By 1966, Jean-Luc Godard had refined the experimental-ballad style introduced in A Bout de Souffle (1959), and was about to make a political choice to abandon mainstream cinema altogether; Le Mépris (1962) displayed the depth of his conventional abilities and the grandeur of his philosophy, and Weekend (1968) would soon come to symbolize his foray into a more overtly political, Brechtian method of film-making. In between these phases one sees the gradual development of a certain ethnographic trend in the mise-en-scene and montage of his texts, one that was a glimmer in the eye of A Bout de Souffle and remains very pronounced through Tout Va Bien (1971) to L'Eloge d'Amour (2001); this tapestry of certain formal and conceptual themes, in many ways influenced by Dziga Vertov's documentary rules and the ontological premises of Italian Neo-Realism, reaches its apotheosis in Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais d'Elle (1966). (1) Finally breaking out of the gangster-genre based films through which he initially engaged with and subverted classical-cinema practices, Godard abandons his cherished bedrock of cinematic history for a more sociological medium based on objectivism as a contextual construct. Godard himself admits that the narrative form of the film is only a pretext, that "it is not a story, but wants to be a document." (2) Through framing, montage, and the relationship of sound and image, Godard poses here perhaps his most coherent and straight-forward attempt at cinema-as-philosophy-that is to say, he sculpts the aesthetics of cinema in a way to suggest cinema not as the subject nor the servant of philosophy, but perhaps as a possibility of achieving the ancient goal of philosophy, to describe and understand the world in a way that transcends the dubious pratfalls of language. (3) This philosophy is a vision of the world in all its ambiguity, centering on the phenomenological attempt to decentralize the subject and to reconcile it to the inter-corporeality of existence.

The title itself, in all its ambiguity, presents many of these themes. Firstly, the notion of itemization so integral to modern artistic ethnography, which is presented in the film both as the portrait of a life as composed by the itemization of daily ritual, and by the ubiquitous consumerism as consummated in the final shot of the film (plastic and cardboard consumer objects aligned on a sheet of grass), epitomizes the proto-Pop-art themes so prevalent in works such as Georges Perec's Les Choses (1965). Furthermore, there resides the tenuous dynamic between subject and object, between cinematic voice and character, a Bakhtinian polyphony circulating among what rests behind and in front of the camera. And, lastly, the subsequent epistemological ambiguity of how a subject derives knowledge and creates and interprets meaning in what are ultimately tenuous social or inter-subjective relationships based on the currency of language . Regarding this last issue, Deux ou Trois Choses… adopts a methodology similar to Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language (Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty), whittling away the subject-object hierarchy by searching for a descriptive understanding of the relationship between an individual and its context.

Due perhaps to film theory's general preference for semiotics and its neglect of other philosophies of language, Wittgenstein has remained completely outside the realm of cinema studies. And, while this essay does not aim to fully develop such a reconsideration (as will hopefully follow), we would like at least to introduce the relevance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to both phenomenology and, the pair, to film theory. Analyzing the Bergsonian dichotomy of mental and physical worlds, Wittgenstein explores language as a function of reconciling sensory data to internal thought, a reconciliation at the center of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and theory of film aesthetics and psychology (Mitry). Recognizing the subject-object dichotomy (and the attempt to overcome this dichotomy via language) as the source of most uncertainty, Wittgenstein explores the existential contexts of feeling and thought that lead to such mistakes. Ultimately, Wittgenstein arrives through an analysis of normal daily situations to a description of how personal experience, which derives mainly from the body's position between internal subject and external object, in fact is responsible for creating meaning that is constantly vulnerable to contextual influences. How is this relevant to cinema, and in particular to Godard and Deux ou Trois Choses… ?

