Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou
1995; Salisbury University; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoShot in two months, during the summer of 1965, with hardly a script but two big starsJean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina-with only a few key locations in mind (Paris, Southern France), and at such a fast pace to make possible its premiere on August 29 at the Venice Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou is truly a breathless film characterized by a pictorial use of color and a disjunctive montage. It coincides with the disintegration of the director's relationship with his wife, Anna Karina, while it marks the end of Godard's socalled existential phase, before the political upheavals of May 1968. Godard's dialectical method and his taste for heterogeneity are well-known. Alan Williams, for example, describes Godard as an omnivorous collector of literary and visual sources (380), which in Pierrot range from high art to comic strips, from Pop Art to television broadcasts, and include the reproduction in all manners of written texts and book covers, anagrams and record jackets, neon signs and advertisements. Echoing Williams, Pierre Sorlin underlines Godard's delight in playing with the high and low registers of culture: Pierrot le Fou was studded with elements such as colours, drawings or paintings, which , were not related to the plot but which could be linked together because they shared some similarities. Godard used them to suggest that many combinations, many texts dealing with ' various aspects of art, were to be found in a film. ( 187) Just like the cinema produces new combinations by reconfiguring opposite levels of culture, collage replaces the distinction between high and low with a structure where each element is as important as the others. Furthermore, the advent of collage shattered into pieces a traditional view of art as something separate from life. In collage, the frame does not regulate any longer what gets into the composition, whereas life seems to hit the canvas and leave its traces in defiance of aesthetic norms and standards of good taste. Cultural historian Marjorie Perloffs description of collage fits well the narrative structure of Godard's film: In collage, hierarchy gives way to parataxis-one comer is as important as another corner. Which is to say that there is no longer a central ordering system. (42) That Pierrot equates cinema with collage is also confirmed by the advertisement used for the film, a paragraph structured like an inventory or parataxis of reference to the rest of the director's work: Pierrot le Fou is: a little soldier (petit soldai) who finds out with contempt (mepris) that you have to live your life (vivre sa vie), that a woman is a woman (une femme est une femme), and that in a new world, you have to keep to yourself (faire bande a pan) to not find yourself out of breath (a bout de souffle). (Leutrat 27) Finally, it is not surprising that Godard welcomes the iconography of pop art within the collage aesthetics of Pierrot le Fou which, in turn, include an array of industrial objects beloved by pop artists: cars, walkie-talkies, T-shirts, lipsticks, jukeboxes, and pin-ball machines. While collage dates back to the various modernisms flourishing at the beginning of the twentieth century-cubism, dada, surrealism-it is the world of pop art with its mixing of high and low, reality and abstraction that in the mid-sixties provided the stimulus for a renewal of interest in the meanings and effects of collage. As a text, Pierrot le Fou is thin, because its story line develops in a chaotic manner, and thick, because it is crowded with allusions, so that Godard's oscillation between these two extremes of all or nothing are in line with the workings of collage. There, many fragments accumulate, create density, while any sense of centering is lost. Yet, the possibility of superintegration coexists with what Jean-Louis Leutrat calls excentration. With objects from the world piercing the fabric of the fiction like meteorites, the narrative itself is about to unravel into many the other potential stories and characters lurking at its borders. …
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