This film is actually quite bad. But that really isn't so important. It's also fascinating, and that's much more important. The whole concept of Misreading, as it has been developed by Harold Bloom, is really important to me, and this film is like a certain kind of textbook. If you have a big American car in a French film, that means one thing. If you have a couple of French guys driving a big American car in New York, the meaning is totally different. Now, of course, we can take this line of inquiry to some absurd places: if an American director would have directed French actors in a French film, shot in New York (driving a big American car)...But, anyway - so much post - Breathless French style is derived from American style. But a lot of American style is derived from misreadings of French misreadings of American style - have you seen Jarmusch's The Limits of Control? Impossible without Melville...
What else should I talk about? The Jazz? Solal's Jazz in Breathless. Perfection. Here? Not really. Again, it's French Jazz, and doesn't really fit NY perfectly. But that's OK - maybe if it was worse, it would be better, like the Jazz in Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska!
In any case, I really want to collate scenes from movies from the late '50s and note how many times certain things reoccur - little portable record players with records strewn all over the floor, cool scenes of cigarettes being lit, gas stations - the scene in the recording studio so much like the one in Masculin/Feminin. What would we get out of such lists? Something...something about zeitgeist. Something about transmission. Something about cross - pollination and its relationship to influence, something about modern myths.
So if the experience of making this film helped him to know what to do and what not to do in his later masterpieces, then, you know what? It's a beautiful thing. Godard once famously said "It's not blood, it's red". Melville found out some kind of similar thing about the difference between America and...American - isms? Something like that.
What else should I talk about? The Jazz? Solal's Jazz in Breathless. Perfection. Here? Not really. Again, it's French Jazz, and doesn't really fit NY perfectly. But that's OK - maybe if it was worse, it would be better, like the Jazz in Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska!
In any case, I really want to collate scenes from movies from the late '50s and note how many times certain things reoccur - little portable record players with records strewn all over the floor, cool scenes of cigarettes being lit, gas stations - the scene in the recording studio so much like the one in Masculin/Feminin. What would we get out of such lists? Something...something about zeitgeist. Something about transmission. Something about cross - pollination and its relationship to influence, something about modern myths.
So if the experience of making this film helped him to know what to do and what not to do in his later masterpieces, then, you know what? It's a beautiful thing. Godard once famously said "It's not blood, it's red". Melville found out some kind of similar thing about the difference between America and...American - isms? Something like that.