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95 C h a p t e r 4 REALIZATION “Between the ages of 50 and 60, he once again gave the impression that anything is possible, worked with the maturity of lessons learned, and continued to experiment like a searching artist. Godard was living through what one critic, Frédéric Strauss, called his ‘Golden Eighties.’” —Antoine de Baecque, Godard: biographie (576; m.t.) MIÉVILLE’S HOW CAN I LOVE AND FAIRE LA FÊTE The“Realization”phase of Godard and Miéville’s work together is marked by a shift from the experimental work of the“Communications”or Sonimage period toward narrative films. All of the films under discussion here—Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), Prénom Carmen (1983), Je vous salue, Marie (1985), Le livre de Marie (1985), Détective (1985)—are, more or less, narrative films in a way that films such as Ici et ailleurs or Comment ça va? really are not. There is a comparable gap between their earlier television work like Six fois deux: Sur et sous la communication (1976) and a program like Soft and Hard (1985), which is a much more lucid and accessible work than its precursor. Furthermore, the problems that are being played out in these works are less esoteric, although no less intellectually informed. Whereas the “Communications” films are all defined by various political engagements (the Palestinian struggle, the revolution in Portugal, a critique of the rise of television-led consumer capitalism), these “Realization” films are more closely engaged with interpersonal matters, specifically with the ways that men and women try (and often fail) to communicate and form intimate bonds. Of course, these kinds of considerations have political and philosophical meanings, and these works investigate these 95 96 Chapter 4 problems vigorously via indictments of capitalist-led alienation (Sauve qui peut [la vie]), meditation on theological problems (Je vous salue, Marie and Le livre de Marie), and a playful engagement with the philosophy of language (Soft and Hard). But viscerally emotional questions are front and centre (sometimes almost exclusively so, as in Prénom Carmen and Détective) in a way that they are not in the “Communications” period. One way to understand the thematic richness of this work, as well as the kind of aesthetic that Godard and Miéville were trying to develop, is to look at two short films that Miéville made by herself shortly after the beginning and just after the end of this period: How Can I Love (1983) and Faire la fête (1986). How Can I Love is a minimalist study in failed communication, and a richly visual one at that. The film presents one woman awkwardly breaking up with five different men, of five different ages, and for very different reasons. The encounters between the woman and these men are all photographed in ways that give a sense of intimacy, if not of connection. Miéville opens the film with close-ups first of the woman and then of a man smoking in bed, and then cuts to a medium shot where the camera is set low, essentially next to the bed. But this medium shot has the man in bed and the woman in the foreground, basically out of focus; that is the set-up where they have a brief exchange about whether he really said that he did not love her. This is typical for the film, which is made up mostly of compositions like this one and comparably cryptic, awkwardly emotional dialogue. The exception to this tendency is the film’s third sequence, which features a jarring cut to an extreme long shot of the woman in the mountains (an image that, as I mentioned earlier, looks very much like the mountain interview in her 1977 experimental television work, Papa comme maman), singing in English a song with the lyrics“How can I love a man / when I know he don’t love me,” complete with non-diegetic instrumental accompaniment . The music ends suddenly, though, when Miéville cuts to a shot of the woman walking down a mountain path. This is an odd sequence, one that pulls the viewer out of the soft-lit moodiness of the rest of the film. The alpine imagery looks a bit like something out of Sauve qui peut (la vie), which, as I discuss below, makes extensive use of the Swiss landscape; really, though, the shot looks most like the comparably disruptive alpine interview in...

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