Une Femme
In my junior year of college, I took a Cinema Studies class, not knowing who or what was going to be covered. There, I was introduced to the filmography of French director Jean-Luc Godard. Our final project was to create a short film that examines Godard’s directing and writing style. I chose to focus on the complex, leading women of Jean-Luc Godard’s stories.
Although this class and project was just an elective credit, it brought a newfound passion for film study and rotoscoping. Below is my full artist statement and analysis of how Godard writes women. If you don’t want to read all that, I would still recommend watching at least one of Godard’s films if you haven’t already. My favorite are Two of Three Things I Know About Her and Contempt.
Although this class and project was just an elective credit, it brought a newfound passion for film study and rotoscoping. Below is my full artist statement and analysis of how Godard writes women. If you don’t want to read all that, I would still recommend watching at least one of Godard’s films if you haven’t already. My favorite are Two of Three Things I Know About Her and Contempt.
The women of Jean-Luc Godard’s films commentate on objectification and the female experience especially under the gaze of capitalism and men. I started this piece wanting it to be a sort of celebration to the women in Godard’s films. These female characters are complex and yet inherently simple by design, making it is hard to pinpoint why I personally find them so interesting. In the preliminary stage of the project, what I found that makes these women unique is how they interact with Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory. In “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey shares the idea of the “male gaze” as the phenomenon of women being sexually objectified for the heterosexual lens in film. In Godard’s films, women are being objectified, but this choice is conscious and socially charged as the women portrayed critique or redefine their own sexualization.
The movies I’m focusing on are Breathless, Vivre sa Vie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Hail Mary, A Married Woman, Contempt, and A Woman is a Woman. In these films specifically, I am interested in how women can be analyzed as struggling through similar conflicts that are mostly internalized. In different forms, they are all prostituted. This can directly reference their occupation like in Vivre sa Vie, A Woman is a Woman, or Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Or, it references their personal relationships with their male counterparts like in Breathless, Contempt, Hail Mary, or A Married Woman. In her objectification, Patricia in Breathless struggles to differentiate between lust and love and what she desires in her relationships. Her character develops throughout the film likewise to her male counterpart, but since the story is seen through his lens, Patricia comes off as more like a motivation for Michel rather than a singular character with individual hopes and desires. And yet, at the end of the film, she transforms from a hopeful romantic to a mirror of how we were first introduced to Michel. She is an example of Godard’s female complexities that are built off their constant objectification in consumerism and in the media.
Further down Godard’s career, this mirroring can also be from his personal relationship with Anna Karina. His films began to reflect their lives, from Vivre sa Vie with the relationship of the young man and Nana to Camille and Paul’s quarrels in Contempt. Karina’s acting style also influenced other women’s character portrayals like Brigitte Bardot as Camille, with the connection going so far that Bardot wears Nana’s wig for a portion of the film. Godard’s call to real world female relationships grows my fascination with their characterization throughout his career.
From these ideas I built a video collage again originally as an ode to their internal complexities. I sourced sound and video clips, and as I continued to collect these, I found many similarities with the women’s actions and choice of words. The way that they stare at themselves as they pass by a mirror, the way they get frustrated, the way they walk around the room. From these video clips I rotoscoped them at a low frame rate. The choice to stay within blues and reds for the rotoscope follow Godard’s choice to sometimes separate characters and backgrounds in primary colors like in Contempt or Two or Three Things I Know About Her. From the several clips collected, I was drawn to and continued the rotoscoping process with sequences that I felt best represented their characterization and objectification.
Throughout the process I realized how this idea may not be successful if I switched the lens to the male characters. Godard separates men and women as external and internal struggles. His male characters’ hopes and desires in film are more situational and action-based, like Michel hiding from the cops in Breathless, or Paul taking the job in Contempt. Their actions are internalized when their female counterparts question their actions. Godard’s men deal with the said, while his women tackle the unsaid. Godard and his actresses present the unsaid through body movement. There appears to be thought, questioning, and consciousness behind every movement made by these women. From Marie hesitating to apply lipstick for the first time in Hail Mary to Angela over-expressing her thoughts to her boyfriend in A Woman is a Woman, the movements feel natural, yet at the same time feels like their brains are two steps ahead from their bodies. The process of rotoscope studies all these small hand movements and head tilts, making me appreciate and connect to these characters more.
I represent the male and female’s internal and external differences in the rotoscope. The women are fully shaded and impressionistically detailed while the men are painted in plain black outlines. Part of the intention with this is to focus the audience’s attention toward the women rather than outshine their movements with the introduction of a similarly detailed secondary character in the composition. It can also be read as the coloring of the inside of the female characters while the men are presented as an outer shell. In my collage, pure black is reserved for the men and only appears on a woman for the scene from Hail Mary where Marie holds her mouth open and presents a black hole. This is to stay true to the iconic effect of the original scene, but also defining the inside of her mouth at this point of the film to the male gaze.
The compositing of the rotoscopes emphasize the similarities in Godard’s framing of these women in his films and draw other portrayals back to Anna Karina. Playing over the entire collage is Karina singing in A Woman is a Woman. Mixed into the audio are quotes from the different characters, correlating to the actress in the collage or the found correlation between the sequences.
What started off as a collage celebrating the uniqueness of Godard’s female characters transformed for me as a study of their similarities. Each actress and their characters are iconic in their own respect and are easy to spot even when they are broken down the simplest of forms and colors, but the way they present themselves on the screen trickle down to similar body movements that can be analyzed by their unsaid thoughts. Their collective critique and ownership of their bodies in a consumerist and male-centric society is relatable and timeless. Une Femme is a collage that is visual but also personal. Tracing their hesitations over and over again made me a mirror of Godard’s design.