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:

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 and Masculin Feminin. Now it is time for us to bear witness to the end of the Godard-Karina collaboration with...


Made in USA (France, 1966, Godard)





Ben Begins:


... oxygen, this little bird needs oxygen.  Do not enter this mine shaft, my coal miner comrade, the air is so bad, it was all I could do to fly to the exit and come out alive.  Honestly, nearly died of boredom.

Monica found this NY Times review from back in the day: "Better seen twice if at all."  (What a great line.  A deliciously dialectical dis.)  I have no intention of seeing it twice and I will come straight out and recommend that you see it not at all.  It's not bad in the offensive way Contempt is bad.  Almost worse.  It's just so much nothing.  On any level.  With the exception of a couple killer lines that I will share with you after this sentence is done, I can think of not one thing about Made in USA that helped me keep my eyes and ears open as it played before me.  Here are the two killer lines:  One:  "It's a political movie, which means it's Walt Disney with blood."  Two: "I think advertising is fascism."

Since he hit the ground running in 1959, Godard is celebrated for changing the grammar of cinema.  InMade in USA, he recycles himself in the most slap-dash way, turning what was before aesthetically radical into tired signature devices.  Might be crowd pleasers for the die-hard fans who want a New Wave guru to idolize, but it borders on a sylistic dogma in my estimation.  As I hope my reviews have emphasized, Godard's critical interrogation of genres and conventions are rescued from being obnoxious insofar as they are obstreperous, when they have that edge.  Made in USA does not have that edge.  I said he was treading water with Masculine, Feminine.  Well, he's floating on dinghy with Made in USA.

 

And it's clear why.  The politics are coming on regular now in bare-knuckle rabbit punches.  He repeatedly interjects the proceedings with strident, provocative statements.  Perhaps I should not say "interject," for the whole movie feels like an excuse for the New Left hot button-pushing.  Problem is, the New Wave button-board Godard has built for himself cannot accomodate his new-found need to infuse his art with determinate ideological values. I have no idea what his style becomes after 1968 (or 1988, or 2008, for that matter).  But already in 1966, his aesthetic as a whole communicative methodology is sagging under the weight of his emerging political world-view.

Made in USA is yet another twist on Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe archetype.  Anna Karina gets to play the tough detective this time.  The setting is the very near future, with cursory casting of "Robert MacNamara" and "Dick Nixon" as this bad guy or that corpse.  It's all very non-linear and cryptic, with all sorts of narrative mystery due to truncated dialogue and editorial obstinance when it comes to basic coherence.  There is also precious little excitment, wit or anything else to suggest that Made in USAwasn't made in three minutes.  I am confident that a coterie of postmodern revisionists will these days sing the praises of this film.  But it's shitty movie, plain and simple.

And Dan:

Based solely upon your Godard 101 rankings, I can intuit that we are on the same page here. I don't have much to say about the film, but what I do say will not be nice. Made in USA probably seemed like a great idea at the time--why not have some fun parodying your favourite film genre?--but in the end, the film just sits there like a three day old dead fish, stinking up the joint. 

Godard is a film noir junkie, and his adoration fills many of the frames of his best films, including Breathless, Alphaville and Little Soldier. So it is quite reasonable, given Godard's track record for breaking new ground in film, that he would attempt something novel with the genre. With Made in USA, Godard decides to take many of the conventions of the genre and invert them, so that we can stare at what is essentially a photo negative of a film noir. Godard exploits a fundamental principle of parody, which aims to turn the sublime into the ridiculous, by contrasting our expectations with the alternative reality of what we see on the screen. So, instead of filming in 4:3 aspect ratio in murky black and white, Godard gives us garish  technicolour in all its widescreen glory. Instead of putting a hard bitten and grizzled male detective in the lead, Godard gives us the young and lovely Anna Karina, thereby fulfilling his own dictum "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." Instead of a driving around corrosive, night time urban setting, the characters spend most of their time walking around a bucolic, daytime French countryside. At pretty much every turn, Godard confounds expectation.

