How does Godard use language to de- and re-mythologize the city of Paris in Alphaville? The assigned article ("Postmodern Dilemmas") will help to answer this question.Post one paragraph
Postmodern Dilemmas: Godard's Alphaville and Two or Three Things That I Know about Her
Author(syf $ O O H Q 7 K L K H r
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Spring, 1976yf S S 4
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Postmodern Dilemmas:
Godard's Alphaville and Two or Three Things That I Know
about Her
Alien Thiher
Jean Luc Godard is perhaps the most representative of
postmodern film makers, at least in so far as his works reflect the anguish and contradictions of an artist who, motivated by the highest ethical
seriousness, has attempted to go beyond the impasse of his own beliefs. On
the one hand, Godard has found himself forced to accept the postmodern canon that we might define as the view that mimesis can be no more than
a representation of itself, a laying bare of its own genesis, or a critique of
those conventions that would claim to represent some substantial reality
transcending the act of representation itself. Every act of representation must designate itself as such or lay itself open to the charge that it is
merely a naive construct that has no consciousness of the way in which it
creates the reality that it offers as a mere duplicata. Any work that
purports to represent a transcendental reality ignores that reality exists
only as perceived in the act of representation. On the other hand, Godard has struggled constantly to go beyond the solipsism that such a canon implies, for he believes that one of the
hopes for man's survival lies in the discovery of new mimetic modes that
947
could be an adequate representation of the social reality that Godard sees
destroying us with increasing rapidity. The film maker must therefore seek
to find new documentary modes that, lying beyond the antinomy
fiction/reality, will allow the unmediated seizure of social reality and, with
this new consciousness, political action. Godard's decision to embrace
Marxist-Leninism at the end of the sixties, after he had become probably
the most influential avant-garde film maker in the world, was thus a
decision to repudiate the entire body of work he had created until that
time. It seems clear, however, that his conversion to Marxism was
motivated by the same ethical concerns that underlie that earlier work.
Marxism would hopefully enable Godard to come to an adequate form of
praxis by offering finally an adequate means of accounting for the discrete
and absurd phenomena that his camera had been recording from Breathless
(1959) through Weekend (1967). Marxism would offer a grasp of the
totality that stands in such direct contrast to the discontinuous fragments
that Godard had been able to film, for, in Godard's eyes, his work of the
sixties could only be viewed as a series of failures. Yet, as each successive,
self-consciously Marxist film has shown, it seems dubious that Godard's
attempt to utilize a Marxist conceptual framework has enabled him to
overcome his - and our - postmodern predicament.
Godard's instinctive reaction to his predicament has been to use
ironic or what we can call pop modes of representation to compensate for
what appears to be the impossibility of an unmediated seizure of reality.
Pop art springs from a recognition that all forms of representation are
ideological and mythological constructs. Having lost its belief in any form
of "realistic" mimesis, pop sensibility then self-consciously creates works
that are essentially ironic works about other works, ironic representations
of representations, or mythic formulations of myth. This is most
noticeably the case with Godard. At the same time his works attempt to
represent the daily bric-^-brac and destructive trivia that make up our
urban civilization, they are also films about other films. Humphrey Bogart
and automobiles, Buster Keaton and brassieres - pop and documentary:
these are the two inextricably interrelated poles of Godard's imagination.
For this reason a study of two of his pre-Marxist-Leninist works
that offer these two modes in a fairly pure state may contribute a good
deal to an understanding of Godard and of the postmodern search for new
mimetic forms. Alphaville and Two or Three Things That I Know about
Her, both films that deal explicitly with urban reality, correspond to the
two categories of pop and documentary. Moreover, both films deal
explicitly with the rapport between image and language, the problem that
throughout the sixties became increasingly central to Godard's work. In La
Chinoise this problem is stated as one of confronting "clear images" with
"vague ideas," an approach that seems to show that Godard held a belief
948
in the possibility that the image might offer a direct appropriation of
social reality if only there were an adequate linguistic means of making the
images "talk." Having embraced Marxism, having found clear ideas and
coherent language, Godard could reformulate the problem in Pravda
(1969) as one of confronting clear concepts and confused images. One
may well doubt that Godard can continue to accept this solution, for his
images in Pravda suggest that the contradictions may well lie in the
conceptual realm: his images show that socialist workers can quite clearly drink Pepsi Cola and manufacture artillery shells for the North Vietnamese
at the same time. In any case, the relationship of image and language is
central to Godard's attempt to find new modes of representation, and this
is quite clear as early as Alphaville (1964).
