IMAGES OF WOMAN, IMAGES OF SEXUALITY

Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe

'Do you know, madame, that despite your very light brown hair, you make me think of a beautiful redhead. La Jolie Rousse is a poem by Apollinaire. "Soleil voici le temps de la raison ardente..." Well, that burning-bright reason which the poet is looking for . . . when it does appear, it takes on the form of a beautiful redhead. That is what can be seen on a woman’s face, the presence of awareness, something which gives her an different, an extra beauty. Feminine beauty becomes something all-powerful, and it’s for that reason, I believe, that all the great ideas in French are in the feminine gender'. 

from  Une femme est Une femme

Are there objects which are Inevitably a source of suggestiveness as Baudelaire suggested about women?

Barthes

​'Following this line of thought, one might reach the conclusion that women have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed the more entirely by the sphere of consumption, to be captivated by the immediacy of the commodity world no less than men are transfixed by the immediacy of profit . . .

In the twenty years that Godard has been making movies one of the remarkable features of this work is its closeness to the contemporary moment. Perhaps the most striking example of this is La Chinoise, apparently aberrant when it appeared, yet confirmed in its actuality less than a year Iater by the events of May 1968. But all his films are inextricably locked in with the moment of their making, existing on the sharp edge between observing the world taking and changing share and, in giving it concrete form in representation, being part of the changing shares.

GODARD: IMAGES, SOUNDS, POLITICS.