However, while I applaud the premise, I must give a raspberry to the execution. The film takes the premise for an interesting 15 minute short, and tries to turn it into a 90 minute feature, and stretch marks are evident in almost every scene, which, lacking any sort of narrative focus, play out languidly. In Godard's quest to emulate the narrative quirkiness of one of his favourite noirs, Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, he has created a film that has pretty much no narrative coherence, and while you might be able to get away with that in a film awash with other admirable qualities, Made in USA is not that film. Even Godard's favourite tropes are not well served. At one point, Karina notes that "advertising is a form of fascism" after having discussed how this story would be different if it were a Disney film, then standing infront of a Disney poster for one of the film's many dull jokes. This sort of nail on the head humour lacks the sort of wit and playfulness we have come to expect of Godard's more engaging efforts. "Tis a sad way to bid farewell to the Godard-Karina collaboration, but bid it adieu I must. So long, Anna. You will be missed, though not for this film. 

Anyway, I see no purpose in flailing this dead horse, or sniffing this dead mackerel, any longer. Let's bury this sucker so I can move onto what I hope is a far more deserving film, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

Rather than offering up the trailer, I'm giving you the scene of Marianne Faithful singing As Tears Go By:

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.  Ben then returned, and we took a look at Pierre le Fou, and now finally have something to argue about, as we offer up our conflicting thoughts on...


Masculin Feminin (France, 1966, Godard)


Ben Begins:

The problem with reviewing an intellectual like Godard (is there another intellectual "like Godard?") is that he beats you to the presses when it comes time for a tag line.  For Masculine, Feminine, he himself says of it during it - in the form of an intertitle, no less: "This film could be called the children of Marx and Coca-Cola."  Yup.

From my point of you, what is interesting about this is that the director seems to be a tad stroppy about the children's prioritization of Coca-Cola over Marx.  This is to say thatMasculine, Feminine is the first film in which Godard deals directly with ideological stances in relation to the US campaign in Vietnam, the current political reputation of the French Communist Party, the continuing presence of de Gaulle and so on.  He also focuses pointedly at the incipient sexual revolution, especially as it was being facilitated by the new technologies of contraception.  There is even a bit with two men making out in a bathroom stall.  Would have raised more than an eyebrow in '66.

I wish I could say that all of this rich sociology makes for a facinating movie, but I must announce that Masculine, Feminine looks to me to be the first time Godard is treading water.  I do not doubt that in it's own day, it was a telling snapshot of the state of the republic from the perspective of the younger set.  Wiki informs me that it was banned for persons under 18 in France, which rankled Godard no end because that was exactly his target audience for the film.  It shows.  Watching it today, as a 50 year-old fat fart, I couldn't help feel that it was sorta like an episode of Friends, if you know what I mean.

Be this as it may, Masculine, Feminine has really helped with respect to my tracking of Godard's depictions of violence.  There is very little of it, but what there is has improved verismillitude.  That it is shown in the context of a movie-within-a-movie is neither here nor there at this stage of GODARD 101.  What is significant, however, is that it is presented in connection with sexual conduct.  Obviously, the mixture of hostility and eroticism is meant by Godard to be problematic, but what I realized is that this is the first time he has shown some actual sexual activity beyond a few kisses thrown into the conversation.

While I think my original speculation is beginning to pan out that Godard's treatment of violence is growing increasingly realistic as he becomes more overtly politicized, I now notice with a more Freudian eye that for all his attention to interpersonal heterosexual relationships and dialogue about true love spoken by lovers who fail to be true - where's the sex?  There has been some suggestion of it from time to time, in rude language and morning-after shots.  And yes, he has to deal with the same censorship by the distributors as the next film-maker.  But even so.  Things never even get lubricated, eh?  Perhaps the handling of violence is as awkward and bothersome as it is because of the continuum between violence and eroticism in the first place, that murky pit wherein the excessively intellectual Godard is not artistically at home. 

And speaking of sexuality, and remembering my promise to stay in touch with a feminist sensibility throughout GODARD 101, the portayal of women in Masculine, Feminine is pretty despicable.  It was darn crappy in a Woman is a Woman, but this could be forgiven insofar as it was so cadidly parodic of the cliche sexism attending the genre being twiddled.  Besides, even if Godard does offend the Sisterhood with that movie, To Live Her Life the next year does outstanding damage control; like I said in my review before, the female existential protagonist is given her dignity, neither to blame nor a victim.  In Masculine, Feminine though, well, the chicks are basically bimbos.  It's irritating, to put it mildly.