Marxism offers a language that is entirely adequate, in its own
terms, for the representation of social reality. Alphaville and Two or Three
Things both point to how Marxism came as a logical solution to the crisis
Godard had been living throughout the sixties, for both films present the
city - Paris - as the crucible in which language is ground up, altered,
emptied of meaning, and, finally, placed in the service of totalitarian
repression. Alphaville presents Paris in terms of a totalitarian future that is
really a pop vision of the present, whereas Two or Three Things is an
attempt to offer a documentary view of the present that contains a
nightmarish future within its ongoing mutations. In either case there is a
nearly obsessive ethical concern with language, for Godard believes that
man's freedom is coextensive with his language's capacity for
representation. According to the mother who replies to her child's
question in Two or Three Things, language is the house man lives in. As a
language Marxism has, in a sense, come to replace the ambivalent nostalgia that Godard felt for American cinema, such as we see in his portrayal of
Fritz Lang in Contempt (1963). Lang is both the Olympian figure for
whom classical European culture is an adequate means of accounting for
human experience and the very embodiment of that era of American
cinema when, in naive terms, there was total harmony between cinematic
language and the experience it sought to represent. Godard's dedicating Breathless (1959) to Monogram Pictures is thus both a form of nostalgia for a bygone language and a pop form of filmic self-reference.
Alphaville is Godard's most consistently pop film in this respect, and it does a great disservice to the film to try to interpret it as a
vulgarization of, say, Orwell or Huxley. Alphaville stands in much the
same relation to American cinema as Lichtenstein's works stand in relation
to comic strips, though the film has thematic elements that considerably enrich the purely pop dimension. For example, Alphaville, today's Paris
and the intergalactic imperialist of the twenty-first century, is the city where language is reduced to functional constructs that the city's
computer mastermind can deal with as it manipulates the city's inhabitants
in the name of "logic." Godard's computer Alpha 60 is an image taken
949
straight from popular mythology in which science and the possibility for
totalitarian thought control are closely linked together. Cybernetics can
only be the workings of the evil deity in the Manichean universe of
popular mythology. On the other hand, the computer's "Bible," a
dictionary from which useless words are regularly pruned in order to
reduce the range within which men can feel and think, reflects the anguish
Godard feels before the increasing inadequacy of a language that must
cope with technological society. In Alphaville we find that the limits of
experience have come to be defined by comic strip language.
The comic strip side of Alphaville could be taken for a Brechtian
form of "distanciation," for it is evident from the film's beginning that
ironic distance must be maintained throughout the film. Otherwise, what
is one to make of a film in which Lemmy Caution, the French Mickey
Spillane, drives into Alphaville in a Ford "Galaxy" (though it appears to
be a Lelouche Mustang) that has just traversed intergalactic space? This
city of the future is clearly contemporary Paris, though Raoul Coutard's
camera offers us a night shot of the elevated Metro that effectively
transforms the present into a fantastic future worthy of a secret agent on a
mission. After checking into a hotel, where this hard-boiled private eye
passes himself off as a reporter for "Figaro-Pravda," Lemmy is led by a
brainwashed Seductress to his room. Pop references now abound as
Lemmy shows that he is worthy of his legend. He shoots an intruder after
beating him up, pays homage to Humphrey Bogart by reading The Big
Sleep while doing target practice on a Playboy fold-out, and, de rigueur,
drinks whisky. Science, comics, and film provide us with other pop
references as we learn that Lemmy is on a mission to inquire into the
activities of a Professor von Braun, once known as Leonard Nosferatu,
before he was banished by the Outerlands and began his work in
Alphaville. Moreover, it appears that Lemmy was preceded on this mission
by Dick Tracy and Guy Leclair, the French Flash Gordon, both of whom
may have perished in the ghetto of Alphaville reserved for deviates. It is
evident that we are in a world of purely ironic pop mythology where
Lemmy Caution, pop hero equipped with only his .45 as a weapon against
malevolent fate, is pitted against the absolute evil that pure logic and
intelligence, endowed with no human qualities, generates with gratuitous
malice.
At this point we might well ask ourselves in more specific terms
what is the importance of pop conventions as they are used as a
postmodern mode of representation. In the case of Godard his work is
clearly permeated by an admiration for the naive harmony that exists
between certain popular modes of representation and the world they
mythically present. Godard is quite serious when he expresses his esteem
for John Wayne. At the same time Godard is in revolt against the
destruction that popular myths work on language and image. No film
maker shows greater anguish when confronting the popular mythologies
950
and those forms of popular discourse that manipulate us and undermine
our capacity for perception. The discourse of comics, magazines, popular
films, and advertising images, this discourse of simple violence, sexual
exploitation, and created desires, is, for Godard, the discourse of a
totalitarian world in the original sense of the word: it is a totalizing discourse that excludes all others as, in its total coherence, it places all
language in the service of an economic system that functions with no other
end than its own perpetration.
Godard's revolt thus raises the following question: when
confronted by a totalizing discourse and the myths it produces, how can
one find a language that this discourse cannot recuperate and utilize? It is
now only too obvious that the anti-discourse of the counter-culture could
be quickly integrated into Madison Avenue's advertising myths - as
Godard seems to show in the sequence in Weekend (1967) in which his
hippy guerrillas depend for their sustenance on bourgeois tourists. One
strategy of revolt is to destroy this discourse by forcing it to designate itself as myth, or, as Roland Barthes has demonstrated in Mythologies, to
transform popular myths into self-designating myths. We can begin to
understand the functioning of pop art and its irony when we see that the
destruction of popular myth can be brought about by mythologizing these myths in their turn:
It thus appears that it is extremely difficult to vanquish
myth from the inside: for the very effort one makes in
order to escape from its stranglehold becomes in its turn
the prey of myth: myth can always, as a last resort,
signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it.
Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to
mythify it in its turn, and to produce artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob
myth.1
Barthes's analysis of contemporary popular myths, calling in the fifties for
the existence of pop art several years before pop art became one of the
major forms of postmodern contestation, points to a way of understanding how pop is a mode of artistic resistance.
Myth is a form of discourse and can be analysed in fairly simple semiotic terms. Let us consider first a fairly simple mythic image such as
that of a soup can or, as in Alphaville, a whisky flask, images that might be
called minimal units in an iconic mythic discourse. In itself such an image is semantically poor, since it is merely a sign possessing its immanent sense
(or denotation) that refers to nothing beyond what is represented. Its
meaning is limited to that of being a simple container, holding a certain
liquid of given properties. A myth is created when this simple iconic sign,
951
joining signifier and concept in itself, is transformed into a signifier that
refers to a larger, mythological discourse. When the image of a soup can is
reproduced in the context of an advertising poster or when the image of a
whisky flask is used in the context of a gangster film, the image's meaning
is appropriated by a mythic function, and the image comes to signify a
realm that transcends the object's immanent meaning. The soup can, to
use this rather celebrated example of banality, comes to signify the world
of supposed convenience, ease of living, and painless culinary expertise
that modern capitalism packages for us. Lemmy Caution's whisky flask,
especially in a French context, is even richer in mythic connotations -
think of all the whisky that is consumed in New Wave films. Among other
things, it refers to the mythic realm of fast living, modernism, amoral
adverturism, to a rejection of provincial modes of life, as well as to the
sophistication, manly force, and spontaneous living it offers.
When the image of a soup can is reproduced in a context that can
add self-reference to its mythic signification, such as in a painting, or when
a whisky flask is used as a signifier in the context of a film that
self-consciously signifies the entire realm of detective films, then a third
link is added to the semiotic chain. In effect, the artist has taken the
mythologized sign and appropriated its sense so that it refers back to the
realm of mythology. The referential chain turns back upon itself and
denotes its own functioning. The myth is still there, but it is designated as
such and, ultimately, reduced through the designation as pop to a
non-signifier.
Images of objects, or iconic signs, are not the only elements of
discourse that can be converted into mythological signifiers. Consider, in
this respect, the comic strip hero or, as in Alphaville, the secret agent or
detective. In himself, be he Steve Canyon or Lemmy Caution, the hero
functions as a narrative agent in a simple, linear intrigue. As the agent of
narration he is endowed with those properties that allow him to resolve
the narrative problematics generated usually by various evil forces whose
function is to create conflict and bring about suspense. But myth quickly
appropriates this simple narrative function and converts the narrative agent
into a signifier that designates a very complex mythological realm. The
detective, the secret agent, this socially marginal figure, comes to designate
a mythical realm where a popular ubermensch signifies the necessity for
violence, the superiority of white men over evil, lesser races, the
justification of basically petit bourgeois ethical notions about retribution
and justice, while at the same time he represents the joys of vengeance,
murder, sadism, gratuitous violence, and degraded eroticism. It is perhaps
because of this mythic realm that so many pop artists have been attracted
to the comics. In no other form does the ideology of the lower middle
class express itself with such abandon.
Lemmy Caution is thus both a mythologized mythical figure and
a hero in the service of the language that can destroy totalitarian
952
repression. These two aspects overlap, for as a signifier of myth, Caution
destroys his own mythic functioning. Yet, Godard obviously believes that
the primordial violence that Caution represents can be put in the service of
a revolt against "repressive logic" or, more properly, against the
conventions for representation that high culture prescribes. Caution is thus
an ambivalent figure, both a creation of pop irony and a subversive force
that defines itself as sheer energy in revolt against the canons of repressive culture. This ambivalence characterizes much of pop art, for it is evident
that many pop artists have also seized the pop mode as a means of fighting
against the dominant artistic conventions of official culture. The ironic
glorification of popular myth thus turns not only against the myths
themselves, but also against the enshrined cultural values of modernism.
To offer one example in this respect, let us consider the way the pop artist
can use the cartoon strip hero or the uni-dimensional tough guy of popular detective films. The glorification of the cartoon strip here, for example, is
emblematic of the postmodern artist's refusal to accept various
psychologisms as the basis for characterization.
This desire to reject various narrative codes and mimetic
conventions has an ideological aim. Brecht might be again invoked here,
for he seems to have foreseen this postmodern rejection of depth of
character, or what we might call the modernist myth of profundity, when
he noted that cinema by its very nature was evolving modes of
representation that would be antithetical to bourgeois notions concerning mimesis:
In reality, cinema needs exterior action and not
introspective psychology. And it is in this sense that, by
provoking, organizing, and rendering automatic certain
needs on a mass scale, capitalism acts in a quite simply
revolutionary manner. By concentrating exclusively on
"exterior" action, by reducing everything to processes,
by no longer recognizing a mediator in the hero or in
man the measure of all things, it is demolishing the
introspective psychology of the bourgeois novel.2
Godard has gone at least one step beyond this notion of process as the
basis for characterization to the extent that in many of his films his
characters try to find their identities in a preexisting popular model that is
derived from film - usually with disastrous consequences. Belmondo's imitation of Bogart in Breathless and the way the "band" imitates Billy the
Kid in Band of Outsiders reflect Godard's refusal of psychologism at the
same time they show Godard's use of pop to be a form of ironic critique. With Lemmy Caution, however, Godard has for the first time used a
popular hero whose mythic existence completely determines his identity. Caution is also Godard's only successful hero.
