Objectification as a Device in the Films of Godard and Breillat: Alphaville (1965) and Romance (1999)
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Date
2005-12
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
In the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties a new school of cinema, the New Wave, emerged out of the traditional French film industry to defy conventional modes of filmmaking and cinematic discourse. Led by the Cahiers du cinema, new cinematic and narrative techniques were sought to relate a story. Jean-Luc Godard specifically was the most progressive member of this group. He not only cultivated new techniques, but his work consistently comments on life in a modern society and continually is self-aware to the extent that his films objectify themselves in addition to their subjects. In the cinema of the following decades, lipstick traces of this new discourse can be seen in the work of a number of cineastes, notably Catherine Breillat. In her filmography, one notices a similar discussion but also a tendency to take what Godard initiated a step further, thereby creating a critical continuum between the two directors.
Despite their similarities, one will notice striking differences between the two in terms of their own critical approaches to objectification and to cinema as a whole. An investigation into the modern society will undoubtedly bring about sociological questions; however, the oeuvre of Godard also represents a questioning of cinema itself, rendering any reading meta-cinematic first and sociological second. Breillat’s differs in that the spectator finds it largely sociological and rarely meta-cinematic—the issue here is the image and how it operates in society and not the relation between images and the camera. The sum of the components of Breillat’s cinema adds up to not just an inquiry but an aggressive challenging of the images in the sociological context, whereas Godard is relatively passive in his analysis in this regard.
The paper will take a closer look at one film from each of these filmmakers: Alphaville (1965) by Godard and Romance (1999) by Breillat. The first is a film noir in which a detective is sent from “the outlands” to corrupt a future Paris dominated by technology and thought dictated by a master computer named 60 that outlaws all concepts and emotions deemed illogical. Due to this interdiction of the illogical, the semiotic chain of signifiers is truncated to its bare essentials; thus, the story, its characters, and the work itself are objectified. Breillat’s Romance is a controversially brutal film dealing directly with the sexual relationships between men and women by focusing on a particular woman attempting to define her independence from her lover through a sadomasochistic relationship with another man and finally through the birth of her child. In this piece, men and women are both reduced to objects by way of cinematic and narrative language, defying established representations of men and women to arrive at post-feminist commentary. Both films, although working towards different ends by different means, nonetheless exhibit acutely similar symptoms due to their use of objectification as a device.
As Breillat’s work is polarizing in both the critical and popular arenas, and as Godard tends to be a volatile element in cinema even today, I hope to make use of both critical journals and popular media in my research. More specifically, there are two archives—BIFI and the Inathèque—located in Paris that contain materials including radio and television interviews in addition to print materials that are indispensable sources for film research. Sifting through these exceptional archives will enable me to arrive at a thorough interrogation into the evolution of the feminine image from the New Wave to contemporary French cinema.
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Film, French