formby its remarkable adherence to a single camerarange-it is filmed almost entirely in long shot.Thus Weekend is the film in which the struc-ture of the tracking shot and the formal prin-ciple of the whole very nearly coincide. Notjust its characteristic shot but the whole ofWeekend itself is a continuous visual band thatunfolds itself along a linear axis. One Plus Oneis an interesting variation on the Weekend plan.I t consists almost entirely of very long takes,nearly all of them tracking shots of the sortdescribed above-slow, fixed-distance, left-to-right and/or right-to-left. Here, however, Go-dard cuts among two primary situations (theStones in the studio and the black revolution-aries at the autoheap) and several subsidiaryones, each of which is conceived and shot strict-ly in terms of a single-band construction. ThusGodard erects a montage construction upon aseries of long takes-in the aggregate a montageis created, though all of its ingredients, all thelocal areas of the film, are long takes.Put another way, One Plus One is made upof parallel visual bands, which correspond tothe bands of the song the Stones are recording,the bands of revolutionary experience that theblacks at the autoheap are assimilating, etc.,


all of which correspond to the bands of theviewer's consciousness of contemporary experience. Recording the song and rehearsing therevolution and watching Godard's film all involve a project of integration, necessarily unfinished, as the film is unfinished. The functionof Godard's montage construction, switchingback and forth among these bands, is perhapsan attempt to hold them in simultaneity andis thus central to the film's integration project."British Sounds is fundamentally different inform from the bands construction of Weekend and One Plus One. Aside from the montage of fists punching through the British flagit consists almost entirely of long takes, including several sequences consisting of a single shotthere are also a few of the tracking shots, notably the long opening track along an assemblyline and the later, related shot of workers discussing socialism at a meeting. The film as awhole. however. is organized rather convenu tionally in terms of sequences, each of whichis conceived and shot according. to its subiectAs the film takes up several Gbjects (faittorconditions, worker organization, women's liberation, right-wing attitudes, etc.) it does nohave a single stylistic conception. British Soundis signed not only by Godard but by the DzigaVertov group with whom he made the filmthis may have made stylistic unity difficult buPravdu, also signed by the group, does haveoverall formal coherence.

Collage and organization by bands are contrasting formal principles. Both are visual organizations, but each is a formal principle ofthe whole in a different sense. The visual conceptions of Weekend and One Plus One areprescriptive and proscriptive-they require acertain kind of shot and rule out other kindsThe formal principles of these works not onlyrelate parts, though they do that also, theyrequire and hence create certain kinds of parts

* It is also possible, however, that Godard's editinghere fulfills the classical function of mmtage-thatof contrast or opposition: the commercial protest othe Stones v. the authenticity of black revolt, etc


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in order to realize a pre-existent or overallscheme. As a result, camera style for each sceneof these films is determined not by the distinc-tive content of the scene but by the overallformal principle of the work. Thus many differ-ent kinds of scenes receive similar cameratreatment, which we see clearly in Weekendand One Plus One (the highway scene andguerilla camp scenes in the first, the auto junk-heap scenes and scenes with the Stones in thesecond). This is formal principle in the strongsense.Collage, in film as in the other arts, is bycontrastthe most heterogeneous and permissiveof formal principles. Indeed, it is formal prin-ciple only after the fact-it does not requirecertain kinds of parts nor rule any out. Poly-centric or decentralized, it relates parts pri-marily toward each other and only secondarilytoward a whole, or ideal unity. (Weekend re-lates parts directly to the whole and only in-directly to other parts or local area.) Collageworks from inside, seemingly with pre-existentparts, and seeks to find within them or in theirarrangement some unifying principle; or atleast some ground on which they can stand to-gether. The collage principle of Pravda, it istrue, is far more aggressive than this-it mar-shals and orders its images in accord with anoverall formal principle. This principle, how-ever, is not that of the collage itself but thatof the sound track, which criticizes and inter-prets the images, not only as parts but as anaggregate or totality. The sound track bothconstitutes a formal totality and criticizes orrelates to the image collage as a totality. Theformal principle of the whole work is the rela-tion between these totalities, but that relationitself seems to be contained within the soundtrack and in no sense in the images. Also, theorganization of the images is far less intensiveand coherent than that of the soundtrack dis-course, so the latter easily prevails.

