During the English lessons in Bande `Part the teacher asks Odile to quote what T. S. Eliot says about tradition: ‘Everything that is really new is by that fact automatically traditional’. Godard’s films may strike one at first as a bewildering complex of inter-related themes: all the central contemporary concerns turn up and are developed in them: the difficulties of communication, the problem of identity, the possibility of personal freedom and what it means, the sense of alienation, and so on. I want to detach from this complex one thread that seems to me essential: follow it, and we may find that it makes sense of all the others, that they come to form a coherent pattern round it: the sense of tradition.

Godard’s films abound in cultural references, and they are remarkably wide-ranging. Even in A Bout de Souffle—and in a sense all his films are embryonically present in A Bout de Souffle—there are visual, aural or verbal references to Bach, Brahms, Chopin and Mozart; Renoir, Picasso and Klee; Shakespeare, Cocteau, William Faulkner, Rilke; the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame de Paris; Humphrey Bogart, Robert Aldrich, Budd Boetticher, Cahiers du Cinéma; and doubtless several more I’ve overlooked. Many people are annoyed by this: they regard it as a silly and conceited intellectual game, an ostentatious name-dropping. But it is of fundamental importance to Godard’s work, something not decorative but integral, pointing to a thematic preoccupation that receives its most explicit treatment, perhaps, in Alphaville, but which has so far remained a constant factor throughout Godard’s work and seems likely to continue to do so.

To start with the English lesson in Bande `Part, besides Eliot, great use is made of Shakespeare. The scene as a whole offers a striking example of that tension between naturalism and stylization that is an essential characteristic of most of the leading directors of the Nouvelle Vague. The class-room setting instantly evokes memories of bare and dingy evening course institutes for anyone who has been inside one; and the behaviour of the students, especially of the three leading characters, Franz, Odile and Arthur, is observed in close naturalistic detail. Yet the lesson is in naturalistic terms preposterous. The teacher declaims passages from Romeo and Juliet in French which the students (who appear to be far from advanced) are then asked to render in, apparently, Shakespearean English in a matter of a few seconds. The teacher collects all the papers and announces a ten-minute recess, during which she proposes to correct the lot. I want to consider in some detail what Godard is doing here.

First, there is the fairly obvious irony of the contrast between Romeo and Juliet and what is going on in the class-room. Arthur has decided to seduce Odile, and during the lesson he whole-heartedly sets about doing this, moving surreptitiously about the class-room, giving her meaningful glances, passing suggestive notes. Odile, in her youthful innocence and vulnerability, is rather like Juliet; Arthur is not at all like Romeo. We may recall here the references to Romeo and Juliet in A Bout de Souffle: Patricia there says she ‘wants to be like Romeo and Juliet’ who ‘couldn’t do without each other’. To Arthur, the relationship with Odile is merely a matter of a casual seduction. (I think this kind of cross-reference between films is valid with an artist whose work is thematically as closely integrated as Godard’s. In fact, it seems to me that his whole work is best considered as one long film in many sections—sections which are at least as closely related as the sections of The Waste Land). We have, then, the ideal, pure, eternal love of Romeo and Juliet used to set off the sordid modern intrigue—a use of allusion that will recall Eliot’s use of past culture in The Waste Land. Yet in Godard the relationship of past to present is not so simple. During the sequence we see Arthur looking at Odile when she isn’t looking at him, and we see in his face, momentarily, a great need, a yearning. In a sense this clumsy, ugly, boorish man is, after all, like Romeo: in his need for a permanent relationship with a woman. It is a need of which he is not conscious—of which he will not allow himself to be conscious—and a need he shares with the heroes of almost all Godard’s films to date. If this is to read too much into a single glance, it can be equally argued, that the need is implicit in Godard’s whole presentation of the character throughout the film. We are continually made aware of the emptiness of his life, and of his vague dissatisfaction, and it is made very clear that what prevents this dissatisfaction from being resolved in his resolutely ‘tough’ attitude, his rejection of all emotional involvement. As he dies, it is of Odile that he thinks.

During the Shakespeare lesson Arthur passes Odile a note: ‘To be or not to be contre votre poitrine, that is the question.’ Arthur, certainly, is as unlike Hamlet as he is unlike Romeo; yet, like Hamlet, he rejects the standards and values of the society in which he exists. And Hamlet’s contemplation of suicide is not so far removed from Arthur’s tendency (albeit unconscious) to move steadily towards his own destruction (he delights, it will be remembered, in miming the death of Billy the Kid, and dies, horribly and grotesquely, allowing himself to be shot repeatedly in the stomach before he retaliates).

The relationship between the Shakespeare references and the action in this scene is, then, quite a complex and delicate one. There is an ironic contrast between past and present values, certainly; but, more important, there is the implication that the values embodied in Shakespeare’s plays are still relevant to the present, even if the present is cut off from them. This sense of discontinuity is greatly intensified by the stylized treatment of the scene. It is not only that the idea of the students reproducing the original text is absurd. The teacher, as she recites, becomes completely carried away—her emotional involvement contrasts with the apathy of the students. But she renders the play virtually incomprehensible by completely destroying the sequence of events: her recitation starts with speeches from near the end of the play and moves backwards, in fits and starts.

This is not to imply that Godard is suggesting that if Arthur read Shakespeare he would find there a solution to all his problems; but what the scene does suggest is his isolation from a whole past culture which, if it doesn’t provide answers, at least would provide some support, some terms of reference, certain standards and values. Later in the film comes the scene where the three would-be burglars break the world record for running through the Louvre. The effect of this little scene seems ambiguous, and the ambiguity is revealing. It is very funny, certainly, and the humour arises from our sympathy—and our sense of Godard’s sympathy—with the characters: the Louvre represents respectability, the stale conventionality against which they are rebelling. Yet the Louvre also contains a lot of great paintings, and it is natural to relate this scene to the English lesson and its background of Shakespeare, and see in it a further expression of this sense of discontinuity. In Vivre sa Vie the Young Man (whose voice, when he reads the Poe story, is Godard’s voice) tells Nana that he intends to take her to the Louvre, and talks of the essential human need for art and beauty: ironically, she is driven past the Louvre by Raoul on her way to be handed over to another pimp (and also on her way to her death).