Content area
Full Text
Shot 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...