The relation to sound is a touchstone of thedifference between colIage and bands construc-tion generally. Since collage is a weak or weakerformal principle, it is not surprising that use ofsounds has a greater impact on it than on the

stronger organization into bands. A MarriedWo ma n, La Chinoise, and Pravda are all visualcollages, but the overall formal organization ofeach is very different, in large part because theuses of sound are different. A Married Womanuses sound conventionally, as direct dialogueor voice over; La Chinoise is frequently a soundas well as a visual collage; and in Pravdu theautonomous sound track not visual organiza-tion is the most important formal principle.This susceptibility to different uses of soundconfirms that collage is not in itself a strongformal principle. In Weekend and One PlusOne, both intensive visual organizations, use ofsound is subordinate and supplementary to thevisual formal principle.

The difference between collage and bandsconstruction can also be expressed as a differ-ence in relation to subject matter. As we haveseen, in collage formal treatment of each partis based upon the subject matter of the partitself. In Weekend and One Plus One formaltreatment of each scene relates to the overallvisual conception and this in turn relates to thefilm's subject as a whole. In collage there isan immediate or local relation to subject; inbands construction only an overall or total re-lation. So also in Pravda the sound track crit-iques not this and this shot, but the totalityof the film's images. The sound track is an over-all formal principle in the sense that the bandsconstruction is and as collage probably cannotbe.In Le Gai Savoir, Prauda, and Wind fromthe East, the relation of sound and image be-comes the central subject of inquiry as well asthe central formal problem. Sound/image re-lation is also important, however, in the otherlate films and, predictably, is different in each.Sound collage and visual collage are sometimessynchronized in La Chinoise, sometimes not.Two characters recite a slogan one word at atime as the camera cuts rapidly between them,US comic book images are flashed to the soundof a machine gun, etc. At other times soundelements are arranged independently: a Mao-ist rock song, passages from Schubert, etc.Sound is important in One Plus One, but prin-


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cipally as a supplement to image, very muchaccording to the conventions of screen realism:the sound the Stones are recording, the read-ings of the black revolutionaries, etc. An im-portant exception are the readings from a por-nographic-political novel that are cut into thesound track at several points. Sound seems lessimportant in Weekend than in any of the otherlate films; or at least more conventional inusage and straightforward in meaning, as in theorchestration of motor horns in the traffic jamscene. This usage is paralleled in the first shotof British Sounds, with its deafening factorynoise that, far more than the image itself, estab-lishes the work conditions in question. Both ofthese scenes make highly expressive use of moreor less realistic sound. A later sequence inBritish Sounds prefigures the sound/image con-structions of Pravda and W in d from the Eust.A spoken analysis of contradictions faced bythe female in capitalist society is run over thestatic shot of a staircase and landing, throughwhich walks a nude woman. We hear an anal-ysis of concrete conditions; we see the subjectunder discussion. In a filmed interview, RichardMordaunt's Voices (1968), Godard criticizesAmerican Newsreel films for showing politicalevents without commentary and interpretation.Godard's position is clear: eventdimages donot speak for themselves.Le Gai Savoir, made between Weekend andOne Plus One, is something of a puzzle. Itssubject is the relation of sound to image but,aside from some intercut photos with writingon them, the style and formal organization ofthe film have nothing to do with this problem.Several factors link the film to La Chinoise: itsfocus on middle-class young people in an en-closed space working out problems of revolu-tionary theory, its passages of intellectual col-lage linking its characters to the outside worlda d o the ]i;roblems they are studying, its mark-ing their growth through three stages, whichare also the movements or parts of the film. Invisual style, however, the films are not similar.Most of the character shots in La Chinoise arehead-on long takes and each of the film's long


