SERGEI M EISENSTEIN

phatically not a modern art, but an art that emerges and evolves outside of the
strictures and constraints of art-historical consciousness. It is a classic art form
whosepractitionersareblissfullyoblivioustothedictatesofthenew.Ratherthan
innovate and test the limits of their medium, classical Hollywood filmmakers
simply produce masterpiece after masterpiece. In Cavell’s estimation, in the
sound period from the early 1930s through the 1950s more undeniable masterpieces
come out of Hollywood than there are in all of Elizabethan poetry (and
thatincludesShakespeare).
The “modern” only really catches up with cinema in the late 1950s and the
early 1960s, with a new generation of filmmakers who are indeed aware, as Godard
phrases it, that “Griffith has existed.” The films Godard and his “nouvelle
vague” peers create are not necessarily technically superior to their predecessors.
In fact, in a survey article for Film Quarterly from 1959 on the earliest films of the
“nouvellevague,”NoelBurch,defendingadifferentstrainofcinematicmodernism
derived from the avant-garde in the visual arts, deplores the poor quality and
obvious lack of technical skill on display in the works of this new generation of
filmmakers. 3 What Godard, Chabrol and their peers may have lacked in wellhonedtechnicalskilltheymakeupforbycreatingsomethingnew,andbytesting
the limits of the medium. The jump cut for instance, a technical mistake of the
most glaringly obvious nature, became a distinctive trait of Godard’s films after
À bout de souffle (1960), to the extent that older filmmakers like Henri Verneuil
startedtoinsert jumpcutsintotheirfilmstokeepupwiththehipnewcinemaof
theyoungergeneration.
But as disruptive or even “revolutionary” as the artistic practice of Godard and
his generation may have appeared, the historical consciousness from which it
derived actually created continuity with the past of film art. 4 Godard placed himself
in an explicit line of filiation with numerous great directors of classical cinema,
but particularly so with Fritz Lang. Lang appeared, of course, as the quasimythical
director of a film version of The Odyssey in Le Mépris (1963). What is less
known is that Lang provided, however unwittingly, the financing for À bout de
souffle: the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, coproduced Lang’s secondto-last
German film, The Indian Tomb (1959), and used the “avance sur recettes,” the
state subsidy paid out as a function of that film’s box office success, to finance
Godard’s directorial debut. 5 In a lengthy interview with Fritz Lang, produced for
French television in 1967 by André S. Labarthe, Godard provided a template for
this and other filiations that constituted the continuity of his work with the past
of film art. The title of the program was “Le dinosaure et le bébé” (The dinosaur
and the toddler), a title that established a sense of the awe-inspiring distance
between Lang, one of the founders of film art, and his still youngish disciple
Godard, but also suggested a specific genealogical template. For Godard, apparently,
to define himself against his past meant to discuss film art in terms of
archaeology vs. paleontology 349