In fact, the whole film is rather irritating.  Again, I concede that it has the merit of an almost documentary record of the Parisian scene for post-highschool/not-in-university types at that point in history.  But it's a lot of talking heads with no story to speak of and just as little to look at cinematographically.  Kind of a relief, to tell the truth.  Guy was switching it up so fast and furious, my head was starting to swim.  Or should I simply say that after Alphaville - a small masterpiece that can still send a shiver down my back today -Masculine, Feminine has not aged well?

And Dan:

Having not read your review for details, but having seen that you rank Masculine Feminine quite low on your Godard 101 master list, it looks to me like we have something of a disagreement brewing about the value of this cinematic work of art. And I don't use the term 'art' lightly here, because I am convinced that MF rightly deserves this ascription. Flawed though it is by some stunt casting in a key role, and a rather unfortunately typical and unforgiving attitude towards women, MF still stands as a stark and compelling portrait of confused Parisian youth in the tumultuous mid-60s. 

There is much about this film that I did admire, but I will start by discussing a significant grievance. MF makes a great show of it's political radicalism in scenes that sometimes walk a thin between amusingly ineffectual and mildly invigorating, but there is little doubt that the film's gender politics are reactionary. Godard's attitude towards the female characters is derogatory at best, as they generally come off as politically disengaged, socially self-involved, and hopelessly materialistic. And his casting of Chantal Goya in the pivotal role of Madeleine does not help matters, and her range of expressions is extremely limited, making almost anything that comes out of her mouth sound either vapid or unconvincing. Or both. This is certainly a problem, and Godard's misogyny an ongoing concern, but thankfully, neither is a fatal flaw. There's just too much here to enjoy.

Truffault's discovery/proxy Jean-Paul Leard (400 Blows) plays Paul, a disaffected youth who is not quite equal parts feigned cynic and disguised romantic. Leard imbues the part with an appropriate combination of earnestness, arrogance, sincerity and vulnerability that is usually appealing but sometimes off-putting. Paul, what we might call a hipster today, has just finished his mandatory military service, and now he is a bit of a French cliche, a 21 year old angst-riddled young man sipping his cappuccino in a Parisian cafe while coolly flipping cigarettes Belmondo-style into his mouth, and writing his political manifesto. The lad is politically engaged, at least at a simplistic activist level, and his leather patch radicalism, while more theoretical than actual, at least points to the character's well-meaningness. 

Still, while Paul spends considerable time mouthing the words of a radical--hell, sometimes he even scrawls them on walls--but truth be known, he is more of a yearning lover than a burning revolutionary. When his prospective girlfriend, the aspiring pop star Madeleine (played by Goya, a real life pop star--in Japan, at least) asks Paul what is his centre, he struggles for an answer, before finally arriving at his decision: love. But love proves frustratingly illusory for Paul, whereas Madeleine, the film's poster child for the emergent "me generation" chooses: herself. This self-centredness proves her saviour, while Paul's romanticism proves his downfall. 

Working for the first time with cinematographer Willy Kurant, Godard at first eschews the sort of eye-catching camerawork that we have come to expect in his collaboration with Roaul Coutard, choosing instead to settle the camera in unusual positions, often focusing on the listener rather than the speaker, encouraging us to experience the film through their ears, while focusing on their reactions. As the film settles in, Kurant is given more challenges, including one particularly impressive tracking shot through a pool hall/cafe that accentuates Paul's inability to find any place that he feels comfortable. Kurant's choice of raw film stock is also noteworthy, as the grays are mostly washed out of the mix in MF, giving the film a documentary style cinema verite appearance, while also making the film more of an authentic black and white experience, suiting not only the tone of the film, but the attitude of its youthful cast, who characteristically swing from one emotional extreme to another.

