The films of Jean-Luc Godard, and particularly the films from Une Femme Maride to the present, are pushing at the boundaries which have stood-more perhaps through habit than intrinsic necessity-between one art-form and another. Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle, for example, defies all categorization, and can only be described, in Godard's own terms, as sociological essay in the form of a novel, written, however, not with words, but with notes of music. La Chinoise, at the same time that it probes the nature of revolution, probes as well the nature of theater--especially the dialectical theater envisoned by the later Brecht. Made in USA (which Godard finished just a few days before Deux ou trois choses) takes a few jabs at the political intrigue film and thrusts its real assault at the tenuous boundary between film and the canvas. Moreover, just as painters today are themselves challenging the notion of the canvas and are reaching out into the world of everyday objects as media for their paints, so too does Godard reach out both to paint and to film the walls, the billboards, the posters, the gasoline pumps, and the comic-books which surround us today; to create of them, in his films, a series of semi-abstract collages which stand-more perhaps than any other contemporary art-form-as the icons of our age. In Made In USA, the style is a combination of the comic-strip iconography of pop art and the violent splashes of color of the painters. The compositions are out of Pollock, Poliakoff, Hofmann, Francis, Gorky-and there is even a flayed skull leering out at us obscenely, like one of DeKooning's terrifying Women. But Godard has, in his own way, gone beyond the action painters to discover still another medium with which to paint -blood. Made in USA, as Anna Karina comments on the film's soundtrack, is the marriage of Walt Disney and Humphrey Bogart, in short, Walt Disney with blood. And blood there is, flowing, spurting, splattering over the whole works; but it is a photogenic blood that looksand is used-suspiciously like paint. A man is murdered in bed and the blood-spattered sheet is cropped and photographed to resemble a composi ion by Jackson Pollock. Along with Antonioni's Deserto Rosso, Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur, and Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan, Made in USA belongs to the burgeoning genre of what might be termed painter's cinema due to the way in which so much of the film-narrative is told in color, composition, and light. Godard, who recognized in Deserto Rosso the sort of film he himself had long wanted to make, has spoken of the impression he had, while watching that film, that the colors were not in front of the camera but in the camera, that the camera did not merely photograph Deserto Rosso but created it-a stylistic effect which Godard himself sought to achieve in Made i USA. What I wanted, Godard reve led, in talking about both Made in USA and his short film Anticipation, was to get inside the image . .. just the way certain paintings give one the feeling of being within them, inside them, or give the impression that they can never be und rstood as long as the viewer remains outside. But Godard is well aware that the ordinary film-viewer's habit of concentrating on the anecdotal structure of the plot often presents a formidable obstacle to his getting inside the film and understanding the more subtle language of color, composition, and light. To help