"This Boy & This Girl, Were Never Properly Introduced to the World We Live In": Ray's influence on Godard
The films of Nicholas Ray (1911-1979) were always personal. His films mirrored his life. He wrote, and he shot from the struggles, dilemmas and experiences that shaped his life. His visual style came from what he imagined, and his characters voiced his inner thoughts. What interested him were the people, the youth. His characters were always enduring the relentless hardships of daunting realities. As Ray put it, “ I have always been concerned with youth and their struggle for belief and understanding.” (McGilligan 417) In turn, the themes of emotional confusion, so dear to Ray’s expression, inevitably affected his reputation. In Hollywood, he was largely seen as an outsider, continually misunderstood, just an ‘arty’ rebel with a vision that could not be swayed. However, as Patrick McGilligan observed, “Overseas ‘arty’ was a compliment.” (231) What displeased the Americans enchanted the French. And when Ray’s recognition began to diminish, the writings of the Cahiers du Cinema redeemed his worth. By the time Ray’s film They Live by Night (1949) opened in Paris in 1951, the filmmakers of the Nouveau Vague had found their inspiration. McGilligan describes:Bazin’s young disciples found in this and other early Ray films a mirror of themselves…His vision was seen, from the earliest prescient reviews, as a struggle against forces (both exterior and interior) more powerful than his own artistic stamina. In “the youth of the heroes” of They Live by Night, in ‘their stubborn intensity’…these young iconoclasts of film theory saw nothing less than an allegory of themselves as young rebels pitted against the outside world, the establishment, the crass commercial cinema…the Cahiers group saw themselves as Ray’s spiritual children. (232-3)
Jean Luc Godard, in particular, was greatly influenced by Ray; he felt that Ray was “reinventing” cinema. In fact, Godard felt so strongly about the direction Ray was taking filmmaking that he once stated – “The Cinema is Nicholas Ray.” (Hillier 118) The pages that follow will explore this mutuality of approach, highlighting the similarities between Ray’s vision and Godard’s cinema in terms of the ‘youth struggle’ at the heart of their work. Both directors had their subject, their ‘victim’ you might say. For Ray it was the young man; for Godard, the young woman. By cross referencing a character analysis of two protagonists – Ray’s Bowie Bowers (Farley Granger) from They Live by Night with Godard’s Nana Kleinfrankenheim (Anna Karina) from Vivre Sa Vie (1962) – against the themes present in the worlds which surround them, it becomes clear that Godard was equally obsessed with the same flawed characters and their unyielding search for redemption. There is a “‘faith we can read in the eyes’ of the characters, ‘faith that is riddled with doubts and yet is ever-present.’” (Gozlan 100)
Vivre Sa Vie opens with a quote by Montaigne –“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself”. Above all, the most evident commonality between the two characters is that they have both shaped a life that is not their own. They have not given themselves to themselves. Past experience and present circumstance have put them into a state of dependency where the only way out is for them to literally sign their lives over to other people. Nana is poor, unable to become an actress; she makes a deal with a pimp named Raoul (Sady Rebbot) and becomes a prostitute. Bowie is in jail, unable to escape; he becomes the third man on a prison break with Chickamaw (Howard Da Silva) and T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen), but in turn has to maintain his role as a bank robber, even though he wants out. Money is the catch. It justifies the means, and undermines the characters, distracting them from their true desires. External forces surrounding the characters have narrowed their focus to money. In turn, the characters are controlled by people who represent money – a pimp, other bank robbers. The protagonists are soon tarred with the same brush, and are dubiously rewarded for their services. In this regard, both protagonists participate in their own corruption, selling themselves for money. Money comes to define their actions even though it bears no relation to their true being.
