the director said

The "story" of the film was taken from a report in the New Observer magazine at the time. The report pointed out that a large number of French women have to work as semi-professional prostitutes in order to pay for the high consumption of modern cities. When such reports on the social status quo fall into the hands of other commercial film directors, it is likely to produce popular dramas that focus on pornography, are sensational, and once again exploit and exploit women's bodies and their social class consciousness. However, in Godard's hands, a "sociological paper" was derived. This "paper" explored how the concept of consumption and economic behavior dominated the establishment of people's subject consciousness and self-identification in modern urban life. feeling formation. But, to a greater extent, it asks: how to express the above statement? In other words, it's a "thesis" that explores how to write a paper. If we have a sense of the theme of this film, it seems to be telling that in modern urban life, the false consciousness and subject identity of people as the main consumer are destroyed by the principle of commodity economy; in fact, more importantly, it also expresses a strict sense of "righteousness". "-style political, social, and moral rhetorical statements have made a rigorous inquiry to explore how such speech activities are established, that is to say, this film essay is about "how does the film speak? How does it reproduce?".

It is precisely because Godard put this material, which originally had strong emotional power, into the category of epistemology and handled it rationally, which caused the film to exude a certain nihilistic tone from beginning to end. Nihilism is both lovely and hateful. The lovely thing is that what it is doing is a kind of ideological "bitter plot" mode, self-flagellation, constantly pointing the scalpel of analysis and exploration at its own internal organs, but it often gets lost and lost in the maze; hateful Yes, every whiplash in the nihilistic self-punishment of nihilism makes us realize that we have been so engrossed in the obsession of feeling and thought that we are stunned; Collapsing our belief systems or making us hide our faces and flee in embarrassment, not daring to face ourselves again.

This description of nihilism and its possible effects is by no means an exaggeration, as it is the usual reaction phenomenon of viewers watching the film. The embarrassment is because many of our familiar intuitions and concepts of cinema have been scrambled, and the belief system collapses because we have lost the accustomed basis for the aesthetic and moral discourse on which to judge the film and its world. From beginning to end, this film is full of errors and defocusing of the distance between fictional and documentary films, the juxtaposition of "virtual" and "real", the disappearance and blurring of the difference between phenomena and ontological thinking, the confusion and disorder of sight and hearing, and the resulting fragmented narrative. It is also this kind of counter-narrative discourse form that prevents us from "concentrating" on the development and ups and downs of emotions and six desires such as joys and sorrows in the "storyline", let alone the fun and pleasure of watching this film. Don't get exhausted in twists and turns. In this film, the counter-narrative method is just a means, its purpose is to control and lock the commodity production mode to the domination and ridicule of people as the social subject, and the image meaning production mode to control and lock the human as the cognitive subject. An allegorical comparison. For Godard, presenting the social phenomenon of French urban women engaged in the trade of flesh is not necessarily more urgent than exploring the meaning of images. Because if we can't clearly think about the complex but fundamental question of "how the meaning of images is constructed", how can we use images to describe the seemingly basic yet more complex phenomenon of "consumer society and prostitutes"?

More strictly speaking, the above dialectical statement should be modified, because it implies: "How to describe the phenomenon of consumer society and prostitutes" after thinking clearly about how the meaning of images is constituted It can be solved. The relationship between these two different levels of problems is not as clear as the relationship between the scalpel and the patient's body. Perhaps the so-called different levels are just virtual illusions; these are two issues at the same level at all. Like some of the film's base genres that are confused and misplaced in this film, is there a fundamental difference between the fictional plot and the factual record? This is an issue at the same level, and there is no distinction of superiority or inferiority, or the importance of value, or the order of priority. In the creation of meaning in life, how much of the so-called factual truth is an element of fiction that cannot pass rigorous testing? However, such "factual truth" is usually regarded as the only criterion for testing authenticity. In the creation of image meaning, much of the recorded reality is the result of deliberate performance, while the fictional arrangement of performance is sometimes also the result of deliberate performance. A true record (of a performance). In the end, we will find that the opposition between fiction and reality may have been a deliberate opposition created by the convenience of thinking. Just like in the previous article, a series of speculations are derived from the analysis and interpretation of Godard's intentions in this film and forged two opposing premises. In fact, when "thinking about the formation of image meaning", it is impossible not to involve the issue of "consumer society and female image" to see the relationship of dominance and anti-dominance between images (consumption structure, meaning production, female image); When starting to describe and describe the phenomenon of "consumer society and prostitutes", the question of how the composition of images and their ability to reproduce shape the false consciousness of (women) people as social subjects has long been hidden. Now let's look at a few passages from the film.