conversations-two between Vkronique andGuillaume, one between Vkronique and Jeanson-is done in a single long take. Le Gai Savoirdevoted almost enti;ely t o conversations abouimage/sound, consists of dozens of close-upof Jean-Pierre Lkaud and of Juliet Berto and oboth of them. As the two converse. the cameracuts around them: from one to the other, fromone to both or both to one, from both to a dif-ferent angle of both, often a reverse-angle. Thisis something like conventional dialogue cutting(which Godard has almost never used), excepthat the cuts have nothing to do with the dialogue itself. Perhaps parody is the intentionOr, since the action takes place in a T i7 studioand the film was made for television, perhapsit is TV style that is parodied. Godard's cuttingestablishes the pair in 360" depth and in multiple angles and viewpoints, but to what pur-pose? This is formal variation without evidencoherence.' Godard also varies plastic elementsparticularly the shadows on his charactersiaces, agd;n seemingly without principle.In Pravda and Wi nd f rom the East. the vrob' Ilem of sound/image relation is realized in theformal principle itself. Whereas the sound trackof Le Gai Savoir consists mainly of the speechof the characters before us (or just off-camera)in Pravda and W i n d realistic or svnchronizedisound disappears altogether. Sound track andimage track are absolutely separate and independent. It now becomes a struggle, and specifically a struggle of sound or voice. to makea connection between them. In both films theimages are those of the imperialist world (inwhich Godard includes western-contaminatedCzechoslovakia) and the sounds are those ofdialectical theory seeking to understand andtransform that world. Sounds criticize and ne-gate images, and frequently themselves alsoThe autonomv of sound vis-a-vis i m a ~ e 'An interesting variation Godard introduces is tocut away from the person who is about to speakthen to hold on the person who is listening. Onecharacter says: "In movies you see people talkingbut never listening."


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NON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLE 9never questioned but previous sounds are crit-icized and corrected by later sounds: "We havemade many mistakes. We must go back andcorrect mistakes." In Pravda footage of Pragueis run over a dialogue in which two Marxist-Leninists analyze the sickness of revisionismwhich infects these images and the proper curefor the sickness. The shots seem hurriedly takenand even their arrangement somewhat hap-hazard; it is the sounds of dialectical theorywhich must provide coherence and order, evenin an aesthetic sense. This they do, as men-tioned, by developing a comprehensive analy-sis, not of this or that shot, but of the image-track as a totality.In Wind from tlze East, it is the film's theat-rical action-an ideological Western-which isquestioned again and again (seemingly everyfive minutes) by the sound-track voice. Here itis not images of the imperialist world directlybut the film's own conceit for that world thatis addressed and questioned. Thus self-criticismis taken a step further. Arguably, the divorcebetween images and sounds is even more ex-treme in Wind than in Pravda in that the soundtrack does not really discuss the images them-selves but the imperialist world which the im-ages symbolize. Thus sounds and images aretwo sets of symbols dealing with, trying to getat, the imperialist world. In Pravda the soundsare tied to the images, in Wind-aside from thepassages of self-criticism-this is not so. It ispossible however, to turn the question insideout and to see the images of Wind as tied to, asan illustration of, the sound track discourse. Ifso, this is not a part-by-part, shot-by-shot il-lustration but a relation of totalities. In eithercase-sound and image separation or image asillustration-sounds and images are locally in-dependent totalities or symbol-structures, deal-ing with each other only as totalities.

We may draw two tentative conclusions re-garding the formal principles of the late films.One is that intensive visual organization andintensive sound organization are probably notpossible within the same films. That is, either

one or the other must be the dominant formalprinciple; one will tend to organize and dom-inate not only itself but the other also. It maybe argued that not either sounds or images butprecisely their relation is the formal principleof some or all of the late films. Such a balanceas this suggests may be possible, but it has notyet been achieved. Perhaps when we under-stand Wind from the East better i t will be seento come closest. Secondly, visual and soundorganizations represent important ideologicaldifferences as well as aesthetic ones. Visual or-ganization is as fully an interpretation andcritique as sound organization, though it standson different ground and has certain differentemphases. Indeed, regarding Prav& and Wind,some dialecticians would question the disem-bodied critical autonomy assumed by the sound-track voices. Others would demand that theseanonymous voices identify themselves and placethemselves within the socio-historical totalitythey are analyzing. Such questions concern thenature, scope, and autonomy of revolutionarytheory and other dialectical problems whichcannot be pursued here. These questions, how-ever, are central to the understanding and anal-ysis of the later films.We have found that Weekend is the one filmamong the later works in which the structure

of the tracking shot and the formal principleof the whole are nearly identical. Because theshots of Weekend deal with a single situation