Nana and Bowie are both caught in circumstances beyond their control. Their decision to ‘take the job’ creates an inner frustration, which precipitates a schizophrenic conflict of motivations. The protagonists are moving in two different directions, a push-pull of the heart-strings between interior and exterior forces. The urge to escape and reinvent themselves is intercepted by the outer cycle of need and obligation they have locked themselves into. Their impulsive decision to hitch their future on the ‘help’ of exploitative others as a quick fix creates a detrimental spiral that goes against their true nature. This reality leaves both characters in a state of regret, frustrated by the realization that they were not conscious of the ramifications of their actions until it is too late. An early illustration of this disjunction occurs when Nana casually picks up a man and takes him to her first assignation, only to recoil in desperation when he persists in demanding she kiss him on the mouth. Her darting head, thrashing in panic and disbelief, speaks eloquently to this disjunction.
Bowie faces a similar realization. The brief honeymoon period after the first bank robbery dissolves in a disastrous sequence of events. When he tells Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) what he plans to do with his share of the loot – hire the best lawyer to clear his name from his past crime – she stops him with the reality check that the cops have found his gun with his prints all over it. “I can skip that trip to the lawyer now,” he replies. Although he did not kill the cop, Chickamaw did, Bowie takes the rap. In an instant his only hope for attaining what he truly desires – freedom – is taken from him by his unthinking decision to commit a second crime to clear the first. In both characters, failure to make the connection until after the fact paralyzes their imaginations. There is a sense in which they keep limiting themselves by what has already happened. Both characters fail to fight effectively, rather they unwittingly accept that they are already ‘in too deep’. With misplaced trust these protagonists have been diverted from their dreams by the manipulation of others and by their own unconsciousness. Now there is no turning back.
However, two film theorists make the observation that for Ray and Godard it is the surrounding world that is evil. Geoff Andrew writes of Ray, “His misguided, lonely victims of a callous and complacent society are followed in close-up; it is the world around them that is presented as corrupt, malign and in need of moral re-education.” (11) Godard creates the same environment. Richard Roud says that “Godard paradoxically claimed that it is the world which is the outsider, his characters represent life; the world is just a bad movie.” (20) Witness the scene where Bowie, fresh from his first bank robbery and dressed in his new ‘persona’ as a big shot, gullibly accepts Chickamaw’s advice, “One thing you gotta learn, kid, you gotta look and act like other people”. He conforms to the harassing pressure of Chickamaw’s horn, urging him to drive faster, and ends up in a car crash. He’s the sacrifice, not Chickamaw. So too Nana, fresh out of watching the film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), impulsively takes a chance to appropriate money that a woman has dropped, only to face a police interrogation of how such a blind moment of desperation could happen. She returns the money but the woman presses charges, a response that feels like a betrayal to Nana, who expected forgiveness in return. “I don’t know. I think it was very mean of her.” When asked what she will do, she looks down, “I don’t know”, then away, “I …is someone else”. Her sense of confusion, despair and defeat is written in her downcast demeanour and sorrowful eyes. How to respond to such a world is beyond her.
The disjunction goes further. Both protagonists fail to see how others see them because they have a naieve, idealistic narrative running through their minds of how things are going to be – once they have money. Both of them have ‘someday dreams’ – wishful thinking that distracts them from the truth of their situations. As Bowie says when he first gets out of jail, “I’m gonna get myself squared around … You know what I am gonna do? I’d like to go to New Orleans, Mexico even.” In the world’s terms, Bowie is not the innocent abroad, itching to travel and see the world, but rather “Bowie, the Kid, the Zelton Bandit”, wrecking havoc across the countryside. “You gotta have wings to be everywhere they say you’ve been”, Chickamaw says with jealous irritation that Bowie has gained the reputation of being the wunderkind, not he himself, the older, experienced thief. So too Nana dreams that one day she’ll become an actress, or that posing nude will be her ticket to the movies. In the eyes of others, however, Nana is the prostitute, a commodity that can be bought and sold, not a woman making a ‘living’ to create the dreams she aspires to. “Life should be easy,” she says. This sense of their own innocence creates an unreality from which they both will suffer. When Bowie tries to escape, he is slapped into submission by the harsh truth of how the other men see him, “You’re an investment, and you’re gonna pay off”. By initially falling in with their plans, he becomes their tool, a ‘lifer’ in the robbery business, an indentured slave. How Raoul and other men see Nana equally defines her – her power as an attractive, desirable woman is owned by others. “One day a week your man will take you to the cinema,” says Raoul, throwing her crumbs of dubious appreciation.
