In other words, when critics describe Godard’s work as more and more radical towards the end of the 1960’s and onwards, and when they describe his aversion to mainstream filmmaking towards the end of the 1960’s ad infinitum, what they really mean to say is that his films are no longer moving images to be watched and critiqued, so much as ideas; to be read, studied, explicated in the context of society and therefore given new meaning and purpose at any given time throughout which the person doing said “explicating” deems necessary.
Ok. So, when I saw Masculine/Feminine for the first time, my initial reaction was: great film. Upon thinking about Masculine/Feminine, the only thing I wanted to do was go back and read the film again – give it its proper meaning and thought process. Is that not what Godard had intended? We as the audience are as just as much part of his “idea” of filmmaking, as anyone else involved in the making of his films.
As mentioned in class, Masculine/Feminine was one of his first films considered unconventional as well as the precursor to the genre of film that Godard would create and/or master throughout the rest of his career. After all Masculine/Feminine was a film about the "idea of youth."
I think that means: it was (Godard's first film) about the idea of everything that was going on in Paris in the 1960's – in terms of the future of a country/city/political base/economic policy, etc. – and thus – yes, it was a film about the idea of everything.
So then language, made up of words, designed to express ideas – is something Godard can and would create in his films (?).
"Words enter into discourse of another order, either to fix an ambiguous meaning, like a label or a title, or to contribute to the meaning that cannot otherwise be communicated, like the words in the bubbles of a strip cartoon. Words either anchor meaning, or convey it." (Wollen 118).
I think for Godard, every word used is an anchor to the meaning of something, some idea, some ideology having not been expressed properly enough through an image, therefore becoming its own image, its own idea of a word.
After Masculine/Feminine came Made In USA. It's interesting to watch these chronologically:
vs.
Masculine/Feminine almost seemed to be the prolougue to what was to become of his next films, in terms of a picture. While the ideas of a mass culture of consumerism, violence, confusion, and general disallusioment where all the same, the picture became that much more pronounced, in terms of a word......
So then for Godard – the concept of an image takes on the concept of an idea, in order to define a word.
-erika
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