953
Lemmy Caution is not entirely a comic strip hero, as we see when
he tells us that not only is he on a mission but that he is also making a
Journey to the End of the Night. This reference to the novel by Celine,
whom Godard had already consecrated in his Pantheon of culture heroes in
A Married Woman (as well as later through long quotes in Pierrotle fou),
shows that Caution is more than an agent for ironically celebrated
violence. He is another of Godard's characters who carry a heavy valise full
of the debris of past culture and who never hesitate to pull out the famous
quote when necessary. In effect, they carry with them the language of the
past that, usually in vain, they try to wield as a defense against the present.
Few critics writing in English have noted that a great deal of Caution's
speech, especially when he confronts the computer Alpha 60, is made up
of famous quotations. When asked what he felt on passing through
Galactic space, Lemmy summons up Pascal: "The silence of these infinite
spaces frightens me." He becomes a Bergsonian hero when Alpha 60 asks
him what is his religion: "I believe in the immediate data of
consciousness." And he quotes Eluard, the surrealist poet, when he
declares that it is poetry that turns night into day.
The function of this language seems double. On the one hand,
within the context - Lemmy Caution attacks Alpha 60 with Bergson and
Pascal - the pop myth is underscored and even further emphasized by the
immediate incongruity. Within this pop context, on the other hand, the
language itself is set in relief and designated as the language of culture. The
language is used to signify not what it means in itself but rather the myth
of culture itself. There is no doubt that Godard has a great deal of
sympathy for, or, more precisely, respectful nostalgia about the
monuments that high culture preserves in testimony to its ability to
account adequately for human experience. His films are full of references,
usually ironic but often nostalgic, to this enshrined culture, to Homer and
Vivaldi, to Mozart and Rembrandt. But it is a mark of Godard's
postmodern sensibility that he takes his distance vis-a-vis official culture
by using it only as a form of self-reference, and thus mythologizing it with
self-conscious irony.
The most problematic aspect of Alphaville, however, is that this
film does seem to propose a language that is adequate at least in so far as
this language offers a form of resistance to Alpha 60. This is the poetic
language of Eluard's Capitale de la douleur (The Capital of Pain). Lemmy
receives a copy of Eluard's work from Henri Dickson, the old and tattered
secret agent who appears to have preceded Caution on his mission to
Alphaville and who dies, in a form of suicide, by trying to copulate with a
Seductress. As he dies Dickson tells Lemmy to overcome Alpha 60 by
causing it to destroy itself. It is language that is the key to this mission, for
the computer must be short-circuited by a language that defies the rational
order of its circuitry - presumedly by the language of poetry, or by the
language of surrealism, the poetry of antirationality.
954
One way in which to look upon Godard's use of Eluard and
surrealist poetry is to consider Lemmy Caution on one level as something
of a surrealist hero. Surrealism's essential goal, as Andre Breton formulated
it, is to find that mode of expression that can unite the subjective world of
desire with that exterior world which, when reified by the categories of
bourgeois rationality, becomes known as objective reality. If one follows
this interpretation, then one might consider Caution, as some critics have,
as an agent in the service of desire, as a representative of a rebellious id
that seeks to destroy the repressive super-ego, or Alpha 60, and its
repressive order. Or, without taking such an allegorical view, one might
simply see that Godard is using surrealism to vouchsafe his own rebellion
against the ossified modes of representation he finds in bourgeois culture.
Moreover, it would seem that Godard is exalting, in a Marcusean sense, a
language of negation that proclaims the primacy of human affectivity in
the face of functional thought. Eluard's importance here, then, is to
suggest that there is a language that can express desire as a form of
liberation.
From another point of view, however, surrealism is a language of
the past that believed in the adequacy of the expressive means at its
command. Surrealism is a modernist movement precisely in so far as it saw
language, among other means of expression, as being commensurate with
the task of expression that it gave itself. Language as well as the image could express, according to Breton, the "true functioning of the mind," an
optimistic view that we might well consider as another version of the
modernist credo of epiphany. Surrealist revelation is, of course, different
from other modernist forms of revelation in that it promised more than a
mere expansion of our perception. It aimed at a transformation of the
nature of our experiential reality, and in this, surrealism joins those heroic
ideologies of the thirties for which Godard at one time felt a good deal of
regret. In Le Petit Soldat (1960) Bruno wishes he could return to the
thirties when, for instance, the Marxist revolutionary Malraux or the
fascist revolutionary Drieu La Rochelle could find an ideological discourse
that was both heroic and historically relevant. In Les Carabiniers (1963),
however, we see that a revolutionary ode by Mayakovski does not stop
Michelangelo and Ulysses from assassinating a member of the resistance,
and we may doubt that Godard's transforming his whisky-drinking secret
agent into a surrealist poet is more than another ironic strategy, more than
another homage to a language of the past. The liberation of desire does, however, lead to a demonstration of
what might be the harmony that would result if image and language could
coincide in a moment of adequate expression. We see this in the montage of shots in which Caution and Natasha seem to dance together as she
recites an accompanying text that, though reflecting motifs taken from
Eluard, seems to come from Godard's pen. Juxtaposed against a series of
intercuts that show the arrival of the police, this montage creates an image
955
poem in which Godard, echoing surrealist myth, shows the couple to be
the locus of salvation:
More and more I see the human predicament
as a dialogue between lovers.