These two films turn on the question of belonging. They Live by Night is a love story, in which the protagonist is saved by the love of a young woman (Keechie) who sees Bowie’s innate goodness, despite whatever bad actions he has committed. He is associated with violence but he himself is not violent. Vivre Sa Vie is Nana’s search for inclusion and acknowledgement of her being. She asks Raoul, the pimp, “Am I special?” She wants to be the most desirable and feels rejected when one of her clients prefers another woman. Everything turns on whether or not she is chosen but she never chooses herself. Equally her longing to find the perfect word to express herself is a desire to be uniquely her own person – to find the words to authentically define her being. But the words escape her, just as her life does. Bowie and Nana fall in love so easily. They place their trust in others because both of them truly long to find a place in the world. Bowie is galvanized into wanting to shape a life by the love and trust of Keechie – she becomes his moral strength and guide: “Just tell me when I’m doing the wrong thing and I’ll snap out of it”, he says. Nana turns to Raoul to give direction to her life, a trust that is sadly misplaced. Although he notices her goodness, he uses it against her. In the background, the lack of a supportive family has kept both Bowie and Nana isolated and vulnerable, prey to the uncertainty and despair of those who have no one to belong to. Love brings hope, a hope of becoming real to themselves and to others.
Cinematically, the representation of the protagonists is shaped by certain variables. The use of space and time becomes a telling signature of character development. The absence of ‘home’ in both films, the fact that so much of the action takes place in cars, buses, hotel rooms, bars, cafes, on highways and city streets, emphasizes this landscape empty of human sanctuary. Where has home gone? Did domestic space ever exist? By never attaching a space to a character, it leaves just the character, alone and vulnerable to the world. Time is always present time, driven by emotional reality with little backstory beyond registering the ramifications of the past. As Ray says himself, “one thing is certain, time and space play no role at all in the construction of a film, the cinema is unaware of them; a scene can carry you into another world, another age. One simply tries to capture, in flight, moments of truth”. (Hillier 124) Vivre Sa Vie is structured in twelve random chapters with little plot continuity; this creates an ellipsis, a jump in time. Nana turns and turns in and out of empty hotel rooms, framed by the white expanse of empty windows – she appears vivid against the leached background where she wanders and poses but nothing emerges or grows, not even her own identity. As Richard Neupert says, “The viewer never learns, for instance, how much time has passed between Nana’s first customer and her meeting with Yvette, who already seems like a long-time acquaintance … Storytelling here offers concrete sections of time and space within chapters but communicates little about what is not shown in the scenes”. (240)
There is a meditative feel to both films, a focus of quiet within which the action occurs. Ray cradles his lovers, as if they are somehow out of time, out of the storm that is constantly breaking around them. They live by night, in the darkness, their hopeful faces lit as if from within. So too Godard captures a timeless quality in his depiction of Nana – she is the archetypal woman trapped in profile, in mirrors and doorways, framed by circumstances beyond her control. Godard observed that, “Each of his films is born … in a reflection of the hero on a moment in time; a meditation that starts from a snapshot. ‘A twenty-fourth of a second which is metamorphosed and prolonged for an hour and a half. The world between two flickers of the eyelids, the sadness between two heart-beats, the joy of living between two hand-claps’”. (Roud 75) The use of close-up in both films reinforces this intimacy, this naked reality where the characters are seen, truly captured in their essence. By filming the characters in close-up, Ray and Godard reveal their humanity, the innocence that lies at the core of Nana and Bowie as their facial expressions register the impact of their emotions. “The greatest tableaux are portraits…A painter who tries to render a face only renders the outside of people; and yet something else is revealed. It’s very mysterious.” (Godard 187) Such unflinching closeness holds the viewer to the experience the characters are undergoing. We see with their eyes as if they are looking back into our own, which Nana does when she gazes right into the camera. No one is spared.
