Cool Desires, Godard Drives
Maureen Turim
Professor of English and Film Studies
University of Florida

Godard has said that all cinema constitutes "une histoire d'amour,
faites à deux."  Yet his illustration for this aphorism is the
collaboration of the Lumières brothers, who gave birth (his term) to
cinema through their working partnership.  While Godardian desire is
often imagined as such a love of cinema, it is as often presented as a
love of women, of his actress wives, or later, of young actresses who
evoke that past as spectre.

I come to this question of Godardian desire as a fragment in a larger
study of desire in the cinema.  How does desire drive Godardian
narratives, or conversely cool off to reach impasses, blockages, or
transmute into a desire for death alone? Is the expression of desire
centered in what we might call "characterization" or is it elsewhere? Do
characters in Godard desire, what do they desire, and what are the
consequences of acting upon desires?  What is the relationship between
desire as narrative motivation in Godard and his critique of desire in a
consumer culture?  Underlying these questions is a contrast I wish to
draw between Godard and Oshima Nagisa as regards their concepts of
desire and therefore certain aspects of the politics of their filmic
praxes in the sixties.

Theories of postmodernism, psychoanalysis and feminism will inform this
investigation which will concentrate on discussion of two films in
particular:
Une Femme est une Femme 1960 and Pierrot Le Fou 1965