Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here.  First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination ofTo Live Her Life, Contempt, The Little Soldier and Band of Outsiders. Most recently, we looked at Alphaville and I did a solo turn with A Married Woman and The Riflemen. Then Ben returned, and we took a look at Pierrot le Fou,  Masculin Feminin and the last Godard-Karina collaboration, Made in USA. Next up: the film that Ben and I both agree is the best of the diverse lot that make up the Godard 101 syllabus. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...


Two or Three Things I Know About Her (France, 1967, Godard)

Ben Begins:

Going in to GODARD 101, of the two or three things I knew about him, this title was one of them.  Had I heard of it years ago, as a kid, not so long after it came out, discussed by the same radical university types sitting in our living room that showed me Alphaville up at the student union?  Or did the title - catchy in its own right - stick with me after just recently re-reading that J. Hoberman's Harper's review of a Godard bio, which put GODARD 101 in the curriculum for me in the first place?  Doesn't matter either way.  Because both ways signal the greatness of 2 OR 3.  If that self-professed revolutionary milieu was chewing over the film back in the day, they were right to.  And if Hoberman continues to hold to this day that it is an outstanding cinematic work, he is right to.

2 OR 3 is "The Portrait of the Artist as an Activist; "unto, "The Portrait of the Activist as (Just) an Artist".  Godard is critically interrogating his own agency as a whole.  The activist is being held inactive politically, so the artist is at least active about this artistically.  Not surprisingly, gone is the cute self-citation as a mocking replication of the history of movie-making, the circular signification of prior significations without concern for an original reality prior to the image.  Now, there's an almost traditional need for a reliable epistemological framework.  And just as old-fashioned, there's a near desperate frustration with uncertainty about how to begin getting a handle on this.  For no amount of sophisticated entertainment can provide what is required by the contemporary situation.

The auto-declarative anguish of the director is all the more pronounced for him expressing it in terms of political outrage that is itself excruciatingly hamstrung by introspective philosophic doubt.  The latter is often addressed by way of monological inquiries that just about junk entirely any pretense of artistic artifice.  Yet, they never stop being aesthetic objects presentedmis-en-scene.  The film gives the impression that the director is bursting at the seams to produce a work of non-fictional agit-prop, but cannot allow himself to engage in direct propagandistic communication.  So he continues to craft a movie as he knows how to do.  Except now the deconstructive approach to what constitues a "movie" is being determined not as a formal game but instead as a necessity of content.  There, I said it.  The sense of political urgency about the state of the real world is driving 2 OR 3, however embodied in a theatrically staged statement on celluloid.

Simply in terms of the topic, 2 OR 3 is a companion piece for To Live Her Life insofar as it also follows a prostitute.  Whereas the former plainly showed a story of downward mobility, however, the latter depicts a scenario about maintaining a middle class standard of living and the modern lifestyle according to consumerism.  Related to this - and for the first time in a Godard film - attention is given to nuclear family life, with parts of no trivial import assigned to children, including heavily-loaded lines spoken by one of them.   The upshot of this is that prostitution is generalized onto the society as a totality, not as a metaphor but as a literal model of capitalist culture.  This comes off as anti-American, especially with respect to the imperialist project in Vietnam, but the critique is clearly aimed at the very ethos of the system.

How the film makes the impression it does, I wish I could say.  For all of it's excessively egg-headed soul-searching at a sometimes remarkably abstact level of discourse, it is somehow staggeringly poetic.  For all of it's sheer intellectual wordiness, not to be confused with dramatic dialogue, the visual compositions and juxtapositions are absolutely essential elements of the meandering symposium, and they have genuine beauty.  In this department it doesn't hurt that the camera is often pointed at a good-looking woman, of which there are more than two or three in 2 OR 3.  This should not suggest that the film has an exploitational sexist gaze - no wait... it has precisely this; but simultaneously as it does, it exposes the illegitimacy of this, shows it to be exactly the prostitution general to the culture that is reducing all social relations to shopping and all communication to advertising.

On the technical side, just as in Alphaville it is a stroke of genius that the voice of the computer is some guy with phony vocal cords, in 2 OR 3 the director supplies - as he so often does in his films - voice-over comments, but this time he does it differently and the difference makes all the difference, eh?  He whispers.  Fucking brilliant.  The effect is off the chart.   He sounds like a person worried that the CIA is tapping the phone, as well as a guy afraid of his own voice at full volume, as if hearing his throughts objectified so bare would just be too much to bear.