A parable occurs in Vivre Sa Vie when the professor tells Nana of Portheos, one of the three musketeers, who dies at the moment he first begins to reflect upon his actions. Nana does not understand this but by the end of the film, when she finally acts upon her own desires to follow love and not Raoul, she too precipitates her own demise. When Bowie is faced with the impossibility of escaping to Mexico, he takes responsibility for the effects of his past actions by choosing to leave Keechie and his unborn child to save them from any further risk by travelling with him. As McGilligan writes, “Bowie’s fundamental decency was underlined by his ultimate self-sacrifice. The doomed character finally succeeded, it might be said, by failing.” (130) Both Nana and Bowie attempt to act in good faith, having realized what they value and long to protect. Another parallel earlier in Vivre Sa Vie highlights the redemptive power of failure, witnessed by Nana in The Passion of Joan of Arc, when Joan is confronted by the promise of her own death at the stake. Her persecutors want her to acknowledge the futility of her quest in the light of her imminent burning. She turns defeat into triumph by proclaiming her death as a martyrdom, consoled by the fact that “God knows our path but we understand it only at the end of the road”. While neither Bowie nor Nana have understood the world that overwhelms them, they both come to a moment of clarity at the end, which allows them to act out of their own truth.
What the characters fail to achieve is given back in the freedom of the filmmakers, Ray and Godard, themselves to rebel against the constraints of more conventional filmmaking, to take risks as they explore subjectively the vision that is in them to express. Ray said on making They Live by Night, “Every mistake in this film is going to be mine. Everything that’s done here is going to be mine. I want to find out if film is for me…Hollywood is not the most advanced place in the world. It’s remarkable that with all its money and talent not one new style or fashion has come from there.” (152) Godard’s work equally embraced this notion of an auteur signature. Ray influenced Godard with his intense commitment to telling his stories in a radically individual style. If Godard wanted to use a tracking shot to shoot a dialogue scene, he would do it; as he said, “I didn’t want to keep the same angle throughout the scene, and at the same time I didn’t want to change the shot because I couldn’t see any valid reason to do so; therefore, the only way was to move the camera.” (Roud 89)
Through their portrayal of troubled and circumscribed youth, both directors achieve a kind of apotheosis for their characters – a redemptive truth that honours their plight. The final images of both They Live by Night and Vivre Sa Vie speak to this unswerving commitment – to see what is. Keechie clutches the written affirmation of Bowie’s love – the simplicity of his sincere commitment, which he was unable to live out in real life – her face turning back to the camera, her expression caught in a slow fade of sorrow and poignant acceptance, lips quietly mouthing his words in return, “I love you”. Nana, who has been pinned throughout by the relentless scrutiny of the camera, lies dead on the pavement, her prone body caught in an awkward angled shot that is testament to the misalignment of her tragic life. Youth is trapped in circumstances beyond its control but Ray and, with his inspiration, Godard release them into a new life, an immortality which rises with the wave of young French filmmakers seeing the world with fresh eyes. As Virgina Graham said, in praise of Ray’s “Gallic approach to an American social problem…if only he had taken the trouble to be a Frenchman we should be licking his boots in ecstasy.” (McGilligan 179)
Works Cited
Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall. London: Charles Letts, 1991. Print.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. Ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. Print.
Graham, Peter, and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Hillier, Jim, ed. Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.
McGilligan, Patrick. Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director. New York: Harper-Collins, 2011. Print.
Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 2007. Print.
Ray, Nicholas. I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies. Ed. Susan Ray. Los Angeles: California UP, 1993. Print.
Roud, Richard. Cinema One: Godard. London: Secker & Warburg, 1967. Print.
They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Perf. Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donell, Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen. RKO Radio Pictures, 1949. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2007.
Vivre Sa Vie. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Anna Karina and Sady Rebbot. Les Films de la Pleiade, 1962. DVD. The Criterion Collection, 2010.
