116 - 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, 1966, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

Thursday, April 26, 2017

116 - 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, 1966, France. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.

Sports, politics, even groceries.

So says Godard of the topics of this film.

"I wanted to include everything."

Good luck finding sports and groceries in it.

Yet he is right in the spirit of his statement.  He is exploring modern life and its anxieties.  And he does so in a thoughtful and penetrating way.

The struggles of trying to make ends meet.  The political and social infrastructures that influence it.  Architecture, construction, advertising.  Words and images.

You live where you live partly because someone put a house or apartment there.

Or an entire suburb.  With overwhelmingly large buildings to hold large numbers of people.  From different places.  Now placed together.

You go where you go partly because someone built the roads there.  Going the way they go.  Taking you where they take you.

You buy things partly because someone advertised them and it created a desire inside of you.  Sometimes with words.  Sometimes with images.

Here we see and hear these thoughts on modern life through the eyes of one woman.  Juliette.

She will be our guide.

Juliette is originally from Russia.  She is a resident of this new residence where people from different places are now placed together.

A new suburb in Paris.  A new movie looking at this new landscape.

Not the grand old stone buildings defining the Paris we have seen in so many movies in the past few weeks.

But new buildings.  Of steel and concrete.  Thrown together quickly to accommodate the masses.  Ugly.  Functional.  Colonizing.  Turning cities into ant colonies.  Turning people into ants.

Godard was already thinking about it in his first film, Breathless (1960).  Michel Poiccard is on the run.  He is with his girlfriend Patricia Franchini.  They get out of the taxi.  They look around the neighborhood.  A grand old stone building on one side of the street.  A new steel-and-concrete structure on the other side.  He tells her it makes him sick.

And here in this film we see the ever-present, ever-working construction sites of construction cranes.

Juliette became a prostitute because she needed the money.  She could not make it as a secretary.

A man named Robert paid for her services.  Then he loved her.  Then he married her.  Then he provided for her.

Then they could not afford the life they were trying to live.

So he asked her to go back to work to help them make ends meet.

Robert works at a garage.  As a mechanic.  They have a son.  He goes to school.  He is writing an essay about whether boys and girls can get along, and how and why they can or cannot.

Juliette works during the day.

The men who pay for her services are as lifeless as robots.  Juliette and her coworkers are robotic in return.

They seem to take no pleasure in what they are doing.

Godard presents us with a world without joy.  Or whimsy.  Or community.  Or fellowship.  A world without dreams.  Or creativity.  Or fun.  Although there is a modicum of love.

The family stays together.  Robert does his duty.  Juliette does hers.  They take care of each other.  They take care of their son.  Their son seems to feel safe and happy.

As he plays with his toy gun.

In this film life consists of making a living.  Trying to get by.  Influenced by the words and images around them.  By architecture and advertising.

Godard thinks about the limits of language.

You see a picture.  You try to describe it.

The words you choose describe only part of the picture.  And not even fully the part you do try to describe.  And even if you make a true statement about what you see, it can be misleading.  The listener may hear your words and envision an altogether different image than the one you intend.

Godard can say that Juliette takes her car to her husband's garage.  To the garage where her husband works.  But when he says that he leaves out other things.

For example, there is another woman there at the garage getting her car worked on, but he does not mention that.

And the leaves on the trees are moving in the wind, but he does not mention that.

How many other things in the picture of the garage are left out in the statement he makes?

And even what he does describe is incomplete.

We are looking at the garage, and we see its shape and size and layout, its color scheme and the tools and cars and workers there.  But language has only given us one word.  Garage.

Godard further asks why we call it "her husband's garage."  Why say his garage?  Why not say the garage?

He further asks why call it a garage at all.  Why does anything have the name it has.  Who named it?  How did we come to agree on it?

When we watch the images he shows us, we see something altogether different from what we hear in the words he speaks to us, even though we can attest that what he says is true of what we see.

Godard points his camera at advertising signs and slogans.

But he cuts them off.

He shows the sign for a Carwash, and the carwash below it.  But all we see is ARWA.

It is playful.  It is thought-provoking.

Godard is also thinking about politics, as always.  And he is shifting his positions away from those he held at the start of his career.

As a film critic he was enamored with American films and American culture.  As a new director of the Nouvelle Vague he expressed this affection.

Now he is growing more critical of America's place in the world, both politically and culturally.

Juliette herself thinks about this.

She sits in a room.  She and her coworker are providing services to a man.  She glances over and sees a copy of Life magazine.  Vietnam is on the cover.  We turn the pages.  There are pictures of men dying.  Brutally.  Graphically.  She sees the pictures while there in the room to give service to a man.

She says--

"It is a strange thing that a person living in Europe on August 17, 1966, can think of another person living in Asia."

She herself meditates on words and images.

She tries to imagine how one could have thoughts without words.

She thinks a thought with words--I'm going to pick up Robert at the Elysees-Marbeuf--and then she tries to think that same thought without using words.

The film is thoughtful.  Honest.  And asks good questions.  And Godard does not presume to know the answers.

But he does indulge in his naïve idealism.

As someone who seems to believe we can change human nature, and human behavior, through the power of the state.

They sit at a table in a restaurant.

Someone asks, Is that the Nobel Prize winner sitting across the room?  Ivanov.  Apparently a fictional character.

We go to him.  He talks to a woman.  He defines "the Communist ethic."

He defines it as "taking care of one another, working for one's country, loving it, loving the arts and sciences."

Does Godard himself believe that?

In this film Godard has criticized Vietnam and Hiroshima, but at least one character mentions Lenin with praise.

Do the Communist concentration camps and mass murders not matter?

Do the lives of 20-60 million people murdered by Joseph Stalin in his carrying out of the ideals of Vladimir Lenin not matter?

Does the removal of human freedom and the forcible taking of other people's property not matter?

At least Godard has the woman respond to "Ivanov": "I get it.  It's money.  It's a great evil since you start to steal unwittingly."

This film fails to address the problem of original sin.  It tries to think through complicated human social and political problems without dealing with the root of human nature.

And because it does not begin with the root of the problem, it will never come close to finding the answer.

With this film Godard leaves the Nouvelle Vague behind and begins a journey he will travel for years to come.

We will go with him for a few more films in the next few days.

Let us see where it takes us.