1 i . x ii.i. r KEVIEWS overdetermine his analysis. At one stroke the major achievement ot Godard, that of using conventions from the romantic tradition in conflict with the tradition itself to evoke the epic form, is nullified. In fact MacCabe's conception of the romantic element in Godard is a limited one. He is, for instance, very precise while speaking of the women in his films, but being unable to extend the portrayal of women in consumer society to Godard's other forms of characterization (the brashness of Belmondo, for instance, as a tradition in Godard's own films and related to Hollywood), MacCabe is unable to really use that structure to great effect. Likewise, a limited perception of the dialectics of any tradition appears to have resulted in his not comprehending the deeper significance of Maoism to Godard's work. The interesting thing about the Maoist phase was in fact that it precisely coincided with the period in which he went through his formalist process having put behind him Pierrot Le Fou. Le Gal Savoir, for instance, which preaches the need to 'Return to Zero' is never really analysed with the depth that the later Tout Va Bien is, because it appears not to play a major role inMaccabe's conception. Although he does point out that the Maoist influence on Godard did not last beyond 1972 - and Tout Va Bien - he is unable to give the reasons why. It is therefore inevitable that he miss out on the importance of the Dziga-Vertov influence. To be very generous to him, he was writing this book before Godard's latest film Sauve qui peut was made, and somehow it is in this film that the fragmenting of a bourgeois pattern of perception - or speed of the flow of images - really takes place, reminiscent ofVertov's Man With the Movie Camera. But one would be reluctant to extend this generosity because the very conception of technology as the mediating factor - in this case the camera, the projection, the ritual of going for a film - between the filmmaker and his audience, which so preoccupied Vertov, has been a major concern in Godard's work right through the post 1968 period. If in Man With the Movie Camera this resulted in the attempt to capture all reality on film, including the reality of such a capturing, in Godard's work this has given rise to various devices of dislocation of the bourgeois image-sound relationship. For instance the use of caricature in Vladimir Et Rosa or the grotesque is Sauve qui peut, or the extraordinary structuring of Tout va Bien (about which MacCabe does speak in great detail). At times the parallel is striking - the camera tracking in British Sounds and the zoom in Pravda are amazingly similar to some of the camerawork of Movie Cam-era. 73 Journal of Arts and Ideas