A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard by Conley Tom Kline T. Jefferson & T. Jefferson Kline

Author:Conley, Tom, Kline, T. Jefferson & T. Jefferson Kline [Conley, Tom & Kline, Jefferson, T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780470659267
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-03-31T09:51:08+00:00

This method, in which the director murmurs fragments of speech that the actors then repeat, gives rise to several of the film's most remarkable features. The performers' flat and mechanical diction, as well as their exaggerated pauses between sentence fragments, can be understood as artifacts of this process of call and response: the prolonged moments of silence that punctuate nearly every instance of speech in the film may be understood as the actors' efforts to hear the lines that they will repeat moments later. Here, it is not the actors who improvise, but the director who improvises through them, and the transistor radio in the opening sequence functions as a mise en abyme of the film's operative structuring principle. The actors ventriloquize the director's voice just as Robert and Roger ventriloquize the voice of President Johnson; the voice of authority vaunting military victories to a country overseas coincides with Godard's whispered injunctions to his actors from outside the frame.

While touched upon briefly in the critical literature, this technique of off-camera microphones and hidden earpieces, used in nearly every scene of 2 ou 3 choses, is one of the film's most radical and underexplored propositions.10 It may be considered a serializing operation, following the filmmaker's method of breaking the visual surface of the film into a succession of repetitive modules: images of rectangular display cases in a clothing store, rows of gas-station pumps, or windows in a vast banlieue (suburban) housing complex (Figure 18.4) tend to critique the alienating seriality of the contemporary Parisian cityscape and its grid of regulation and control.11 The intervals that separate Godard's promptings from his actors' recitations transform the irregular rhythm of speech into evenly spaced segments: rather than being heard in a single breath, or with the pauses and hesitations accompanying everyday utterances, these verbal fragments are systematically interrupted by regularly spaced pauses. Such sustained alternation between silence and speech transforms the space of discourse into a serialized field, organized not by the irregularity of an actor's spontaneous reactions, but by the regularity of his or her acquiescence to an invisible authority's command. Godard's technique resembles the disciplinary scenario par excellence: the dictée or dictation, that mechanism of social training deployed in the French primary and secondary education systems, whereby the instructor recites a text that the student copies down, word for word.12

Figure 18.4 Screen capture from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) directed by Jean-Luc Godard (1967), produced by Anouchka Films, Argos Films, Les Films du Carrosse, Parc Films.

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