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(rather than two or more), they are not juxta-posed (as in One Plus One), but merely linked-as though to form one long composite track-ing shot. This continuity is emphasized by thenear-constant camera range of long shot, whichrenders the entire film, even static shots, intoa single band of reality. In our discussion of thetracking shot as long take we distinguished itfrom composition-in-depth shots and therebycharacterized the tracking shot in terms of acertain kind of flatness. If the overall structureof Weekend parallels that of the tracking shot,then the film as a whole must exhibit flatnessalso. In light of our distinction between partsand wholes, it must also be that flatness of thewhole is something different from flatness ofthe part; and in Weekend this is found to betrue. Nevertheless-flatness seems an odd cat-egory in which to discuss the formal organiza-tion of a work, partly because it seems a neg-ative concept, partly because "flatness" hasno meaning except in relation to "depth." Infact, however, Weekend itself is negative-re-garding its subject, the bourgeoisie-in severalimportant respects. And, as we shall see also,the "flatness" of Weekend has specific relationto a previous "depth"-composition-in-depth,the principal mode of bourgeois self-present-ment in cinema.If we now propose to discuss the formal or-ganization of Weekend, part and whole, interms of flatness, the effect may well be one ofanti-climax and disappointment. If this is so,it is due in large measure to the imprecisionthat such terms, and especially this term, carryin film analysis. What this means, since the cat-egory of flatness comes up inescapably here andelsewhere, is that some theoretical clarificationneeds to be done. This task cannot be under-taken here but minimal clarification must bedone to permit our analysis of Weekend. Thereis no single sense of flatness in cinema but infact several senses, not only in regard to differ-ent films but often in regard to the same film.A single work may be flat in several senses, ornow in one sense and now in another; so wemust ask not simply which films and scenes are"more flat" than others but in precisely which

NON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLEsenses they are flat. An equally great problemarea is how critics use the judgment of flatness-the correlations they make between flatnessand other matters, particularly those of sub-ject and meaning. Clearly an undifferentiatedjudgment of flatness cannot be the basis for anadequate interpretation or discussion of sub-ject. A correlation between the "flatness" ofMade in USA or Weekend and Herbert Mar-cuse's theorv of a One Dimensional societv isitoo general-in regard to both elements-to beof much use. Criticism must cut finer than thisor it is not helpful. Rather we must ask ineach case which of several kinds of flatnesshadhave been achieved and what is its/theirspecific relation to the subject of the part and/or whole to which it relates.

Cinema, like painting, is a two-dimensionalart which creates the illusion of a third dimen-sion. Painting is limited to its two dimensions;cinema is no< Cinema escapes the limits of twodimensions through its own third dimension,time. It does this by varying its range and per-spective, by taking different views of its sub-ject (through montage and/or camera move-ment). Cinema overcomes two-dimensionalitythrough its "walk-around" capabilib, which isalso a prime feature of ordinary human per-ception. E. H. Gombrich says: "While (oneturns, in other words, he is aware of a suc-cession of aspects which swing round with him.What we call 'appearance' is always composedof such a succession of aspects, a melody, as itwere, which allows us to estimate distance andsize; it is obvious that this melody can be im-itated by the movie camera but not by thepainter with his easel." (Art and Illusion, pp.256-7). Cinema can take several views of asubject, go from one camera angle to a re-verse angle or other angle, from long shot toclose-up, etc. I t can take the measure of a char-acter or object from many sides, in short, inthree dimensions. Both montage and composi-tion-in-depth accomplish this walk-around proj-ect, both create and explore three dimensionsthough in two-dimensional steps or segments,so to speak. It is obvious how montage accom-plishes this-through a succession of shots from


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different angles and at different ranges. It isequally clear &at a moving camera can ac-complish the same succession of aspects withina single shot. Even in those long takes whichdo not involve a moving camera, the actorsthemselves may move with respect to the cam-era; that is, they walk back-and-forth, or at di-agonals, changing in relative size, e t ~ .n short,the actors turn themselves around for us, cre-ating different angles and perspectives on them-selves. Instead of the camera's walking around,they walk around in relation to the camera.This also is well bevond the two dimensions ofpainting, whereby h e see only one side of afigure, which must stand for and suggest hisentirety.It is precisely cinema's capacity for depthwhich Godard excludes in Weekend. His mov-ing camera, by adhering rigidly to the single-perspective, one-sided view of painting, elim-inates the succession of aspects. The trackingshot's lateral motion extends this single per-spective rather than alters it, very much as anlural does. The movement of Godard's cam-era creates not a succession of aspects, but asingle aspect upon an unfolding subject mat-ter. Both montage and the usual moving cam-era multiply aspects or perspectives in regardto a single subject. To borrow a term frommusic, the succession of aspects is a kind ofelaboration. The subject in question is putthrough multiple variations (or views), towardsome-ahaustion of its nature, meaning, or ap-pearance. Godard's tracking shot does not elab-orate in this sense. Its variations through timeopen up ever new subject matter; they do notelaborate or take multiple views of the samesubject, as both montage and composition-in-depth (nearly) always do. Throughout the du-ration of a tracking shot, a one-to-one relationis maintained: a single perspective per stretchor segment of subject matter, with never adoubling or curving of perspective on a singlesubject.It should be emphasized that this flatness ofthe single aspect is a formal quality of thewhole, not of the part. We cannot judge aspectsuccession or constancy on the basis of the