The opening scene where Juliet appears on the balcony of a high-rise has already announced the film's thinking method. Accompanying the play's character Juliet is Godard's own low voice: "This woman is Marina Verratti. She is an actress. She is wearing a dark blue sweater with two yellow twill stripes, she has She's of Russian descent, her hair is dark chestnut or buff, I'm not sure which one." Then Marina began: "Dad Brecht wants our actors to speak as if they were people." Dahl's voice reappeared: "This woman is Juliet Jensen. She lives here . From this passage we see the separation dialectic of the relationship between the actor and the other characters. Actors no longer fit into characters to gain audience approval; instead, actors consciously watch themselves in the role of others. We thus watch the actors watching themselves act. The several layers of distance opened up in such an instant determine the tone of the entire film below and the complex interaction between the audience and the image. The first effect caused by this special relationship is the alienation of the audience's psychology and dramatic ability, so the perceptual identity and emotional rendering power are very weak, and the portrayal of the character's psychological motivation will no longer have a three-dimensional effect, but become a plane. . The so-called storyline is thus diluted by the actors (characters) who freely move between the story and the non-story world.

The same actor (character) estrangement occurs in many other scenes in the film. In the coffee shop, in the clothing store, in the hair salon, in the hotel pick-up, Juliet, Marina and other actors and characters occasionally walk and live in the story, but occasionally jump out to face the camera and give a monologue and a story before and after Irrelevant trifles. The role of such alienation effect is to disrupt the unified point of view in general narrative films. The establishment of narrative viewpoint aims to preset a comfortable and comfortable cognitive position and peep into the secret angle for the audience, thereby providing the pleasure of viewing or the value of moral rationality Confirm and judge. However, the inconsistency of viewpoints brought about by the "disintegrating" storyline and narrative logic in this film forces the audience to reconsider the conditions on which the inevitability of the film's narrative is based, and the meaning of the images. Whether the symbolic violence relationship between the formation and the narrative body is based on the audience's strong desire to find perceptual identification and so on.

The results of thinking about these questions do not necessarily lead to clear and unambiguous answers; instead, the conflicting views present a cacophony of voices and friction between symbols and meanings. For example, in the first coffee shop scene, the spatial relationship between Juliet, the woman next to him, and a women's magazine spread out on the table is cut into a hodgepodge that does not conform to the principle of subjective lens splicing. As for the meaning production and domination relationship between the subject and the object, the viewer and the viewed object is seriously disturbed. Then, the camera slowly dips into the liquid of a cup of coffee, so that the liquid surface fills the entire camera and screen. The black liquid and smoke bubbles in the wriggling and swirling stay on the screen that does not represent the point of view of any character, losing any relationship with the story. The referential meaning of inside and outside, the same composition and close-up also appear in the subsequent scene of Juliet and Robert in the bedroom, that is, Juliet's lit cigarette butts fill the entire shot; at the end of the film, a variety of goods are listed in in close-up. In addition, in the scene where Juliet goes to meet Robert working in the depot, the camera suddenly cuts to the fronds of a large tree by the roadside. In these cases, after an object with a certain fixed meaning is enlarged to the point where it is out of the normal relationship with its symbolic meaning production environment, the fixed meaning ceases to exist. The disappearance and derailment of this kind of meaning is not actually meaningless, but more of different meanings. In fact, they are all telling a story: a meaning has gained a dominant monopoly position, which is the result of violent conflict; it is the result of a narrative style mixed with a causal logic and a discourse of purpose, which suppresses the potential of many other meanings. As long as the push-pull lens extends in or out a little more, the material properties or symbolic properties of the object will be different. The so-called connection between meaning and the chain of meaning is actually nothing more than a desperate victory state in which the principle of pleasure is repressed under the principle of reality in our desires; it is also the futile pursuit of the eternally lost original meaning by the meaning subject. A puppet object arbitrarily sacrificed at times, so that the subject can refer to and obtain the consistency and complete independence of the subject. However, this puppet object replaces the lost meaning that the subject is looking for, and overtakes it, so that the subject is satisfied with the dazzling dazzling self-image reflected in the mirror, indulges in self-fascination and ignores the confirmation that the subject's self-image is caused by the object. Preset and locked position to watch and spy on this tragic fact. Therefore, the examples in the above paragraphs are an attempt to cut the chain between the usual production of meaning and image symbols, so that we no longer only look at the distant end of the chain of what the final meaning is attached to; when these paragraphs in the film When they become the "narrative noise" in the film, they are as tightly bound to our limbs

Godard's counter-narrative style in this film not only occurs in various relationships between shots, but also in the dialectics of sound and image. Since the beginning of the film, the noise of engineering construction, the noise of the pinball game machine in the coffee shop, the operation of household appliances, the sound of airplanes in the sky, the sound of trucks pulling, and the sound of cars on the road have filled our auditory nerves. The counter-narrative occurs because the sound level has not changed due to the appearance and order of the images on the screen, and it recedes from the foreground to the background in accordance with the dominant order of the images and supports the confirmation of the screen's requirement for the principle of true imitation. Therefore, the recording of these real voices did not give way to the authority of the narrative process of the images, but, like the dialectics of the actors/characters, formed the tension between the voices and the paintings. As a result, the narrative of the video is disrupted and interrupted, and the audience is once again forced to think out of displeasure to what extent the production mode of the meaning of the video has relied on the collusion between the sound and the painting to achieve the audience’s understanding of the position and the angle of observation. design.

In this film, you can hardly hear the sound editing techniques commonly used in ordinary movies. In ordinary movies, sound editing is the same as video editing. It follows the principle of transparency and integrates different levels of sound effects, sound, vocal dialogue and music. In a seamless story world, strengthen the psychological state of the characters or the atmosphere of the whole situation. However, the sound clip of the film is as "fragmented and disintegrated" as its image. Dialogues between characters are usually drowned out by various noises both indoors and out. On the balcony of the opening film, Godard introduced Juliet's scene, and the construction noise outside the building did not stop from beginning to end. The conversations in several coffee shops were almost overwhelmed by the incessant machine sound of the game instruments in the shop. Most frustratingly, when the video narrative has been cut to perfection, the audience is still somewhat reliant on sound, dialogue, or the many narrations of Godard himself to reassemble the overturned puzzle, but not only are these dialogues affected by noise. Seriously distracting, and even more discouraging by Godard's almost inaudible muffled voice-over, faintly indecipherable, one wonders how much of Godard's credibility as a narrator is left. What's more, the characters in the film are completely indifferent and deaf to the high-pitched noise, thus canceling all possible interactions between the characters and the environment, and making the audience's unbearable noise unable to get the common sense of the characters, the audience. The identity with the characters is also destroyed once again.

Like video editing and sound editing, the use of color in this film is the same as alienating techniques. According to the principle of pictorial imitation, the use of color in the film is the highest performance that does not hinder the progress of the grand narrative, conceals the independence of color existence, and assists in the depiction and hinting of the characters' situational atmosphere. Therefore, the use of color in the film is mainly based on harmonious colors, so that objects can be easily integrated into the narrative space, hidden and not obvious, and the formation or transfer of a certain emotional state is implied from the side. However, in this film, the strong contrast of the large primary colors makes the colors have to flaunt themselves independently of the narrative space. For example, in the passages of many outdoor engineering buildings, the land bridge is blue, the railing is white, and the construction vehicle is red; Juliet is in the first bedroom scene, her top, bed sheet, quilt cover is also blue, white, red; in the title design , titles in French also appear in the order of blue, white, and red. In the magazines Juliet flipped through on the table in the coffee shop, the images of women smeared their lips into a striking Union Jack pattern, also blue, white, and red; The scribbling pen in the coffee shop is red and the paper is white; the signboard of the outdoor gas station and the pumping unit are also large blocks of blue, white and red. Such a large use of strongly contrasting primary colors creates an uneasy harassment on the viewer's eye. The lack of intermediary of midtones and colors, the extreme contrast of blue and red, causes extremely busy pressure and burden on the extreme anterior and posterior retinal nerves, and it is impossible not to notice the difference between the meaning of the dazzling existence of colors and the image narrative and the visual narrative. its possible. These primary color blocks with extremely high levels of lightness and great saturation, due to the lack of gradual drop differences in hue gradients, make the color perspective space compressed into color block planes, plus the film's almost uniform hard and high-key lighting, all possible The sense of depth or the referential connection between the characters' psychological space and narrative space generated through the color arrangement has been written off. Therefore, the use of color (and light) in this film is non-referential, non-dramatic, non-psychologically suggestive, rather, it is self-referential, self-sufficient, and not narrative Independently existing cinematic elements of the service. In other words, like the images and audio-visuals in this film, it is a kind of code that is not maintained by fixed symbols and is constantly drifting freely.

On the face of it, Godard's work appears to be a random assemblage completely out of sequence. However, among the various contradictions and inconsistencies analyzed above, there is still a firm consistency, that is, no matter at which level of film symbols, Godard never gave up any break with the traditional film narrative style. At the same time, he tries to preserve the narrative remnants in his works to highlight the inter-referencing of dominant and anti-dominant discourse language in the process of symbolic meaning production. This is also the biggest difference between Godard and most avant-garde filmmakers. The latter tends to completely disdain the historical question of how the stereotypes of image generation have a huge impact on political society, while ostriches bury themselves in the sand of their own formal optical image experiments, or publicly exhibit their pale souls. Garbage; Godard has never taken lightly the dissemination and circulation of the image consumption structure and image meaning in the image society. Because he knew that this was not just an aesthetic issue, but a political one. It is a political issue because in the process of socialization of (image) sign production, knowledge and (image) meaning production process interact and collude due to the interaction and collusion of the power structure of (image) knowledge and the dominant (image) interpretive group. Historicity was killed.

In the poor video experience and concepts we share, the historical problem of how video knowledge is produced, redistributed, and consumed has never appeared in the narrative films we are most familiar with, and Godard in this film. The attempt is to subvert the mental image and narrative space of stereotyped images to produce meaning, to press the imaginary depth space between all symbols and their fixed referential meanings into a flat surface, as Godard said, "return to zero", and then Then start from zero to establish the historicity of the symbolic meaning of images. If Godard repeatedly delays and evades the positive treatment of the phenomenon of "consumer society and prostitutes" in the story content or the peeping exploration of details, it is because it involves The social, psychological, identity, desire and other issues of narration are historical issues, which cannot be analyzed and described by a non-historical narrative image style. In this fragmented story, we see the chaotic construction of a city, and at the same time, we also see the construction of a film with contradictory voices, paintings, and colors; we witness how commodities dominate the main body in the consumer society The phenomenon of consciousness, and at the same time, I also feel that film, as a commodity, also dominates our image consciousness. And Godard's suggestion is: just as Marina looks at herself from the role of Juliet, we should struggle from the position of meaning consumption set for us by the big narrative body, and examine the relationship between our subject consciousness and the composition of images .