The heart has but a single mouth.
Everything by chance.
Everything said without thinking.
Sentiments drift away.
Men roam the city.
A glance, a wind.
And because I love you everything moves. . . .
This sequence ends with Natasha looking out into the city, with Capitale
de la douleur pressed against the window. She seems to enact an Eluard
text by pressing "her forehead against the pane" ("le front aux vitres"), as
if she were looking through the transparency of adequate language in
which desire and expression would be in harmony.
This lyrical evocation of what might be a moment of adequate
expression gives way quickly to a pop denouement in which the secret
agent is the avenging force who brings about the final judgment on
Alphaville as he destroys the diabolical scientist, the computer, and all the
malignant, mythic powers that the recurring formula E=mc2 signifies. This
pop eschatology points to the dilemma Godard faces in having recourse to
popular mythology. Pop art is ultimately a form of anti-mimesis that can
only designate the disfunctioning of received codes of representation. In
Alphavile Godard has placed in question those codes that in effect limit
our perception of urban reality, but ultimately his representation only
turns on other representations, designating them for what they are and
thus demystifying them. Alphaville is a successful film precisely because it
accepts the limits imposed upon it by preexisting popular myths and then
subverts that discourse with an irony rarely found in film. Yet, for
Godard, this subversion of discourse could only be the first step in the
creation of new forms of discourse that could adequately account for the
destructive urban reality that is proliferating like a cancer. There are no
Lemmy Caution figures to save us from the Alphavilles we have
constructed - only bewildered film makers who, having seen that we do
not even see what is about us, must struggle to find ways to represent our
own reality to us. Alphaville is thus the negative moment in a creative
project that demands that one at least attempt to find a way of
overcoming our lack of adequate discourse.
That attempt came two years later, in 1966, when Godard made
Two or Three Things That I Know about Her, a film which is immediately
linked to Alphaville in so far as it purports to represent an urban reality
that Godard characterizes as resembling increasingly an enormous comic
956
strip. Though Two or Three Things is an attempt to create documentary
modes of representation, it bears much in common with Alphaville.
Godard's documentary Paris often seems to be a product of science fiction
in which machines have become autonomous beings that, like strange
insects, appear bent on imposing their will as they wander about the urban
landscape. Night shots of Paris in Alphaville bring out the dehumanizing
anonymity of urban structures. In Two or Three Things what Godard calls
the "gestapo of structures" no longer hides its destructiveness. As red,
white, and blue dump trucks and cranes crawl across devastated building
sites and freeways, as jackhammers beat a din into our ears, we realize that
in this film even more than in Alphaville he has turned "familiarity into
awareness" by stripping it of its inconspicuousness through what Brecht
called "alienating the familiar." Yet, once one has revealed the aberrations
inherent in the daily experience of the urban dweller, there remains the
task of explaining them.
Two or Three Things is thus a film that relentlessly pursues the
familiar, the banal, the quotidian in an effort to find modes of
representation that can go beyond mere revelation of the incongruous. To
accomplish this Godard does center his film on a narration, for the film
purports to tell the day in the life of a suburban housewife who practices
part-time prostitution in order to pay for the necessary luxuries that the
society of affluence expects her to consume. There is perhaps an element
of pop in this choice of a topic taken from a weekly magazine, Le Nouvel
Observateur, which is perhaps part of a larger ironic stance Godard adopts
as regards the necessity of providing a narrative line at all in a film that
seeks to lay bare the essential structures of urban society. Yet, it is also
evident that prostitution has obsessed Godard since he began making films.
Prostitution, be it presented directly as in My Life to Live (1962), or
indirectly as in the case of the Seductresses in Alphaville, is more than a
banal fact of social reality. For Godard it is a privileged metaphor that
expresses a fundamental truth about the nature of contemporary social
relations as well as the degradation the individual must suffer when she
seeks to accommodate herself to those relations.
The attempt to describe a typical day of a lower-middle-class
housewife who sells herself in order to buy Vogue dresses, pay the
electricity bills, and meet the payments on her husband's car is the point of departure for the investigation of a web of relationships that are
connected at least metaphorically, if not by some network of absolute
laws. Godard's working premise seems to be, however, that there is an
ensemble or totality that, were he able to find the proper modes of
representation, would be revealed as underlying all the disparate
phenomena that his camera lays bare. Language itself seems to point to
some such unity underlying the discrete appearances we see. For instance,
Juliette, the prostitute housewife, lives in a grand ensemble, a huge
complex of suburban apartments where, as in so many box-like
957
dormitories, the inhabitants of the city are "together" when they are not
at work. The ensemble is thus a new form of urban organization that
capitalism has produced. Ensemble also means "together," or the parts
united as a whole, and yet this is the paradox of the grand ensemble: that
men are housed together but are separated from each other in ways that
would have been inconceivable in older forms of urban organization. In
this ensemble the camera reveals only disparate parts, no wholes. How
does one go from this fragmentation to what Godard notes is the
mathematical sense of ensemble, to the "total structures where the basic
human units are governed by laws that go beyond them, precisely because
these are lois d'ensemble," or laws that govern a total set of individual
phenomena?