part alone since the succession of aspects isoften a succession of shots. It is true that eachtracking shot in Weekend is flat in this sense ofsingleness of perspective, but what is done inone shot may be undone, or complemented, byanother. This is the method of montage, where-by the angle and range of one shot give way tothose of another and another, until a totalityof aspects is accumulated. Even with laterallong takes, a subsequent tracking shot may pro-vide a different view of the subject of a previ-ous tracking shot. Thus we do not know untila film is over whether a given subject is elab-orated multiply or not. We must look at allthe shots of a sequence or film before we cansay whether they present a succession of as-pects on a single subject or, as in Weekend, asingle aspect on a single, unfolding subject.Thus the flatness of the mural effect is an at-tribute or quality of the whole.We have argued that Weekend is flat in anoverall or structural sense in that it eliminatesthe succession of aspects, by which cinema ap-proximates the third dimension. This is an ab-solute flatness-a sequence, a film either variesaspects or it does not. Generally speaking, theframes of Weekend are also relatively flat inseveral painterly respects, and this is always arelative flatness, a question of more or less.The clearest case of this kind of flatness isachieved by posing a character or charactersagainst a short wall or background, as Godarddoes in Masculin Ferninin, Made in USA, andother films, and as Skolimowski does in all hisfilms. Weekend has certain of these shots, butit also has others with considerable depth-


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the camera follows its subject, the bourgeoiscouple, across a continuous background/land-scape that is sometimes flat (thick foliage be-hind the pair), sometimes deep (the highwayback-up).But there are other kinds of flatness. Theshallow wall shot achieves flatness simply byeliminating the long shot range, and perhapsalso the medium-shot range. Godard's trackingshot achieves a converse flatness by eliminatingthe close-up, medium-close, and often mediumshot ranges-by arranging his subjects(s) andbackground all within the long shot range. Thepoint may be clarified by a comparison withcomposition-in-depth, which aims for maximumvisual and expressive use of depth, in that botha close-up and a long shot can be includedwithin the same shot. Composition-in-depthachieves its illusion of great depth by arrang-ing its subject through all possible ranges ofthe deep-focus shot and, of course, by makingdramatic relations among these subject ranges.Godard achieves flatness using only a portionof the devth which deev-focus lenses vermit-I I Ihe uses the long-shot range and leaves theshorter ranges "blank," so to speak. Thus, evenwhere there are several planes in a Weekendshot-highway, countrysiae, tree-line, etc.-theyare all relatively flattened together, because alllie within the long-shot range. (Moreover, Go-dard does not achieve this flattening by usingtelephoto lenses, as Kurosawa did in RedBeard.)Secondly, Godard's planes, even where mul-tiple, are strictly parallel-they do not intersector interrelate. Consequently the eye is not ledback into the depth of the frame nor forward toits surfaces. How we have to "read" a paintingor frame is one aspect of its depth; to read theframes of Weekend, the eye moves strictly fromleft to right (sometimes from right to left), neverfrom front to back or back to front. What is truein a compositional sense is also true of the sub-ject of these frames: the film's action. The char-acters, their movements and activities, never takeus into or out of the frame but always from sideto side. Neither in a compositional sense nor anarrative sense are we ever required to relate

