Word: leaud
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Godard has always needed to know how people think about the real things and events of their experience. Masculin-Feminin (1965) included a crude attempt to find this out directly: one sequence had Jean-Pierre Leaud go around Paris asking housewives sociological questions. Significant though the confusion of their resources seemed, it only invited the question, What do these women actually mean? or, How are they using language? That's the question Leaud and Berto now realize they must answer before they can know anything else. First they decide...
...eighty-four . . . thirty-three feet six inches tall . . . my sweater [which we see as blue] is yellow." Either the sound or the image is lying; will we ever again trust the statements of men speaking on TV? She recommences: "I'm twenty . . ." "That's obvious," interrupts Leaud, offscreen, for us. "Yes," she replies, "but imagine de Gaulle talking to students, or Franco...
...Savoir works best in cases like this, where a certain mode of presentation suggests the way to analyze that mode. A more suggestive example occurs when Leaud and Berto decide to interview a Frenchman of the year 2000 by satellite; Godard cuts to a small red-haired boy dressed in red against a blue background. They feed him single words and he responds: "Aristotle"/"Red," "Circle"/"Lion." As in One Plus One's interview with Eve Democracy, we immediately begin weighing his responses for their political significance ("Revolution"/"October," "Stalin"/"Airplane.") Then, however, the problems implicit in this mode...
Those sequences which employ metaphor also have limited success, for their meaning comes less from their formal mode than from a semi-representational correspondence to real events. One sequence finds Berto singing scales on "oh." Leaud, standing directly behind her, begins to strangle her and say "ah"; she falters, begins brokenly saying "ah," and with Leaud's approval ends singing scales on "ah." Because the sequence represents something far more awful than the action it presents, it cannot avoid a note of falseness. It is not at all suggestive formally because the meaning to which it refers bears no relation...
MISTODIMAN . . . a mixture of "method" and "sentiment" . . . It's a word I made up to describe images and sounds. -Leaud...