Pierrot Le Fou

Godard's 1965 film Pierrot Le Fou is different from his earlier films in that he moves beyond deconstructing/mutating genres. Instead, for him, it is about capturing the essence of mutation itself. This leads me to believe that Godard, in this film, works in what Deleuze would call the ballade/ballad (trip/ballad). Deleuze explains that the mutation that comes from the trip/ballad is a sort of "weakness of the motor-linkages, the weak connections, that are capable of releasing huge forces of disintegration." We see this when the characters come into or arrive at situations that challenge their sensory-motor responses, and lead to dislocated movements (sometimes acts, sometimes observations/"seeing", at any rate a happening). Ferdinand does not know what to expect from the trip, instead, he comes into it head on; there is no perception of the action, it is just movement through events opening up to him. The center of attention is not Pierrot or Marianne but rather each event of the film, each new obstacle, becomes a center in itself. The situations themselves become the "characters" looking for action to fill them up, sometimes action arrives and other times it is nowhere to be found. This brings me to the passage Ferdinand reads about Velasquez. Like Velasquez Godard "drift[s] around things like air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core." This also speaks of the ballad aspect of the film, which moves through music/song in order to "transform" the events and their relation to the objects (including the characters) at hand. The relationship between Marianne and Pierrot is no different. Details about Marianne spill out onto the scene without any cause, transforming the event without any connectives. For instance, it is revealed that her so-called brother is actually her lover. Also, the relationship unfolds to separate the two characters' behaviors. Pierrot, along the trip, discovers his literary ambitions anew. Marianne, on the other hand, follows her urge to be free, her desire to move away from words and responses, she is about spontaneity and action. These little divisions are little creations/potentials that birth through/in the film. What Godard is filming here, as abovementioned, are these mutations and transformation, and not the concrete (instead, a non-normative storyline, non-solidified characters, etc). He takes this as far as moving through different artistic references outside of film history. Take for instance the color, the primary colors of Piet Mondrian seem to flow through the scene, seamlessly affecting the aura/tone of both the settings and the characters. At the end when Ferdinand paints his face, making an artistic creation of himself (with his face as the canvas), the "International Klein Blue" of Yves Klein richly colors the expression and "faceity" of the scene (especially in the close-up shots of his face). We move through "high art" references without ever seeing a direct re-presentation of the artists' works. These colors become something other, they are a mutation of their original form. But these mutations create new potentials, new combinations; they flow through new spaces, new objects, completely unlike their original space (the stretched canvas).

Some notes: Deleuze - Cinema 2
pp.19: [Characters] of the trip/ballad are unconcerned (they are 'mutants') [...] it is precisely the weakness of the motor-linkages, the weak connections, that are capable of releasing huge forces of disintegration...

pp.19: Godard says that to describe is to observe mutations. Mutation of Europe after the war, mutation of Americanized Japan, mutation of France in '68 [...] cinema [...] becomes completely political, but in another way...

pp.20: A new type of actor [...] professional non-actors [...] 'actor mediums', capable of seeing and showing rather than acting...

pp.20: [Even] metaphors are sensory-motor evasions, and furnish us with something to say when we no longer know what to do...

pp.22: [Elements] of the image enter into internal relations which means that the whole image has to be 'read', no less than seen, readable as well as visible [...] The cinema is going to become an analytic of the image...

Alphaville

Godard's Alphaville is an exquisitely oblique take on two genres, science fiction and film noir. It was brought up in class that perhaps the film is prophetic, in that it was about the future of our world. But is the film actually about the future? It seems to me that he uses and skews these two genres to create a new world. He uses Lemmy Caution to create a legend. It is what Vonbaun says upon meeting with Caution, "You'll become a legend Lemmy Caution," which adds to the fiction of the world we view, we see myth in the making. The world contains many disjointed and parodic gestures. This parodic aspect can be viewed in several ways. For one, it can be quite unsettling for the viewer, and at the same time it carries a comic element that draws us into the world, but at the same time keeps us from identifying with the characters. We relate to the forces of this cinematic world, but the characters are so abstrusely designed that we are unaffected by them, or do not know precisely how to feel about them. This parodic element also has an element of reflexivity in response to the world, and to ideology. Godard essentially, as abovementioned, creates his own universe in order for the viewer to juxtapose it with our own. This ultimately entrenches us in a new world, with new gestures, new modes of experience, as it is explored through the world of hyper-logic. But this new world allows us to distance ourselves from our own reality, our truth. From this film we can take this distance and look back on our own gestures, and see that they too can appear to be artificial; or that our sense of logic and religion can appear to be quite comic if we see what ritualistic habits they maintain. We get a sense that our own world is perhaps as artificial as Alphaville. The people of Alphaville do not see this in their world, they take reality for truth, "logic" as absolute. It is not until the system collapses that the artificiality is revealed. By then the people become baseless, their hyper-logic grounding collapses, and a crisis emerges. The people are empty, they become tactile, their sensory perception is new to them, it is no longer a trained instrument of action. Lemmy the legend understood this, his otherworldliness allowed him to see, like the viewers, that this is a strange place. Henry on the other hand was carried away by the world of Alphaville. He tried hard to maintain his otherworldliness (his "Outlandness") by looking for love, etc., but ended up forgetting himself, for instance, wondering what the word "why" meant (for it was not in the Alphaville bible). At any rate, Alphaville's relative proximity to our own world allows us to draw intimate connections between it and our own world. As it was mentioned in class, the buildings, the cars, the clothing, etc. are all very similar to our own. It is particularly the idea of Alphaville that takes us out of our worldly element. We see that the characters' behaviors are starkly different from our own. The freeway becomes an interstellar pathway between galaxies. The Alpha 60 computer, this "truth machine", heads the technocracy. The people become as affectless as their "ruler", the computer. Godard uses and construes our everyday objects and spaces to build false truths into this new world, Alphaville. It is precisely this making false of everything that reveals the "idea" of Alphaville. Godard exposes the nihilism of Alphavillean ideology, and Vonbaun's will-to-dominate, as opposed to will-to-power. It is nothing of the will-to-power. Instead, it prohibits creative potential, and adheres to the strict circulation of "logical" rhetoric. And affects or forces become numbed and/or exploited for Alphaville's own negative means.

Deleuze:
It is what Nietzsche called the stages of nihilism, the spirit of revenge in various shapes. Behind the truthful man, who judges life from the perspective of supposedly higher values, there is the sick man, 'the man sick with himself,' who judges life from the perspective of his sickness, his degeneration and his exhaustion.
pp. 141 Cinema 2

By raising the false to power, life freed itself of appearances as well as truth. . .
pp. 145 Cinema 2