This is the first Godard film I have seen that I believe I will have to see again.  Not because I enjoyed it more than all of the others.  Far from it.  There is a quality about it that prevents me from feeling attracted to 2 OR 3, honestly, a terrible dullness.  Yet, this very sensibility strikes me as a marker of numbness, of a false passivity in the face of not knowing how to break through the alienation of urban cubicles, from the blocks of apartments to the TV sets in each cell or even just yet another booth in a diner.  Of not knowing how to photograph an image with a meaning that can be trusted and acted upon.  Of  not knowing how to stop the napalm.  Maybe it's just the fits and starts of GODARD 101 that make me cautious now, but I strongly suspect that 2 OR 3 is the real deal, profound art.

And Dan:

Clouds in my coffee? That's just the tip of the iceberg. I can see clearly now, as Two or Three Things has shown me God(ard) in a cup of coffee. Or is that Solaris? Just as we both flashed on Bela Tarr while watching The Riflemen, I could not help but see Tarkovsky's futuristic wish-delivery system in that devilish cup of java. What have we here? A lyrical Godard? A champion of the finding the glorious in the everyday image? Searching for the profound in the seemingly prosaic? Perhaps. Or is Godard pondering the efficacy of the image, trying to determine if there is any more truth in the concrete than in the abstract? Whether looking at a bank of fluttering of leaves as they tremble under the gaze of Godard's curious camera, or into the Hadean ashes that flare up at the tip of a newly-lit cigarette, of this there is little doubt. With Two or Three Things I Know About Her, we are witnessing a development in Godard's art that is at once a great leap forward and, at the same time, a completely natural outgrowth of his previous work. However, no matter how you look at it, Two or Three Things I Know About Her is the most significant and damned impressive of Godard's films of this remarkably fertile period (1959-1967.)  

One the one hand, it would be easy to make a list of the familiar tropes that run throughout the film, including the love of mirroring shots, long conversations in cafes, usually between a male and a female, often about sex, abstract voice over narration, vivid technicolour palette (reds, whites, blues predominate, which also happen to appear on the French and American flags) within an anamorphic widescreen format, the use of comic book elements to representative the cartoonish aspects of modern life, digressions that alternate between fascinating and soporific, and while there is no girl with a gun, we do get a tot with toy machine gun, if that counts for anything. Godard is nothing if not persistent in his consistency.

That said, I think we can safely say that Godard is ready to put the rigors of conventional narrative cinema in his rear view mirror. To call the plot of this film elusive is to lavish it with praise. In fact, the emptiness of the narrative could be more than a ploy, it could be a reflection of the emptiness of these people's lives. Nothing much happens because these people are nothing much. And yet, they are, because they represent so much of what is wrong with our world, or more specifically, the capitalist world through which which so many of us make our way. What there is of a story makes it clear that Godard views life under this system as oppressive. We are all prostituting ourselves to stay afloat in this sea of consumerism, dehumanized, fragmented and commodified by advertising, pop culture, and the crushing economic demands of a life always kept just slightly out of reach. The sight of two prostitutes parading before a client wearing only airline flight bags over their heads captures just about all we need to know about these themes in Godard's work.

In trying to dig more deeply into the film, it could be instructive to study the title for clues as to Godard's intent. The "her" in question most obviously points to the character of Juliette, and the actress (Marina Vlady) who plays her. Juliette is a middle class wife and mother of two and occasional prostitute who moves through this day in her life, usually in character, only to sometimes break the fourth wall to comment on life, either as herself, or her character, or both? The objective pronoun in the title is also the city of Paris, as images of Juliette are constantly either juxtaposed with those of suburban renewal, while other times they share the screen, with Juliette often marginalized or dwarfed by the modern and dehumanizing suburban high rise developments that mark her home. Finally, it is also entirely possible that the titular figure is the capitalist system that comes under such virulent attack throughout the film. All of this is familiar as well, for Godard has used these techniques and examined these themes in earlier films. Yet, there so much more to the film that is breaking new ground for Godard. 