Godard thus starts with the hypothesis that such laws exist,
though at the same time he knows that he will be able to reveal those laws
only through the invention of cinematic modes of representation that can
grasp them. And ultimately we might well suspect that Godard, again
caught up in the postmodern dilemma, really believes that these laws will
exist only as a function of new modes of representation. Thus his camera
constantly lays bare images of incongruity and destruction. Yet, there
appears to be no underlying explanation, no laws, no linguistic mediation
that can account for them. Much of the frustration that Two or Three
Things produces comes from the tension the camera creates. Godard's
camera unmasks the appearances of banality and forces the viewer to face
a chaotic world that is, in effect, his daily world. But the viewer - and the
film maker - wants to find a significance in them that transcends mere
chaos.
Godard sees language as bearing a heavy burden in this task. One
has the feeling that at times he wants indeed to shift the burden from the
camera to the spoken word, though Godard's interrogation of language is
also part of the postmodern questioning of the possibilities of all forms of
representation. In fact, it is this constant questioning of language, this
constant juxtaposition of clear but inarticulate images with confused
concepts, that endows Two or Three Things with its most persuasive force.
To accomplish this interrogation Godard has borrowed, in an entirely
self-conscious way, certain Brechtian concepts of acting, for each actor,
reciting his role and questioning his words, often joins the narrator in this
process of weighing the adequacy of language.
Juliette (Marina Vlady) is the most important character in this
respect, since we follow her from her morning chores, throughout her
day's activity, until she and her husband go to bed in their HLM, or
housing project apartment (HLM or "hopital de la longue maladie" as it is
called in Alphaville). Godard first introduces Marina Vlady as an actress
and then, repeating the same words he used to describe her as an actress,
immediately introduces her again as Juliette, his fictional protagonist.
From the outset Marina underlines the Brechtian character of this refusal
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of traditional mimetic illusion by telling the spectators that her task is "to
speak like quotations of truth. Papa Brecht used to say that. That actors must quote." Godard's refusal of fictional or theatrical illusion reflects his
basic interrogation of the very possibility of filmic representation. This basic questioning aims at more, therefore, than inducing a critical state of
awareness on the part of the viewer.
First, the explicit joining of the real actress and the fictional
protagonist points to a specifically cinematic dilemma Godard must face as
a documentary film maker. By its very nature cinema converts every image it offers into a sign that in the filmic context becomes charged with
semantic density of varying degrees. The postmodern film maker, and
Godard in particular, is often painfully aware that film offers no neutral view of some reality that preexists its filmic appropriation. The very fact of filmic appropriation means that the filmed object is converted into an
iconic sign. A real actress, even if she retains her identity in the film
(which in point of fact she does), becomes a protagonist who has, in a
broad sense, a symbolic function. In one sense film automatically converts
the real into the symbolic material of fictions even though the image continues to denote the real. Godard has shown his awareness of this
problem in nearly every film he has made through ironic forms of
self-reference that both underscore the fictional nature of the work and
attempt to destroy the generation of fiction. With regard to his refusal to
generate fictions one might consider his part of the collective work Far from Vietnam (1967). In this documentary he refused to do more than film himself musing on the impossibility of filming images that could have
any pertinence, or rather, the only relevant images he could show would be those depicting the anguish of the film maker trying to find images that
might be more than private fictions. In Two or Three Things Godard
accepts this dilemma by beginning the film with a self-referential demonstration that shows how the film converts the real into the
symbolic, how Marina Vlady remains Marina Vlady at the same time she becomes a filmic sign and a fictional protagonist. Marina-Juliette can thus both act and reflect on her role as an actress as well as her role as a fictional protagonist. Godard allows her to
participate in the questioning of the possibilities of representation,
particularly with regard to the language she uses. Juliette has at least three voices in this film, or if one prefers, she speaks on three levels. On one level she speaks as a fictional housewife-prostitute in a non-reflexive manner. On a second level she examines her language and uses a self-reflexive language. This level leads to a third where she tests her
language against her environment, which often shows how absurdly incongruous her language is with regard to the images that present her
situation. The film thus becomes a documentary or a self-denying fiction about an actress representing herself as she struggles to represent a fictional character to the second degree.
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To see how these three voices interrelate, let us examine the scene
that takes place in the Vogue shop where Juliette goes to select a dress
that she will pay for later with her afternoon's earnings. Godard
immediately places the possibility of language in question by increasing
the noise level to such a point that one must strain to hear the words
above the roar of automobiles and machines. In terms of decibels the
sound is probably not any louder than the noise one might hear in a good
many Parisian streets. It is, however, considerably louder than the
background noise allowed by cinematic convention for the naturalistic
mimesis of daily reality. By disregarding this convention Godard does
more than merely represent a sociological average concerning street noises.