NON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLEforeground and background in Weekend. Strict-ly speaking, there is no foreground and back-ground, only background, just as in the shallowwall shot there is only foreground. In anothersense, foreground and background are heremerged into a single plane. Again, composition-in-depth provides a definitive contrastLike the baroque in painting, composition-indepth makes a great deal of foreground/back-ground relations, of foreshortening, of huge ob-jects in the foreground, etc. It is not too muchto say that foreground/background relation isthe axis of composition-in-depth expressivityAs we have seen, it is its moral base also.Thirdly, the non-intersection of planes inWeekend is the result not only of their strictparallelism but also of the fixed, 90' cameraangle, which arranges all planes in parallel tothe borders of the frame itself. Of these planes,all are inert or non-operative in both a narra-tive and a compositio~al ense, except that occ u ~ i e dbv the characters. All interest and moveI ,ment reside in the characters and they occupy(or constitute) always the same plane: they donot move between planes. Weekend is singleplaned in the sense that the camera and theviewer's eye fix upon only one plane, that occupied by the characters, and follow- it out, inone direction only, at infinite length. The framemay contain several planes, but the film as awhole is constructed in relation to only one ofthese.

Weekend's single-plane construction sets itavart from either school of film aesthetics. mon-tage or composition-in-depth; comparing Weekend to them will help us understand the vari-ous senses of the film's flatness historically. Itis clear that montage editing (and overall filmconstruction) involves or results in a series ofplanes or planar perspectives. Cutting amongclose-ups, medium close-ups, medium shotsand long shots, in any order or combination, isobviously an alternation of the planes of ascene, and the result when assembled a sequence of planes." The scene or event is broken*A s i t happens, th is phrase also appears in StuarGilbert's translation of A4nclrb Malraux's Museum


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13ON-BOURGEOIS CAMERA STYLEinto its component parts or planes, then theseare reconsGcted in-various patterns, in accordwith a structural montage principle-rhythmic,emotional, or intellectual. Besides changes ofcamera range, there are also changes of angle,which can alternate planar perspectives ratherthan particular planes. Cutting to a differentangle on the same scene, however, is also arearrangement or reordering of the planes bear-ing upon the action. This ordering or sequenceof planes is the very texture of Eisenstein's art.Composition-in-depth is not fundamentally dif-ferent in principle and overall purpose. Com-position-in-depth internalizes the sequence ofplanes within the shot; its ideal, as Bazin pre-sents it, is the inclusion of all planes bearingupon an action within a single camera set-up.With all the planes of a situation before oravailable to the camera. the entire action ofthe scene may be worked out within a singleshot. As with montage cinema, dramatic actionis advanced by way of the alternation and inter-action of planes, but now this is done by cam-era movement and/or bv, the movement of -actors, themselves planes or parts of planes,through or in relation to the planes of the scene.At the same time the camera must organizethese planes in terms of importance, dramaticinterest, etc. By composition-in-depth the suc-cession of planes is greatly fluidized, proceed-ing in a smooth flow rather than in jumps, butthe right solution to a given scene becomes

Without Walls (Garden City, 1967, page 75): "Themeans of reproduction in the cinema is the movingphotograph, but its means of expression is the se-quence of planes. (The planes change when thecamera is moved; it is their sequence that consti-tutes cutting.)" A similar mistranslation of theFrench plan (shot) as plane occurs in Gilbert'stranslations of Malraux's variants of this passage inThe Psychology of Art: I : Museum Without Walls(New York, 1949-51, page 112) and in The V oicesof Silence (New York, 1953, page 122), in whichhlalraux is made to assert that "the average dura-tion of each [plane] is ten seconds." But Malrauxwas simply expounding the classical view that cut-ting, the sequence of shots, is the source of expres-sivity in cinema.

more difficult and complex. Implicit in theshot's first image, or accessible to it, must beall the scene's action and the full exploitabilityof its planes. Shots must be worked out care-fully and carefully rehearsed. An example ofthe way that composition-in-depth orders planeswithin the frame is given by Bazin-the scene inThe Little Foxes in which the steel box soughby several characters occupies the extreme fore-ground of the frame while its seekers are ar-rayed in multiple planes behind it. ,4 more ex-treme case is the scene in Citizen Kane in whichMrs. Kane learns about her son's inheritance.Shot with a static camera, the shot is very nar-row and very deep, virtually a visual corridorWithin the squeezed cabin room we see themother huge in the foreground, the bankerfrom the East behind her, the \vindo\v in thewall of the cabin behind them, and in the fardistance, young Kane playing with his sled. Notonly the composition of the shot but its dra-matic action requires the eye to move continu-ally back and forth. It is clear that Godard'streatment of planes in W e e k e n d is directly op-posite to that of this shot, an extreme in theopposite direction. Godard's visual field has lit-tle or no depth and has-or aspires to-infinitelength; that is, it exists in a single lateral plane.

