At the New Yorker, film critic Richard Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (and a man with prodigious beard), offers some interesting thoughts on ‘Vulgar Auteurism’ (a new term to me, if not exactly a new idea) and the legacy of the New Wave:
In opposition to the constipated naturalism of the art-house consensus—whether the one that prevailed sixty years ago or that of today—crudeness has an intrinsic merit, and it’s easy to detect the same impulse behind [Vulgar Auteurism] and Godard’s decision to dedicate “Breathless” to the B-movie studio Monogram Pictures. Getting rid of prejudices—acknowledging that there’s no such thing as intrinsically good acting or cinematography or direction, but only the evidence of artistic inspiration—is as great a discovery for critics as for filmmakers. From the start, Godard repudiated the false merits of so-called production values, but he invested the film not with the elements of the usual Monogram movie but with a rich and complex collection of high-art references, intellectual divagations, and documentary-based techniques, all held together by an aesthetic philosophy that owed more to Sartre than to Hawks. His praise of cheapness and scruffiness wasn’t in the service of those qualities but of the virtues of the grandest, greatest art and ideas he knew. The hat tip to the gangster genre served to embody his most intimate emotions and personal experiences—and, for that matter, to suggest the way that those very intimacies had become tied up, for better or worse, with the experience of moviegoing.