However, it is in the audio realm that Godard continues some of the bold experimentation that has marked his development as a formalist. Other than continuing the naturalism of his earlier films, and allowing ambient noise to not only creep into, but sometimes obscure snippets of dialogue, MF shows other interesting innovations in the use of sound. For instance, in the aforementioned scene where Paul and Madeleine meet, the camera shifts position part way through the conversation to reveal an agitated couple in the background. While continuing to foreground Paul and Madeleine, Godard shifts the audio focus away from the young leads, and allows us to listen to their argument, which eventually spills out onto the street in a shocking act of violence. In fact, throughout the film the audience is put in a similar position, eavesdropping on other's conversation, mirroring the one of Alfred Hitchcock's favourite tropes, filmgoing as voyeurism. However, unlike the psycho-sexual deviance of Hitch, the audio innovations in MF allow us to become part of a community of voices, most of which are exploring the film's key dynamic, the gender divide in the youth culture. 

This sea of voices is presented mostly in naturalistic ways, as we get a snapshot of mid-60s Paris locations, bars, coffee shops, arcades, recording booths, bedrooms and cinemas, as we observe people conversing on all matter of subjects. But one of Godard's favourite techniques for teasing information out of characters is the interrogation scene, which he deploys several times in the film, whether in a formal setting (Paul interviewing Miss 19, or the police detective questioning Madeleine and Catherine) or an informal one (Paul grilling Madeleine as she grooms herself in front of a mirror). The crime is modern society, and everyone is a suspect.

To be more specific, the crime as Godard sees it is pop culture and its influence on a youthful population trying desperately to find their footing, a hint of some meaning, in this world. Paul in particular (though he is not alone) is adrift, with no mooring,  moving from one job to another, one interest to another, one person to another, searching for a centre, settling on Madeleine, but it (she) cannot hold. 

MF is a film about children trying to become adults in a society in transition, but finding the requisite real life examples of adulthood lacking--there are very few adults on screen, and those that are do not offer much to emulate-- finding their models in the (mostly pop) culture around them--music, movies, and advertising in particular. Godard recognizes that his work in film has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as he has Madeleine and Paul reference Belmondo's romantic free spirited antics in Pierrot Le Fou when they attempt to be as free spirited and romantic as Belmondo, whose Breathless-level ultra-coolness Paul has been mimicking throughout, with both his cigarette flip and his thumb across the lip gestures, themselves imitations of Hollywood hipsters. In Paul's desperate attempt to be both grown up and cool--at least two degrees of separation from the source material.

MF is a film about young people set adrift in an uncertain, violent consumerist world of pop cultural influences without the social and intellectual mooring necessary to find their way through the morass. They move from one job to another, one interest to another, one person to another, looking for a centre, but it cannot hold. 

Then Ben:

We definitely saw the same film.  We just don't feel the same way about it.  I reckon this says more about the difference between us than anything else.  You seem to take each film as it comes with no pre-conceived notion about why it comes.  I take each film as a stage in a developmental trajectory that we know will come to a head in 1968.

Your attention to the formal construction of Masculine, Feminine aside - (I like your awareness of the audio disjunction, this picks up a thread we haven't unraveled further since I tugged at this yarn ball in my review ofA Woman is a Woman) - the political attitude informing the film you feel delivers "a stark and compelling portrait of confused Parisian youth in the tumultuous mid-60s."  What these French city kids are especially confused by, you indicate a number of times, is the pop culture conditioning their consciousness.

I do not disagree with the latter.  Indeed, in my final term paper for GODARD 101 I develop this position at length with an eye to something in this pop culture you have not noticed, at least not precisely in terms of media sources.  Nevermind that now, however.  What presently separates us is your appreciation of Godard's political attutude in Masculine, Feminine.  What you find stark and compelling, I find a tad stroppy; as in: "the director seems to be a tad stroppy about the children's prioritization of Coca-Cola over Marx."

I believe you have yet to see The Chinese, so I will not speak of it in any detail.  Still, I trust nothing will be spoiled for you by me asserting that Masculine, Feminine (early 1966) is best appreciated as a stepping stone to The Chinese (1967).  Considering I had not yet seen The Chinese when I  reviewedMasculine, Feminine, my irritation with the film was the result of my unwitting anticipation of the more fully realized work that would come.  "The tumultuous mid-60s" is right and Godard's transition in the year 1966 is pivitol.