Firstly, on a methodological level, Godard embarks on a similar mission, which is the clarification of meaning via the observation of context; in order to do this, Godard takes moments of reality, or what Mitry would call "un mot du monde" (4) ("a word of the world") and presents it as a part of the whole, an object among objects, as epitomized by the relationship between a person and a modern city. However, each object, especially human, is also a subject, a paradox that Godard presents most strikingly by the confusion of a subject (person) being also an object (having a body that exists in a social context with other subjects and objects). While Deleuze is apt to note that with this film Godard's objectivism is fundamentally subjective due to the fact that he substitutes visual descriptions for the actual object, Godard does not stop there; it is not merely this description with which Godard attempts to arrive "at the interior" (5) of the object, but instead through a contextual slippage of relationships, relationships that prove, through the text, to be more crucial than any one subject or object (as prefaced by Godard's own explanations of the text). That is to say, Godard does not merely present the visual representation of the subject, but does so by taking up cinematic subjective positions that reveal the diagetic subject's relationship with everything around her; through this process, the text illuminates the fact that, in relation to language, cinematic expression is in fact closer to parole than langue; in fact, cinema is akin to a series of contextualized speech-acts, taking bits of (possible) reality and combining them through montage to create a self-sufficient system of meaning. (6)

What emerges is a sort of cinematic essayism that works in a spiral around and toward the subject in order to reveal the subject without exploding it; or, this text articulates the object without actually labeling it, thus avoiding the classical trap of courting the sublime. Using a kind of cubist realism (the un-abstract adoption of multiple view-points) to explore the relationship between subjects and objects, Deux ou Trois Choses… hybridizes documentary styles and uses specific themes of framing, camera movement and montage in order to provide a certain ethnographic mood based on contextual existence, even if it ultimately testifies to how very hard it is to actually know a person, to understand their situation, when such knowledge derives so much of its significance through a language-system that problematically tries to bridge the interior with the exterior.

According to Godard, the film intends to provide unbiased glimpses with varying depth into the lives of multiple people; by regarding as much their relationships with the world as the individuals themselves, the text should construct a portrait of "l'ensemble", "the together"; in order to do this, Godard attempts "to describe them both as objects and subjects…. That is to say, I cannot avoid the fact that all things exist interiorly and exteriorly." (7) This blatantly phenomenological statement bears testimony to the influence Merleau-Ponty had on Godard (who cites Merleau-Ponty numerous times in published texts in order to describe cinematic mise-en-scene), a reference that will prove important to understanding the process by which cinematic expression in fact relates more closely to processes of perception than it does to signification. Directly following, Godard quotes Malraux:: "I hear other voices with my ears, I hear my own with my throat", a reference that highlights the Wittgensteinian theme that dominates the film, which is the duplicity of body and mind and how the two interact through and with language. We find Juliette, the subject of Deux ou Trois Choses…, perplexed by the notion that she can have sex without importance, can be just an object in such a way without subjectivity, while simultaneously realizing that she clearly feels her arm when she moves it; that is to say, she can be an object, a subject, or a subject-object, depending on the context. Just as Wittgenstein engages this issue with the contextual act of social existence, Godard uses the cinematic form most illustrative of the parole of life: ethnography. By deriving many stylistic elements from the documentary tradition (especially those of Dziga Vertov, whose name Godard will appropriate two years later for his production group), Godard experiments with sound and image in order to merge the genres of television news, kitchen sink realism, and city symphony, in quest of a cinematic form capable of engaging the philosophical problems encountered by Bergson and Husserl. (8)

Though the conflicts between sound and image in this film have served to analyze the cinematic representation of women (an analysis well-performed by MacCabe et al, Godard: Image, Sounds, Politics, 1981), it is useful to continue where that study stopped: that is, perhaps, what that study skipped, which is the aesthetic self-consciousness produced by a text that constantly draws attention to its own form. For example, numerous times in the film, be it Juliette (the protagonist) speaking about the objects in the room she is in or the voice-over narrator describing her, there is reference made to something guarded outside of the frame, an incongruence that draws direct attention to the frame itself, the limitations it imposes, its relationship to the greater diagetic world and the possibilities that it implies for the centralization of meaning in film (cinematic meaning at all times being constructed along a network of dimensions, including those of sound-and-image, in-frame and off-frame, etc). This relationship is further scrutinized by the voice-over narrator's saying "she turns to the left", a descriptive statement that is in fact true for those of us facing her, but is the very opposite of her own reality; thus are we drawn into a critique on the relativity of truth and the ambiguity of meaning that turns on the axis of the subject-object problematic relating to subject (is it the author? the narrator? the protagonist?) and object (is it the overall meaning? the plastics? the protagonist?).

