Made in the U.S.A. (1966)
Made in the U.S.A. orLa Nuit Americaine(FR) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Written by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Anna Karina; Jean-Pierre Leaud; Laslo’ Szabo’; Yves Alfonso; Jean-Claude Bouillon
“We were in a political movie - Walt Disney with blood.” - Paula Nelson (Anna Karina)
Set in the vaguely futuristic Atlantic Cite’, Made in America stars longtime Godard muse Anna Karina (who was, at this point, separated from, but still legally married to the director) as investigative journalist Paula Nelson. Actually filming simultaneously at some points with Two or Three Things I Know About Her, this was, perhaps, Godard’s final flirtation with genre reconstruction. Bursting at the seams with political, cinematic, and literary references, the plot, which essentially involves Paula investigating the politically motivated murder of her lover, Richard (”Dick”; “Richard P.”) Politzer, is wafer thin. Godard’s disillusionment with traditional cinema, and his obsession with left wing politics, are all too clear throughout. Part essay film, part political noir, part auto-biographical exploration, part farce, Made in the USA fits comfortably into a stretch of similar films that followed Godard’s most critically successful period that include Une Femme Marriee;Two or Three Things I know About Her; Weekend; and La Chinoise.
Visually, the color is ultra vivid, juxtaposing highly contrasted monochromatic backgrounds with lush wardrobe or vice versa - the kind of eye popping palette of which contemporary Jacques Demy might have been proud. Shot by genius cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard referenced pop artist Piet Mondrian in his description of the look, and a debt is also owed to one of the sources of the entire Lichstenstein/ Warholian pop art movement - comic books, which are mimicked in the film a variety of ways. Godard goes so far as to show comic book-like inserts that punctuate the action on screen (at one point a card reads “Bing” as Paula is accosted). The sound design also leans toward the cartoonish, with numerous dissonant honks, horns, and plane noises (although some were used to cover material the French censors would have eliminated anyway) assaulting our senses.
Inspired by Hawks’ The Big Sleep, and nominally based on a novel Juggerby Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark), the actual film plot bears little resemblance to the source material. There are, however, numerous allusions to film noir and pulp fiction, beginning with the dedication in the opening credits to Sam (Fuller) and Nick (Ray), two directors whom Godard, and his fellow Cahiers du Cinema critics had, short years before, championed as artists to be admired and emulated. The film is stocked with insider nods to various noir films, with some of the most obvious references being characters named Aldrich (Robert); Seigel (Don); Widmark (Richard); Mizoguchi (Kenji); and Goodis (writer David, who was responsible for the source novel for Truffuat’s Shoot the Piano Player); and streets named Preminger (Otto) and Hecht (Ben).
Godard’s meta approach and subversion of narrative is in evidence as, on multiple occasions, characters speak asides to the camera (a favorite device), and at various times the sound of the dialogue is merely dropped so that the audience cannot hear what the characters are saying. Various characters also mention the movie audience as being easily fooled, talk about a garden location being a good one for a film, and in one bar scene have a protracted discussion about semiotics, a scenario that also includes Marianne Faithful in a cameo singing As Tears Go By(later popularized by The Rolling Stones). Of course there is the famous line spoken by Karina about Walt Disney and blood. Additionally, there are numerous devices employed by Godard to further sublimate the narrative and comment on the artifice of cinema itself, including having a neon sign reading VO popping up at various times while voice over is being spoken, using signs and images to telegraph the plot, and employing an insert card reading liberte (freedom), which is then riddled with bullet holes.
The entire story, in fact, functions as a kind of excuse to deliver excerpts from Godard’s Marxist political and personal philosophical screed, and at no point is there a sense that we, as audience, should be invested in the characters or the events they are participating in. Any mystery involved with gun-toting Paula’s search for the truth is undercut by an almost complete lack of credible or believable danger or suspense. Violent acts are committed, but they are shown in a farcical light. Godard’s use of the Brechtian devise of alienating audience through form aggressively separates his films of this period from the reconstructed, though more tradition narratives he, and the other members of The French New Wave, had become famous for.
The political topics addressed in the film in ways big and small are often steeped in the intricate details of historic and current day 1960s French politics, but for the most part involve the struggle between left and right. Some of the matters addressed include colonialism in general and matters relating specifically to the French - Algeria (a topic Godard visited in Le Petit Soldad); Morocco; and the Vichy. Ever the Marxist, Godard, as he did more specifically in Un Femme Mariee, also targets old favorites like consumerism and advertising (which he relates here to fascism), as well as American imperialism and the war in Vietnam (two characters named Richard Nixon and Robert Macnamara talk about enjoying killing), criticism that would only increase in the years to follow. In fact, the next year he would participate in an anti-Vietnam project called Loin Du Vietnamwith fellow French directors including Left Bankers Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and Chris Marker.
Despite the arch quality to the delivery and tone, Made in the U.S.A.is not without obvious reference to Godard’s personal life and work. It would seem that both the David Goodis writer character (Yves Alfonso) and perhaps the Donald Siegel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) character are, in their own way, stand-ins for the director himself. In fact, on two separate occasion Paula kills Leaud’s character, a possible reference to her leaving Godard and the dissolution of their marriage. Godard also employs his own voice (as he would continue to do in other films) on tape as the disembodied Richard Politzer talking about actual political events of the day. Throughout the rest of the sixties and seventies, Godard’s work would prove to be of an increasingly political nature, and his films would reflect the rigidity and fervor of his commitment. He would, simultaneously, increasingly distance himself from the formal constructs of traditional cinema, although his work in the 80s and 90s would eventually include films that had the trappings of story and plot.
Godard’s abandonment of the very style of film-making he and his Cahiers compatriots championed, and then emulated through their own work and deconstruction of the same, is fascinating from a cinematic historical perspective, although, as was clearly his aim, the audience for the films of this period and beyond would grow smaller, increasingly relegating his audience to the intellectual elite, those sharing his political leanings, and hardcore Godard/cinema enthusiasts.