All of this is to admit that I was a tad stroppy with Godard for being ONLY a tad stroppy with the kids' infatuation with fatuous consumerism while striking radical chic poses.  There is a connection between their political pretentions and their romantic preoccupations that ultimately rests on their sexual immaturity.  And on this, we really must bring the male chauvinism of the picture more centrally into it.  Both of us are offended by this sexism but do not seriously criticise it insofar as we partition off the matter from the rest of our discussion of the film.  But I now insist that it is at the very center of what makes Masculine, Feminine a wanna-be political statement that fails to materialize in the radical direction Godard tries to point it.

Am I too hard on the film from the perspective of the films that will follow it?  Well, yes and no.  It's a hell of a lot better thanMade in USA, as my review of that film indicates, but pretty much a throw-away compared to the uber-masterpiece of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which the director allows himself to confront absolute philosophic doubt, after which he is able to commit to The Revolution in The Chinese, albeit with a healthy dose of political scepticism.

I suppose my irritation with Masculine, Feminine could be regarded as misplaced by countering that the film should be understood as a kind of documentary.  After all, both of us touch on this quality of the film.  I actually think there is a case to be made that all of Godard's New Wave movies - even the most fantastic and surreal - have a kind of documentary quality, but I do not mean to pursue this case now.  My present point is that the documentary quality of Masculine, Feminine does not for me convincingly counter my irritation with it.

By the way, this documentary is not without its fantastic/surreal/what-to-call-it-? moments.  Can you please explain to me the significance of the pinball arcade scene wherein a stranger stabs himself in front of the protagonist?  I mean - what? (!)  This doesn't come out of just left field.  It comes out of another ball park altogether.

And Dan:

I reckon what you are referring to that I have not unpacked Godard and pop culture-wise is the awareness that characters have in many of his films that they are themselves instances of pop art themselves. Hence the films constantly have the characters breaking the fourth wall, reminding us that we are watching a movie, that these are actors performing roles that have been created by someone else (Godard) and to be thinking about what this all means in relation to ourselves. Godard doesn't want us to ever get so "lost" in the film that we forget this very important fact, because he wants us to be constantly aware of, examining and questioning the relationship between audience and the (pop) art we are viewing. 

As for the scene you mention, well, first off, we have to give Godard some props for actually showing some flesh and blood violence, right? Regarding its meaning, I reckon your guess (come to think of it, you didn't make a guess!) is as good as mine. It does foreshadowing later events, of course, but actions should not exist purely as literary devices, they should stand on their own right a well, and the only things I can come up with is the way that the moment (a) plays around with (pop) psychological notion that violence against others is evidence of self-loathing (b) contributes to the feeling of uncontrollable and unpredictable violence that runs throughout the film and represents the mood in Paris at the time, according to Godard (c) presents the idea that this generation of confused youth have a decidedly self-destructive bent.

Now, over to you. What do you have to say about this scene?


Then Ben:

Yeah, come to think of it, I didn't make a guess and still can't make one as good as yours.  Not that I find yours all that helpful.  I mean, I get your points (a), (b) and (c)  - basically one point approached from three different angles for argumentative momentum - but I feel you are too quick to dismiss the literary device of foreshawdowing.  I must confess to not remembering the film in detail well enough to fathom what this scene foreshadows.  So please tell me what subsequent event or events you have in mind.  Honestly, I just could not make head or tail of the self-stabbing in the plot ("plot" that is).

Meanwhile, no, I do not have to give Godard some props for actually showing some flesh and blood violence.  At least not for the scene under discussion.  I will give him those props for the scene which opens the film.  I agree with you that it shows a "shocking act of violence."  But the self-stabbing is too bizarre.  The lack of communication - not just no verbal exchange , no body language also - made the whole thing for me weird in the extreme.  Rather than actual flesh and blood violence, I saw a strange ritualistic act, almost a piece of street theatre.

How this may or may not support your attempt to make sense of the scene is beyond me.

And Dan:

I wish I had more to add to help you with the ritualistic/theatrical angle that you are trying to develop here in support of Godard's inclusion of this scene, but I don't. As for the foreshadowing, well it could be argued that this incomprehensible act foreshadows the future somewhat incomprehensible death of the central character. Was it suicide? Accident? He does say early on in the film that a life without tenderness would lead one to suicide, and Madeleine is not a beacon of affection, so there's that.

