Foreign Affair

I-House is screening director Jean-Luc Godard's lost film.

by Sam Adams

[ godard in the u.s.a. ]

For more than four decades, Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. has been a provocative gap in the great filmmaker's C.V., the missing link (at least chronologically) between Masculin Féminin and Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Released in 1966 — although set, for no obvious reason, a few years in the future — the film was shot without a script, but Godard took some of its plot from a pseudonymous novel by mystery writer Donald Westlake, an uncredited borrowing that has kept the film out of circulation and off of home video, at least until now.

It's ironic that the film's plot should be the reason for its vanishing act, since narrative is the least of the movie's concerns. Despite the film's dedication to Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, whose films The Crimson Kimono and They Live By Night will be shown along with Godard's at International House this weekend, Made in U.S.A. bears few traces of the director's once-passionate love affair with American noir. All that remains are trace elements: Anna Karina as a gun-toting femme fatale, László Szabó as a fedoraed gangster who recalls both Humphrey Bogart and his Godardian counterpart, Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Although Godard and his fellow Cahiers critics made their mark by lionizing American studio directors, by this point he had grown deeply suspicious of Hollywood technique. The film acts as an assault on what Karina's character calls "well-worn words," notably in a scene where Karina and a barfly exchange disordered dialogue while an incongruous Marianne Faithfull warbles "As Tears Go By" from a nearby table.

Richard Brody, author of the weighty Godard bio Everything Is Cinema, views Made in U.S.A. as a turning point, or rather a marker of a shift that had already occurred. "Even the title of the film suggests how much his attitude toward American film had changed," he says. "What is it that's made in U.S.A.? According to this film, it's political violence and neo-fascism."

Enraged by the Vietnam war, Godard lashed out, although not always coherently. "Except for its fierce anger at certain American political intrigues, the politics of the film are pretty diffuse," Brody says. Karina's search for a vanished lover was clearly inspired by the disappearance from French custody, and probable murder, of Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barka. Brody reads it more coherently as a commentary on the acrimonious end of Godard and Karina's marriage. In lieu of her lover, Karina turns up a series of tape recordings recapitulating the public pronouncements of prominent left-wing figures; Brody confirms that the voice on the tapes is indeed Godard's.

The missing man at the center of his own film, Godard is the ghost in his machine, unsure what form to take. Brody quotes a contemporaneous remark of Godard's: "Up until now, when I was making a film and got stuck, I would ask myself, 'What would Hitchcock do?' Now, if I asked him, he'd say, 'Figure it out yourself.'"

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Made in U.S.A. | Fri., May 15, 7 p.m.; Sat., May 16, 5 p.m.; $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org. Richard Brody will introduce Friday's screening.