  

And perhaps not coincidentally, we see real evidence of humility in Godard's film, with some of the best proof of this being found in his voice over narration, and not just in the content itself, which is rife with a quiet and honest inquisitiveness,  but in the style itself. Certainly, the hushed whisper bespeaks an Orwellian paranoia that he could be under surveillance, but more interestingly, it also registers with the audience a key movement towards a certain uncharacteristic but at the same time equally exciting timidity in the face of the grand ideas he is exploring and the large questions he is posing.

Yet, this Godard is no metaphysical man, no hippy dippy tripped out Carlos Castenada. The Godard at the helm of 2 or 3 Things is the same angry man, the same rawly-formed radical vigorously attacking all that he sees wrong with the world, and the human systems operating within it. He's still fueled by the same frustration with capitalist practices, American foreign policy in Vietnam, and our increasing enslavement to consumer culture (among many other things.)  Images of napalm victims and injured soldiers are alternated with those of Parisian suburban renewal and they act to show us the consequences of these practices in France, as people are herded into anonymous industrial-looking cookie cutter housing complexes, while the aforementioned dwarfing of characters within these shots reinforces such impressions.

The film's famous final images of a series of consumer products arranged around a field is equally informative, for in a world where advertising is king, name brand products are the architecture of our lives. Just as Paris is being torn down and rebuilt in the image of the contemporary capitalist society, so too are our lives overrun by consumer products. 

Among the many reasons that Two or Three Things is so fascinating is the appearance of a newly vulnerable Godard, a more openly curious artist who is asking questions without being certain he has any answers.  As he inquires, he is uncertain, and truly opening himself up to the world, a world of wonders and wondering. And in this wandering, Godard is becoming intoxicated with the world and its possibilities. Godard is probing areas that are both familiar and novel. As has been the case throughout his career, Godard remains determined to examine the language of sound and image in order to more fully develop a system of cinematic art and communication to rival the great art forms of centuries past. If language is the house that man built, Godard wants to get in on the ground floor of the 20th century's great contribution. And he is increasingly determined to apply this new formalism to his evolving political radicalism. Simply put, in Two or Three Things, Godard is trying his damnedest to figure out how he can use cinema to serve the cause. 

And for the first time, revolution is on the table as more than just a passing thought. Comradeship emerges, as the narrator (Godard) refers to some characters as brother and sister, while another character, Juliette's son, shares a dream he had about two twins walking hand in hand who turned out to be North and South Vietnam, then later writes about importance of friendship  and camaraderie between boys and girls. Knowing Godard's own chauvinistic tendencies, this (and other conversations between characters) reveal a man who seems to be reassessing his gender politics, while also becoming more actively committed to his earlier political radicalization. 

Damned fine film, the pinnacle of Godard's art (to this point, at least). I am eager to watch it again.

Then Ben:

"What have we here? A lyrical Godard? A champion of the finding of the glorious in the everyday image? Searching for the profound in the seemingly prosaic? Perhaps. Or is Godard pondering the efficacy of the image, trying to determine if there is any more truth in the concrete than in the abstract?"

I think you are right to emphasize the lyrical impulse in this film.  I said it is "staggeringly poetic."  And I think you are right to emphasize the candid longing for truth.  I said "there's an almost traditional need for a reliable epistemological framework."

But with respect to the efficacy of the image, I do not think Godard is grappling with a contest between the concrete and the abstract.  His openly lyrical investigation is at the same time his most intellectually penetrating inquiry.  The pursuit is of the image as efficacious both in lyrical concreteness and ideational abstraction.  The director's desire is to do with cinematic imagery what Blake does with words in this poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Yeah, well, good luck with that Jean-Luc.  2 Or 3 Things is nothing if not a testament to his feeling of failure in this regard.  So you do well in acknowleding his explicit modesty - how's that for a dialectical oxymoron? - his extroverted display of his deepest insecurity.

Is it too much of an ad hominem speculation to say the the director is questioning his right to make a movie given the state of the world?  That his overwhelming sense of political responsibility is forcing him to seach for an Acrchimedean point on solid philosophic ground, only to find himself a mere artist who expresses himself with images that are obviously illusory - how's that for a dialectical oxymoron? - images that must somehow represent reality so viewers can actually take action to change the world?  For you also do well in acknowledging that 2 Or 3 Things is nothing if not a call to revolution.  Not with a bang.  With a whimper.  But a call even so.