Then Ben:


Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  I completely forgot the plot point that the central character dies at the end.  Thank you for reminding me. I guess his death was so incomprehensible I just didn't try to sort out if it was an accident or a suicide in relation to the rest of the film that came prior.  As before, your guess is better than mine.  If he did kill himself in keeping with his emotional principle, though, this only adds to the stupid sexism of the film; as if the function of a woman is to keep a man alive with her affection.  Reminds me of what a female character critically says in a Margaret Atwood novel:  When a man says that his woman doesn't understand him, what he means is that she doesn't suck his cock enough.  Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.


And Dan:


To be fair to the character, he did not say men would die without tenderness. He suggested that people would die without tenderness. And while that is a foolish and naive notion on a purely physical level, there is truth to it on an emotional level. Something in us dies if, for whatever reason, we are cut off from human affection.


Then Ben:

You are so right.  And so wrong.

You are so right that we are finally chewing the meat of the matter with regard to the protagonist.  You dig him a fair bit whereas I figure he's mostly a wanker.  Clearly, this is behind you liking the film more than I do.  In your review you describe the character as "usually appealing but sometimes off-putting."  It would appear that I found him sometimes appealing but usually off-putting.

But you are so wrong if you think this is all the meat that matters.  I continue to focus also on the women - "meat" indeed in the movie - and I continue to insist that our identification with the protagonist must be restricted by our criticism of the sexism conditioning the film as a whole.  In your review you state that "the film's gender politics are reactionary."  Yet you keep on partitioning this off from the rest of the film.  But come on.  It's called Masculine, Feminine, right?  I cannot say whether the male chauvinism in the movie is or is not a "fatal flaw," unlike you, who announce that it is not.  All I will say (again) is that it "makes Masculine, Feminine a wanna-be political statement that fails to materialize in the radical direction Godard tries to point it."

And since I'm taking you to task on this topic, you go so far as to say that "Godard's misogyny [is] an ongoing concern."  There is a difference - which I trust you will agree is significant - between the degrading treatment of women as inferior and the abusive hatred of women as the sexual Other.  On behalf of myself and Godard too, the ongoing feminist concern I am bringing to his films is about the former, which I sometimes see in his work, and not the latter, which I never see at all. 

Then - Ben

P.S.  I realize that this is not meaty, but having travelled from the self-stabbing scene to your suggestion that it foreshadows the death of the protagonist as a possible suicide, I still wonder about the latter and ask you to wonder with me.  Like I said before, I didn't notice that he was in so much pain, eh?  Did he at any time strike you as even potentially suicidal?  I suspect not, considering it was you who introduced the description of his death as "incomprehensible," and rightly so.

And Dan:

No, I did not see a self destructive streak in Paul. At all. So I'd have to go with his death being an accident. Of course, the coolness with which the two young ladies report his death casts some suspicion of the deed upon them. But I doubt that they're capable of murder, except in the most passive aggressive sort of way (withholding sexual affection, knowing that it might make Paul reckless or self-destructive.) Again, though, there is no evidence of this, and so I'm going with accidental death. Seems to me the main reason for Paul's death is so we can have the chilling moment when Madeleine calmly talks about giving herself an abortion with a curtain rod (apparently she wore and earpiece in this scene, and Godard dictated that line to her, which explains her detached demeanor. Undoubtedly exactly what Godard was going for. The bastard.)

You make some strong points regarding the film's central flaw. The key to my ability to continue to appreciate the film while also recognizing the problematic sexual politics is that, in this movie at least, I can understand why these young characters are not yet fully formed enough to realize their essential misogyny. I'm not excusing it, mind you. They're still radicals in theory only, reactionaries in practice (particularly when it comes to women). The lad's lack of sexual experience and confidence that contributes to this conservatism will be addressed over time, you'd have to hope. 

However, while this can be explained away as the shortsighted-ness of youth, it does not help us to understand Godard's own myopia. It will be interesting to see, as he becomes increasingly radicalized, if he also becomes aware of his own internal political contradictions on this matter. 

And finally, here is the trailer for Masculin Feminin:

Th