These two examples demonstrate the themes, so dear to Godard, of the inherent ambiguities of cinematic expression, the struggle between author and character, sound and image, that represent the schizophrenic subject of modern civilization through the form of an industrial art. Godard never once tries to conceal the fact that cinema is an industrial art that has arrived in an urbanized world; quite the opposite, his camera tries to accept the world as it is in order to achieve that sense of "l'ensemble", of things-in-their-relationships, that is at the center of the ethnographic trend running through his entire body of work and would find its source in the influence of André Bazin and the films of Italian Neo-Realism, and in particular the neglect of montage in preference of mise-en-scene.

More than ever does Godard explicitly set out here to create a documentary film, a social artifact, which he reveals in his relevant statements about wishing to be the director of television news and trying to make the text of this film like a document. (9) He attempted a similar thing with Les Carbiniéres (1963), which promotes itself as a war-documentary in order to criticize the covert aspects of the Algerian War; however, it would be more pertinent to discuss Vivre Sa Vie (1962, basically the same story with a different end), which also utilizes such Brechtian tools as intertitles and direct address in pursuit of a similar ethnographic tone; and, while a more in-depth comparison of the two will in the future yield a striking understanding of how each uses its own proper set of aesthetic tools (plastics, denotations) and principles (ideas, connotations), it suffices here to draw attention to the fact that they use similar or identical settings and character relationships. I note this specific similarity to mark the difference: whereas the intensely cinematic aesthetic of Vivre Sa Vie uses this space to draw attention to the aesthetic form itself, Deux ou Trois Choses… uses a much more dry, flat aesthetic foundation in order to draw attention to the people's relationship with this space.

In this sense, Deux ou Trois Choses… bears a striking resemblance to various traditions of tele-visual and documentary languages of reality; and, while the influences of John Grierson and Jean Rouch are noteworthy, what is more provocative and crucial to the text's aesthetic construction is the influence of Dziga Vertov; not only did Vertov wield immense ideological influence on Godard, but it is from Vertov that Godard derives the paradigm of montage used in this film, which is based on the system constructed by Vertov for the production of actualities, newsreels. "Le montage d'idées", as Mitry calls it, relies on an a-posteriori ordering of independent objective facts, whose unpremeditated juxtaposition expresses an idea impossible to conceive outside of the relationship therein established. (10) This manifests itself in the text in visual patterns quite anomalous to Godard: the excessive use of medium close-ups as opposed to his signature detached long-shot, and the near-complete stasis of the camera, so very different from the frenzy of A Bout de Souffle, the regenerating circles of Le Mépris, and the endless lateral track of Weekend. (11) While being no less laden with connotative intent, the aesthetic themes of Deux ou Trois Choses… permit the juxtaposed presence of context, as is epitomized by the frequent interjection of harsh images of urban de(recon)struction.

This "totality of experience" is, of course, paradoxical in its ultimate intent: that is to say, one hopes to describe a unique existence by revealing its contextual relationship with everything around it. In order to proportionately represent "l'existence singuliére" (13) via the essayistic navigation of a subject's relationships with its context, the text functions upon the dialectic premise of the human being and the city, the ultimate modern symbol of existentiality in a social body. A fundamental family resemblance between the epic documentary tradition (Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1927), Berlin: Symphony of a City (Ruttman, 1928), A Propos de Nice (Vigo, 1930)) and the post-war "new" Cinemas (Rossellini's war trilogy (1945-'47), Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Resnais, 1959) Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972), anything by Fassbinder, Wenders, etc.), the modern city serves film language as an aesthetic connotation of ethnographic rhetoric. Godard has traditionally promoted himself (and been hailed as) the great martyred Parisian; though actually Swiss, he was an active part of many large socio-cultural movements that started in Paris in the '50s and '60s, and his representation of the city and its inhabitants echoes the cynical appreciation and self-consciously sentimental nostalgia similarly found in Proust, Victor Hugo, and the paintings of Renoir. Unlike films in which the city itself is merely a secondary character among others (A Bout de Souffle, Une Femme Est Une Femme), Deux ou Trois Choses… follows the trend of Alphaville in its direct engagement with (and independent representation of) a location to create ideas surrounding its inhabitants.

The city plays a social function, and the Paris of Deux ou Trois Choses… is one of gray lines and sharp angles that conflict with the soft orange roundness of the human forms, a space of destruction and reconstruction of inorganic materials and machines. This juxtaposition is performed both in montage (a shot of a person, a shot of the city), direct presence (a person walks through the city), and negative presence (the backdrop of the city that frames the opening interviews). It is a city that has begun to develop in spite of its inhabitants, promoting economic development in lieu of the happiness of those who actually live there. It is noteworthy that the industrial or urban shots all involve a battle between blue (sky) and white (cement, material): taking into consideration Godard's obsession with the French tricolor, we see here the complete neglect of red (blood, humanity) in the growing conflict between nature and industrialization. The organic influence of this skewed value system (which Godard introduces in the Wordsworthian inter-title "New Lessons Concerning Industrial Society") is not confined to aesthetic of spatial relations, but has dire moral consequences as well. (14) Godard himself notes the obvious, that the goal of Deux ou Trois Choses… is to demonstrate that Parisian social existence requires the prostituting of the self, (15) a pertinent issue that manifests itself most profoundly in the scene in which Juliette comes to terms with her own existence as both subject and object.

The theme of prostitution ultimately confronts the reconciliation of an internal subject with the necessities demanded by an external context, thus creating an overall notion of the social body. The obvious narrative relevance of prostitution (epitomized by the inter-title "Introduction to Ethnology" that prefaces Juliette's first "sex scene"), and its symptomatic exploration of sexuality, operate within a certain theme of anatomy, insides and outsides, the veins of visual lines carved by roads through the city from a bird's-eye-view, the conceptual obsession with itemizing subjects and objects. Narrative methods (such as the documentary agency of "the interview") serve mainly to echo this visual theme, which manifests itself in a recurrent use of the close-up, most notoriously with the swirling coffee and the hair-rinser (but also, to a degree, with aerial views-what is a close-up of a city?!). In the first example, the close-up offers a visual representation of the ideas being expressed from an ambiguous voice on the sound-track (the constant reformation of meaning, the spirals of relationships). In the second, the visual representation offers an existential definition of the context in which the subject is functioning.

An untypical Godardian device, the close-up performs for Deux ou Trois Choses… what Fernand Léger strived to instill in a wedding of film and Futurism. (16) Léger's analysis of the close-up, unlike those of Balasz and Barthes, is infused with an early-modernist avant-garde appreciation for machines and objects, the millions and millions of tiny pillars that hold up modern civilization. The close-up holds not only the epistemological capability to reveal something in microscope, but furthermore has the capacity to pull an ordinary object out of relief, to make it the center of attention, the subject-hence the comment that "art is the humanizing of forms"-and in many ways (à la Joyce) to explode it, to make it so absurdly large that an otherwise easily-missed feature can adopt a very heavy significance. Not only does this method suggest the sublimity (17) of a single, perhaps otherwise insignificant object, but it also suggests the ambiguity of what separates an object from a subject (or, for that matter, forces one to consider how the same thing can be both). What has always been relegated to be an object is, suddenly, a subject, projecting meaning at you, an external building that looms and casts you into the shadows, or the ceiling that encloses you in your room, defines the space of your existence. (18) This reinforces the aforementioned organic nature by which the human condition is affected by its material and spatial surroundings (in this case for the worse). In Deux ou Trois Choses… the close-up destroys the subject-object hierarchy by illustrating their interchangeability, the conceptual origin and result of the aesthetic theme of short-take close-ups connected by Vertovian editing.

This Futurist device (the close-up) is integral to the film's basic cubistic structures, which also include color themes and geometric juxtapositions, and is cohered by the dominant concept of multiple perspectives. Like Musil's method of essayism, or Adorno's negative dialectics, Deux ou Trois Choses… functions with intent upon revealing the object by sliding along subjective positions. However, whereas Musil was confronting the strict scientific formalism of logical positivism in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and Adorno was confronting the totalitarian quest of monolithic philosophical methods, Godard is confronting the bourgeois dominance of classical cinematic language by the subject, hoping to combat this with a coherent aesthetic system. As Godard's four-step process for the film illustrates, this philosophically thematic style is the cinematic transposition of the phenomenological ontology that generates such artistic methodologies as essayism and cubism. To show everything around a person is to describe that person's existence as fully as possible, thus the great ethnographic dictum. However, this is only made possible by the ability to turn the inside out, to include into this polyphony the "outside" within the subject: a close-up of a personality: language. If visual surfaces were everything (contrary to Godard's every aesthetic suggestion), describing and understanding would be simple; what is confusing is when these surfaces become the frontier, an object surrounding a speaking subject.