Consideration of W e e k e n d ~ o i n t sUD under-Ilying similarities between montage and compo-sition-in-depth and serves to set Godard's filmapart from either school of film aesthetics: bothmontage and composition-in-depth define cin-ema in terms of a multiplicity of planes andboth see the problem of form or technique asthe inclusion or relation of planes in a meaning-ful format. Godard in W e e k e n d renounces themultiplicity of planes as a project of cinemaand hence rejects both schools.

What are the implications of these shiftsfrom three dimensions to two, from depth toflatness? An ideological interpretation suggestsitself-composition-in-depth projects a bour-geois world infinitely deep, rich, complex, am-biguous, mysterious. Godard's flat frames col-lapse this world into two-dimensional actuality;thus reversion to a cinema of one plane is ademystification, an assault on the bourgeois


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world-view and self-image.* Weekend's bour-geois figures scurry along without mystery to-ward mundane goals of money and porno-graphic fulfillment. There is no ambiguity andno moral complexity. That space in which theviewer could lose himself, make distinctionsand alliances, comparisons and judgments, hasbeen abrogated-the viewer is presented witha single flat picture of the world that he mustexamine, criticize, accept or reject. Thus theflatness of Weeken d must not be analyzed onlyin itself but in regard to the previous modes ofbourgeois self-presentment, particularly of com-position-in-depth. The subject of Weeken d isthe historical bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie inhistory; the film's flatness must not be seenstatistically, as a single moment, but dialec-tically, as a flattening. Given this overall cor-relation, the specific correlations of the severalsenses of flatness fall into place. The successionof aspects not only multipfies viewpoints on thebourgeois world so that final judgment and anykind of certainty become impossible, it pro-jects a bourgeois world infinitely inexhaustibleand elaborable. Godard's tracking shot formatinsists on a single perspective and on the suf-ficiency of a single comprehensive survey for

* This transition is more than a formal one. Thepractitioners and advocates of composition-in-depthgenuinely believed in this moral depth and ambigu-ity. Bazin points out that the conception and inter-pretation of Ci t i z en Kane depend on the composi-tion of the image. It could hardly be otherwise ina great masterpiece. William Wyler's composition-in-depth films, which (as Bazin says) have little orno ambiguity, are not masterpieces. In such a casecomposition-in-depth becomes merely an imposedformat, a style without internal correlates. (Wyler'sbetter films, such as T h e L e t t er , are not structuredaround composition-in-depth). Welles, the greatestcomposition-in-depth director, is also the directorwho has made the most of the theme of inexhaust-ible mystery. Not only Kane but many or most ofWelles's other films center on impenetrable mysteryand several, also like Kane, proceed through amultiplicity of viewpoints and perspectives whichnevertheless fail to yield certainty concerning theunderlying questions.


understanding of the transparent, easy-to-un-derstand bourgeois world. Whereas in montageand composition-in-depth, complex form workson simple material, working it up as complexalso, in Godard simple form works on simplematerial. The tracking shot and single-planeconstruction suggest an infinitely thin, absolutely flat bourgeois substance that cannot beelaborated but only surveyed. Finally, thesingle camera range represents not only a refusato participate in bourgeois space, throughforward camera movement, intercutting camera ranges, etc., it also has to do with themaintenance of critical perspective. Giventhat the film's subject is the historical bour-geoisie, Godard keeps his subject before him aall times. He refuses to pick and choose withinthe bourgeois world or to prefer any part of ito any other-even for a moment-because thainvolves partial eclipse of the whole. The na-ture of the bourgeois totality and the projectof criticizing it require that it never be losfrom view, or broken up into parts and aspectsbut always be kept before the viewer as singleand whole. Obviously the long-shot range isthe range of the totality and the tracking shothe instrument of its critical survey. For thisreason also Godard does not allow the closeup and medium-close ranges to be filled, fora face or figure huge in the foreground literally obstructs the whole and distracts attentionfrom it in an emotional and intellectual sensealso. Flatness in Weeken d , in its various sensesis in fact the result of a formal totality that re-fuses to relinquish total perspective on thesocio-historical totality that is its subject.

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