He endows the sound with significance not only by making
communication impossible but also by violating the code for naturalistic
mimesis. Through this violation the noise becomes a sign that designates
the malfunctioning of the entire mimetic project. This malfunctioning is
also underscored by the moments of absolute silence that Godard uses to
punctuate the bedlam. The opposition of noise and silence sets up the
context in which each comes to represent a form of failure both in the
world and in the attempted representation of that world.
Against this backdrop Juliette inquires about the various dresses
offered for sale. Her first speech constitutes the non-reflexive level of
discourse. Our first impression is that at this level Godard is making a more
or less straightforward documentary, since her speech seems to reflect the
daily language of a typical housewife. It is the language of utter banality.
Godard also uses the other actresses in the shop to create this
documentary impression. For example, in this scene a sales girl turns to
the camera and, as if replying to some sociological questionnaire, tells us:
"I'm leaving at seven o'clock. I have a date with Jean-Claude at eight. We
go to a restaurant, sometimes to a film." The camera's presence is thus
acknowledged as being there, as an agent that solicits language. But
Godard's interest in their speech goes far beyond a merely documentary
interest in the typical. He is using Juliette, the shop girls, and the
prostitutes to reveal the limits of consciousness that everyday language
seems to impose. One is reminded of the Seductresses in Alphaville and
their mechanical "I'm very well, thank you, not at all." Like these pop
characters, the Parisian shop girls are locked in trivial forms of discourse
that are totally incommensurate with the environment that surrounds
them or with the degradation they undergo in their daily life. Language is
here used to signify its own inadequacy, not through its primary meaning,
but by its semantic nullity. In contrast with this language stands Juliette's examining her
language and her role from within. As she examines dresses, Juliette weighs
the language she must use: "Yes, I know how to speak.... All right, let's
speak together (ensemble). . . . Together. . . . It's a word that I like very
much. An ensembfe, that's thousands of people, a city perhaps...."
960
Implicitly, refusing theatrical illusion, she uses language reflexively. There
is a poetic tension in this metalinguistic quest, for the noise level increases
and, at this moment, her speech is juxtaposed against a quick shot of a
freeway exit framed against a clear blue sky. The tension between image,
noise, and language continues as Juliette faces the camera and speaks to us
directly. Now there is no attempt to produce theatrical illusion, as the
actress questions the possibility of mimesis itself. Godard thus presents his
actress as she tries to cope with the language she must speak: "No one
today can know what the city of tomorrow will be. A part of the semantic
richness that belonged to it in the past. . . it's going to lose all that,
surely . . . surely. ..." We see the third level of language appear at this
point in this scene when Marina-Juliette begins to spout a verbiage that
undermines itself by its own incongruity. This language might be called the
language of culture, or at least a pastiche of language that is offered to us
by the official explicators of social and cultural life. Juliette in this speech
beings to undo her meditation with the word "perhaps" coming after the
certainty she expressed with "surely": "Perhaps. . . .The creative and
formative role of the city will be assured by other means of
communication . . . perhaps . . . Television, Radio, Vocabulary and
Syntax, knowingly and deliberately...." The sudden insert of the
paperback cover of Psychologie de la forme, taken from the inexpensive
Gallimard series called "Ideas," shows that Godard is, as in Alphaville,
again ironically playing with what we have called the myth of culture.
Juliette's language seems to have become a canned imitation of the
language of the paperback culture that is marketed everywhere in the same
manner as Vogue dresses. And this language, too, seems radically
inadequate in this clamor and tumult where a pretty robot can give a
resume of her life by saying that, basically, she does "a lot of banal things." Juliette is not alone in this testing of language, nor in her failure
ultimately to represent her coming to terms with her role of representing
herself as an actress. Godard, a French intellectual who consumes far more
paperbacks than his actress-housewife, forces his own language as film
maker to confront the cinematic image. This critique of language becomes
quite explicitly a critique or a questioning of the relationship between the
image and the word in the cafe sequence in which Godard's camera, using
extreme close-ups, transforms the swirling foam that forms on the surface
of coffee into something that could be likened to an image of the cosmos
or perhaps of the intercellular world that the cinematic "biologist" tries to
study. In any case, the camera has taken one of the most banal objects of
daily reality and converted it into an ambivalent sign that Godard, in his
role as film maker, tries to translate into verbal language. Much like
Juliette questioning her language from within, Godard thus begins this
scene by asking how he, a documentary film maker, can give an adequate
account of the simplest object, be it a women's magazine or the surface of
his coffee.
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Godard's instinctive reaction is to draw upon the cultural
categories that the culture of the past, that culture marketed in
paperbacks, proposes. As his camera focuses on an "object," his
commentary rapidly becomes something of a parody of his own search:
Perhaps an object is what allows to connect... to go
from one subject to the next, thus to live in society, to
be ensemble. But, since the social relation is always
ambiguous, since my thought divides as much as it
unites, since my speech brings near through what it
expresses and isolates by what it does not say, since an
immense gap separates the subjective certainty I have of
myself from the objective truth that I represent for
others, since I never cease finding myself guilty whereas
I feel innocent.....