To the misfortune of Dufrenne and Mitry, Godard does not relegate his subjects and objects to their perceptual existence, but instead balances this with the fact that they try to reconcile this existence through language. So Wittgenstein, Juliette speaks dryly and with complete distanciation about how odd it is that a man is about to put himself inside her, which she concludes by saying, with a bit of curiosity, "Yet I feel my arm when I lift it." She is coming to terms with the fact that she, her independent self, can be both subject and object; she comes to terms with this through language. It should not be dismissed that Juliette says, as well, that "Language is the house where man lives": language can be seen as well as co-existing in this inter-subjective field, an object that is also a subject that offers us help and makes demands, a contextual fact of existence that has severe consequences. Juliette speaks lastly of how she feels a bond with the world, a notion that is followed by a 360-degree pan of the room; she then says "you could say it can't be expressed in words, but I feel that my facial expression has meaning." Thus does the text demand further analysis of the contextual relationships created between language, image, and body, within the greater exploration of subject-object dynamics.

Notes

1. While this essay is not going to confront directly the success of Godard's own proclamations about the film, let us at least note the basic ideas introduced in "Ma demarche en quatre mouvements" (reprinted in Godard par Godard, p.296-8). These "four movements" include: 1) "objective description" (including the objective description of objects and of subjects), 2) "subjective description" (of subjects [through emotion] and of objects [through subjects relationship to them], 3) "study of structures" (relationships of subjects and objects), and 4) "life" (provocation of sentiments of togetherness).
2. ibid. p.296
3. One might be tempted here to explore further the proposal that the being or essence of an object can only be realized through perception (Mikel Dufrenne, cited by Mitry, Esthetique et psychologie du cinema, p.179)
4. ibid., p.79
5. Deleuze, Cinéma II, l'image-temps, p.21
6. One should note here a necessary rejection of the ongoing attempts to reduce cinema to a comparative language (Astruc, Metz) that is rightly rejected by Mitry and Deleuze. As Deleuze eloquently states, "this language-system of reality is not at all a language" (ibid. p.43); it is definitely a system of signification, but in film signification is always on the periphery (Barthes), is always a result of syntactical relationships.
7. ibid. p.296-7
8. Godard categorically demonstrates the centrality of these themes in the aforementioned article, "Ma Demarche en Quatre Mouvements".
9. Ibid. 298
10. For an extended analysis of this form of montage, see Jean Mitry, ibid. p.191-5.
11. Important note: there is one scene in the film that is replete with camera motion, a continuous track-and-pan shot around the internal space that serves as daycare center, travel agency, and whorehouse. This scene, greatly reminiscent of the extended apartment scene of Le Mépris, reveals an endless cavern of divided internal space, a theme reprised by Godard to accentuate the way in which modern space is fragmented and disjointed, the way these objects (buildings) are carved around us to provide separation for the subjects (people) who dwell within.
12. David MacDougall, "Prospects of the Ethnographic Film" p. 147
13. Merleau-Ponty, cited by Godard, ibid. p. 270.
14. "A landscape it like a face" Juliette says to the camera; we then cut immediately to a horrific pile of cement rabble and metallic construction mobiles-the face of modern civilization is not a tender, of even humane, one. This is reinforced by the interview with the female secretary who was fired and cannot find work because she is too old, which is followed immediately by a pan of office buildings. We see here the associative capabilities of the form of montage used in this film.
15. Ibid. p. 298
16. See Functions of Painting.
17. Not only do we refer here to the notion of the sublime that recognizes the impossibility of directly articulating it; more importantly would we like to note the relevance of framing and the limitations it imposes, which, be they mathematical (as in this text) or dynamic (as in most other Godard texts) provide the aesthetic equivalent of the two Kantian sublimes (Deleuze, Cinéma I, image-motion, p.79)
18. It is useful to note here that this is exactly what Godard tries to explain by "subjective description of an object".
    

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