In On The Jewish Question, Marx regards The Jew as the epitome of The Bourgeois; not the essential social relation of capital accumulation, just the most fully formed personification of it.  For this, he has often been regarded as anti-Semitic.  I believe this objection is wrong.  It is wrong because of a failure to forge a dialectic between the abstract essence and the concrete epitome.

Having established this, I can now say analogously that Godard forges such a dialectic in 2 or 3 Things.  The Woman is the epitome of the prostitute whose essence is wage-slavery.  The Woman is the epitome of the housewife whose essence is consumerism.  The Woman is just the most fully formed personification of the social relations of the capitalist system. Naturally, I extend the analogy completely and maintain that it would be wrong to see any sort of male sexism in this.   On the contrary, I see in it a feminist perspective that is not just compatible with the anti-capitalist critique, the perspective is intrinsic to this critique.

Harbingers of this feminist anti-capitalism are at work in To Live Her Life and A Married Woman, and I believe I made gestures towards this point in our discussions of those two films.  On the other hand, Masculine, Feminine is infected with male chauvinism, and provides only the most cursory and trivial opposition to capitalism.  In our discussion of that film, I went so far as to suggest that the latter was caused by the former.  Godard is a politicized intellectual but he is not a political theoretician.  He is an artist.  He cannot abstractly go to essence in a direct way.  He must deal with it indirectly by concretely dealing with what he takes to be the epitome.

He is so an artist.  Ultimately, the two or three things Godard knows in 2 or 3 Things are not about her but about himself.  The film is a Catholic confessional.  The darkened theatre is the confessional booth, we in the audience are the priest, and the screen is the screen, from behind which the director directs his confession to us: 

I have made movies that have started a revolution in cinema but I do not know how to make movies that will will start a revolution in the world.  If you thought I was your leader, think again.  The times they are a-changin' but this is another side of Bob Dylan.  I'm just a guy with a movie camera.  If you look back with open eyes, you will see I was always honest about this.  What is to be done?  You tell me.

In The Chinese, he does let a few different factions tell him.  Fortunately, he has recovered his sense of humour by this point and comes pretty close to replying:  But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.

Meantime, the two or three things I think I know about 2 Or 3 Things may be errors in the extreme.  But of this I am certain.  Of the 1959-1967 New Wave,  2 Or 3 is not 2 or 3.  It is #1 with me.

And Dan:

I see that I need to more clear and/or precise. I agree that Godard is not "grappling with a contest between the concrete and the abstract" so much as he is playing around with it, and even at some times exalting in it. I thought that the sometimes jarring juxtapositions and the even more fascinating super-impositions of abstract ideas over concrete images were a continued  (hardly the first time he's done it, but this is by far the most effectively) attempt by Godard to play around with and even stretch the medium, exploring the possibility of cinema as not just a form of communication and art, but as a way into radical discussion and (tentative) action. And now that I've seen The Chinese, I can see that he is also clearly interested in the limitations of such a discussion.

One of the things I'm interested in exploring with 2 or 3 Things is Godard's apparent about face on the whole question of gender politics. As you note, his politics in Masculin Feminin (and A Married Woman, for that matter) are riddled with chauvinism, while in 2 or 3 Things, the female characters are not only much more clearly the victim of the system, but also the more alert to the cruelty and injustice of this world. [a sidebar: here we have another sexless Godard film, this one featuring prostitution prominently; however, the sexlessness is not just due to Godard's squeamishness. It is also expressing a truth--when you turn sex into a commodity, there is not longer anything sexy about it]. And while To Live Her Life is more conscientiously neutral on the issue of women's place in the world, this is the first film that seems to clearly take up the women's position. Sure, prostitution is a metaphor in this film, but it is also on objective truth: many middle class women were resorting to prostitution in order to make ends meet (apparently one of the inspirations for making this film was the revelation of this fact in a magazine article.) When it comes to advertising and the commodification and dehumanization of people, women--particularly in the 50s and 60s, when they were more likely to be homemakers, and put in charge of all matters domestic--are on the front lines, as they are the ones whose roles are defined by their ability to sort through all the ads to get the best deals. There has got to have a soul crushing, deadening effect. And rather than wag his finger and mutter tut-tut as he does in A Married Woman, he digs a little deeper in 2 or 3 Things, and has a rather more open minded response to the difficult position of the female in this system. 

Voici le trailer: