the moviegoer

"In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review, Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of high modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais but not Buñuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls."