G-dard's films often achieve breathtaking and philosophically rich effects seemingly at odds with their seemingly random, uncontrolled, aleatory qualities and unconventional structures.

2 Ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais De Ce Film...

G-dard hates the institutions of capitalism, industrialism, war-mongering, consumerism, materialism, pseudo-intellectualism wherever they exist, be it the US or France.

Paris is alive with endless tympanic construction designed to facilitate capitalism and consumerism while our xenagogue Juliette, awash in weltschmerz, is decaying on the inside as a result of this "progress".

Dead objects are still alive while living persons are often already dead.

All the film's themes are in the opening sequence: the adverse psychological and retromorphic effects of construction, the vitiative effects of capitalism and consumerism and materialism on people and society, both internally and externally, people as objects and commodities, psychomorphism (objects are alive and will please you more than another human being or nature: pinball machine is alive and breathing and in full motion and more entertaining than anything else in existence, while Juliet Berto [café scene] treats Robert like an inanimate object), life as nothing but a puppet of advertising, consumption, exchange, money, etc.

2 Ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais D'Elle is about the impact of commodity culture on subjectivity and social relationships. The film explores the effects of commodification, advertising, and popular culture on social relations, on subjectivity, and on the status of things and consumer goods in the environment, especially their presence as visual artifacts.

G-dard shows us a Paris under construction transforming into a vast marketplace and site of consumption. G-dard explores the frustration and desperation (prostitution...) provoked by the discrepancy between a large sector of the population with limited buying power and the wealth of goods available for consumption. He was telling us that in order to live in Parisian society today, or any capitalistic society, at whatever level on whatever plane, one is forced to prostitute oneself in one way or another, or else live in conditions resembling those of prostitution.

He investigates the impact of an economically and architecturally changing Paris on its inhabitants, which includes the correlation between consumerism and prostitution within the "new" city. He investigates how the way people think and feel and live are contingent on the architecture and economy around them, and how they're forcibly caught between the newly built modernized architecture (defined confining spaces) and the high cost of living within that city matrix.

Consumer behaviour is created and shaped and manipulated by architecture.

The landscape itself is being prostituted.

Urban spaces are being remade in a way that negatively mutates the pathologies of the inhabitants.

G-dard attempts to recover the clear, productive reality of objects and images from the artificial signs and manufactured meanings that glut our contemporary world, especially signs and meanings that are generated by and in the service of commerce.

Jump-cuts, weird sound effects, voice-overs, narrative absurdities, close-ups and other formal elements all contribute to the Brechtian "alienation effect", and G-dard wields these devises to perfection, disrupting normal kinds of identification and visual pleasure and cinematic narration, and re-establishing concrete distance from subjects/objects, in order to make objects appear like new, which allows viewers to approach the elusive real and see things again like new. Repeating for clarity, he disrupts unconscious viewing habits and preconceptions of "reality," enabling us to approach the "elusive real", and we see things again "like new", even if only for a few brief but precious moments.

Verfremdungseffekts - defamiliariazation for distanciation: G-dard reduces the emotional impact of art, reduces spectator identification, reduces mimesis and direct emotional involvement, provokes viewers into thought, jolts viewers into exercising our rational faculties, rather than allowing us to emote serenely and passively throughout the performance.

G-dard over-cites, he makes citation an explicit subject and tool, and thus restores a measure of materiality and difference to objects and people and relationships, which runs contrary to homogenizing tendencies of idealizing, reified, simulacral discourses that dominate "normal" narration.

G-dard highlights and exaggerates many reified meanings in order to deconstruct them. He seeks out an excess in the image which is irreducible to the functions attributed to it by its associated languages, and a potentiality for transformation is revealed. His hyper-reification of normal ideas we affix to things shakes up those ideas and calls them into question. He selects best angle not for visual pleasure, but for glimpses of essence, fresh significance.

G-dard sets up typically voyeuristic situations involving "objectified" female subjects, then amusingly undercuts the spectatorial pleasure and authority of those scenes. He offers images of erotic expectations, then frustrates or subverts them, denying the viewer of erotic gratification.

The bellicose pronouncements of Lyndon Johnson regarding Vietnam circulate in the same logosphere as both the advertisements for detergents and the philosophical reflections of the dishwashing Juliette on the nature of time. These different sets of languages coexist within the same space, no longer segregated into the opposing spheres presupposed by so many of the cultural strategies characteristic of modernity.

Language itself has been transformed into a [capitalistic] commodity, branded with a specific value and endowed with a specific function, no longer natural but manufactured.

The very tools we use to critique and interpret have been contaminated by that which we are critiquing and interpreting.

2 Ou Choses Que Je Sais D'Elle is a commentary on commodification and a commodity itself.

Jackhammers, motors, percolators, coffee cups, pinball machines, burning cigarettes, construction sites, signs, radio transistors, beer taps, fashion magazines, book titles, stacks of books, postcards, etc, impede communication.

The Mini plus Juliette and Marianne is the comic strip of the poster come to life. By association with the poster, via the editing, Juliette, Marianne and the Mini seem to have stepped out of the advertisement. That cinematic moment suggests the power and influence of commercial values, of advertising, on everyday life. And the next shot suggests that this is a malign/destructive influence, a wrecked car, with a poster in the background for another product or service (VIT) that assures pleasant, economical trips, without incidents. The three-shot montage progresses from the "comic strip" car to the real car to the real wrecked car (which contrasts with the VIT poster's assurance of "trips without incidents), which means advertising lies, consumerism wrecks us, commodification is not for our benefit, capitalism is a lie, etc.

The mise en abyme includes a meditation on the ontology of the photographic image and its pervasive relationship with mortality: viewers are meant to thin about the relationship between image and time and narrative.

The Coffee Cup sequence is pure bliss.

The social microcosm is, on the surface, utterly banal; a barman, a pimp, a bored girl, a guy smoking and drinking coffee, a beer tap, a cup, and unknown characters, American shoes, cigarettes, the Cokes are treated by the camera with the feeling that nature lovers reserve for mountains and waves and trees.

The Coffee Cup - the rhythm of the film slows as we enter this other space of meditation, drifting out of ordinary perception: a cinematic poem about the quintessence of things and the role of consciousness in a world which is irreducibly other....

The smallest details of the opaque liquid fil the screen, its bubbles of sugary foam slowing hypnotically, swirling, dividing, coalescing, expiring, re-forming, the Milky Way, imagine lying outside at night looking up at the Milky Way and thinking of the cosmos, milky bands of bland brown coffee reminds us of one's place before the immensity of the unknown....

Physical and metaphysical realities are separated by a thin shell of materiality that the camera's probing gaze effortlessly penetrates.

During the last shot the camera also drifts out of focus - a striking visual metaphor for lack of mental clarity, and other frustrations of consciousness; our Narrator muses on the enigma of death; then the camera eye and time pace it refocuses "pleasurably" (regular pace) to signify clarity and heightened awareness, which is echoed by the narration.

G-dard juxtaposes the uninhabitable space of a postmodern Paris under construction with voice-overs in which Juliette speaks lyrically of her vague memory of something like the experience evoked in Baudelaire's Correspondances. She's still haunted by the memory or dream of a landscape ("paysage") that looks back at us like another face ("visage") in a movement of mutual recognition and identification. Her dreamily disconcerned wistfulness is a last nostalgic look "back" at modernist nostalgia for authentic experience.

Language is the house in which man dwells.

Film Quote: [quote] The world alone. Today, when revolutions are impossible and bloody wars loom, when capitalism is unsure of its rights and the working class is in retreat, when the lightning progress of science makes future centuries hauntingly present, when the future is more present than the present, when distant galaxies are on my doorstep. My fellow creature, my brother.

Where do we start? But start what? G-d created heaven and earth, sure, but that's too easy. We should put it better. Say that the limits of language are the world's limits, that the limits of my language are my world's limits, and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it. And one inevitable and mysterious day, death will come and abolish these limits, and there will be no questions nor answers. It will all be a blur. But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. Everything will follow from there.

I don't know where or when... only that it happened. I've tried to recapture the feeling all day. There was the smell of trees. I was the world. The world was me. [/quote]