If You Want to Find the Message in a Godard Film,
then Cherchez le Pimp!
John Kriedl, Jean-Luc Godard Twayne Publishers (Boston 1980), reminds us
that in a study made of prostitution in France in the last days of the IV
Republic (1954-58), it was revealed that one out of every eighty Parisians
women were prostitutes. The prostitute can thus be seen as a protagonist of
French society. Accordingly, Jean-Luc Godard moved the prostitute to the
centre of his first five films.
Now if one goes to Godard¹s earlier film work Breathless, A Woman Is a
Woman, and The Little Soldier, we see the beginnings of a subjection of
women to a rigorous semiotics scrutiny. Godard¹s women appeared almost
extra-filmic, leaning out of his films, and as they did so, were subjected
to a rigorous, almost Gestapo-like questioning. Kriedl goes on to argue that
continuing this train in his film work, Godard introduced a technique for
analysing women that was a total break from all Hollywood convention; a
technique, Kriedl asserts, that borrows from sources as wide apart as
Umberto Eco, the TV Interview, and Russian Formalism.
This technique is called experimental semioticization, which means reducing
the character to a bunch of signifiers, stripped of any psychologism, and
making these signifiers belong to a class, concept or ism, such as
prostitution. This external semiotisation of a female character was a
technique totally new up to 1962 in France and 1968 in USA, which violated
all the character conventions pertaining to female images.
So if we search for a semantic meaning in a Godard film we rapidly find
information systems that tell us we are observing pimps and prostitutes.
Therefore we follow what narrative there is, until we see the prostitute
signifiers. These will also signify pimps and the signs we receive are
those giving the sense of prostitutes controlled by hidden pimps - in other
words, behind every prostitute is a hidden pimp.
Godard¹s semiotics on the sexual element of the prostitute/pimp
relationship, were of course just the codes and signs which pointed towards the real Mafia in our society. An illustration of this would be Godard¹s response to women undressing in his films. He stoutly defended this, and would point out that the real pimps in this area of our society are the ones who dress women. Taking this
Semiotic decoding a step further we find in Breathless that the Inspector is
the pimp of the law; yet, we also find that, even worse, by law is meant
(the real Mafiosa) the economic law. Therefore a successful decoding
process for the Godard film would necessarily take us through the following
steps:
1. Assume that each film will contain a prostitute and a pimp; evidence of
one is evidence of the other.
2. See that in an extension of the prostitute/pimp story, the pimp can be
the state or an agency of the state, and sexual prostitution will not be the
only signifier for the prostitute shown in the film. The signs showing the
pimp's control will stand for societal forced prostitution and will search
out what the character is really unwilling to do but does anyway.
3. Recognise that part of the prostitute/pimp story will have a
self-referential element that is Godard¹s self-criticism of his own, i.e.
deploring the artist (Godard) selling out to a capitalism.
4. Assume that the resolution to the story line of the film must happen
later, in real life, and that the film we saw is episodic, not final. Its
beginning happened before the film and its end will be found later, or, in
the next Godard film.
The pimp/prostitute relationship was one of Godard's bêtes noires and it
was through this device that he hoped to concentrate minds on larger social
issues.
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