The coffee foam and black surface fill the wide screen, and Godard's
language seems to have all the relevance of a dialogue lifted from an
intellectual comic strip. Mixing Baudelaire's ironic lines from "Au lecteur"
(mon semblable, mon frere . . .) with a non-sense use of Sartrian categories
of being and nothingness, Godard throws out a pop mixture of cultural
cliches that can barely be heard above the noise of a pinball machine. The
iconic sign successfully resists any attempt at verbal translation, while
Godard's verbiage finally turns back upon itself, designating itself as
inadequate.
Throughout Two or Three Things the symbols of culture -
paperback covers, famous quotes, even the idea of questioning language
itself - that Godard uses as compositional elements are essentially
self-referential and, as signifiers, thus turn back on themselves to designate
their own failure to mean. This attempt to mythologize the myth of
culture finds an ironic analogue in the presence of Bovard and Pecuchet,
Flaubert's mad cataloguers, in the long scene that takes place in the cafe
where Juliette's husband waits for her. Compilers of the word in every
form it has taken, Bovard and Pecuchet cull one sentence after another
from books in an attempt to create the absolute book, the total
encyclopedia. Here the cultural myth of adequacy turns against itself as an
absolute impossibility. Moreover, Bovard and Pecuchet's attempt to find a
means to represent the totality of culture seems to be an ironic analogue
to Godard's own attempt to represent the ensemble of urban reality.
Godard's ironic self-depreciation thus continually undermines his
own mimetic project. In this respect, it would appear that he cannot really
rid himself of his postmodern disbelief in any form of cultural absolute
except, perhaps, that of impossibility. In spite of his stated desire to be a
cinematic sociologist, we see that he does not believe in any motivated
form of representation. Every attempt at mimesis is belied by the gratuity
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that underlies the effort to organize a discourse that purports to offer a
unique truth. There is no unique reality to which mimesis would conform,
but only so many arbitrary representations of reality which are, in effect,
only so many different constructs. Thus Godard offers the sequence taken
in the service station as another self-conscious demonstration of the
impossibility of finding the discourse, the exact organization of images and
language, that will reveal the essence of even the most banal of Juliette's
daily experiences (and what is more Flaubertian than this quest for
essence?).
Godard begins this sequence with another ironic demonstration
of the ambiguity of "signs," for a "Mobil Protects" sign is juxtaposed
with a shot of a car whose fender has been bashed in. It seems as if Godard
must first assure us that language is corrupted before he goes on to show
that cinematic forms are also inadequate. This sequence then breaks down
into a series of disparate juxtapositions of advertising signs, Juliette, her
car, her husband, etc., while Godard wonders aloud how to relate them so
that signification will emerge from the filmic discourse he might construct.
Though each image may have an immanent sense if taken in itself,
Godard's Joycean desire to encompass the totality, his attempt to find a
significance that transcends the details that should make up an ensemble,
leaves him grasping nothing: "Why all these signs among us that end up
making me doubt language and which submerge me under meanings, by
drowning the real instead of separating it from the imaginary?" Godard's
premise, perhaps in nearly Hegelian terms, is that the real must be more
than the mere aggregate of disparate signs and images presenting service stations and Austins, trees blowing in the wind, and a pretty housewife
who prostitutes herself. Yet, his camera, with diabolical consistency, seems
determined to prove the contrary.
Two or Three Things That I Know about Her is, then, a
documentary about a film maker and some actors who tried to make a
film about life in contemporary Paris. It is obliged, however, to be only
the attempted representation of that representation. The documentary
founders on Godard's epistemological uncertainties, not the least of which
might be the necessity of infinite regress. For if the validity of an act of
representation can only exist in function of another act of
self-representation, then this act of auto-mimesis can only exist in function
of another act of representation to the third degree, and that only by
another to the fourth degree, etc. in the face of this uncertainty and
failure, Godard's recourse is to use ironic self-consciousness, which in turn
leads him back to the creation of pop modes. There is no infinite regress, since Godard's representation, in representing itself in its circularity, by
designating itself as failure, turns itself into another pop mode of mimesis.
Two or Three Things is ultimately as much a pop work as Alphaville in
that it mythologizes its own postmodern myth of the impossibility of
discourse.
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Yet, this self-representation of failure is also an ethical act. To
represent failure is, by implication, to proclaim the need for a praxis that
would create a world in which the lost harmony of language and referent
would be recovered. Failure here is a form of praxis, but it is a difficult
one, and perhaps this is why Godard has come to prefer his own version of
Marxist commitment to the politics of pop. None the less, Godard's
disasters cry out for a world where human discourse is adequate to man's
needs. Or as Godard himself expresses it in Two or Three Things That /
Know about Her:
The birth in man's world of the simplest things, man's
taking possession of them with his mind . . . a new world
where men and things will know harmonious relations.
That's my goal. It is as much political as poetic. It
explains, in any case, the rage to express. Whose? Mine.
Middlebury College
NOTES
1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 135.
2 Bertolt Brecht, Sur le cinema (Paris: L'Arche, 1970), p. 180.
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