Calling the Shots: Women as Deleuzian Material in the Cinema of Godard

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the essay that firmly established her as a leading critic in feminist film studies, Laura Mulvey interrogates the “advanced representation system” (15) that is cinema, constructing a critique of the sexual politics that she argues pervades the cinematic system necessarily, as it is produced “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance” (19). For Mulvey, this imbalance is inevitably betrayed throughout cinema, as woman in film “holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire” (19). Published with the earlier essay in Visual and Other Pleasures, and co-written with film critic Colin MacCabe, Mulvey’s piece on the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard maintains that, even in the cinema of Godard, whose revolutionary engagement with the politics of representation Mulvey readily acknowledges, the problem of the exhibition of women is at best revealed, but is by no means resolved. Taking Mulvey’s analysis as its starting point, this paper examines the specific techniques of Godard’s representation of women in his earlier films in order to suggest an alternative way of understanding the status of women in those works. In particular, this paper aims to mobilize postwar French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema and other artistic media in order to posit that Godard’s representation of women—especially their bodies—offers his female characters a status that exceeds what Mulvey characterizes as Godard’s “romantic heritage in which woman is divided into an appearance that can be enjoyed and an essence that is only knowable at risk” (51).

Furthermore, this paper will use the Deleuzian concepts of immediacy and materiality to argue that, in fact, Godard’s films present women’s bodies in a way that signals the potential for women to assume precisely that position of agency that Mulvey argues is nowhere accessible to them in cinema. Deleuze’s oeuvre, because of the way in which it radically reconceptualizes artistic work, serves as an effective frame for reconceptualizing Godard’s cinema in general, and the status of women within it specifically. To begin with, Deleuze and his frequent co-author Félix Guattari theorize materiality such that, rather than reiterating the essentialist notions of woman evidenced by the “romantic heritage” wherein Mulvey locates Godard, materiality offers the potential for real subjectivity, as it does not refer to woman as the essential object of that art, but rather refers to the materials of which the artwork itself is composed, to the matter of the artwork. This matter, for Deleuze and Guattari, necessarily produces what they understand as the immediacy of art, the presentness of its sensations: “Even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration....Sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept of affect” (What is Philosophy? 467, their emphasis).

By means of its material, then, art actualizes sensation, art actually becomes sensation. “Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that take the place of language” (Philosophy 472), write Deleuze and Guattari, suggesting that art “undoes” the substantive forms of sensation (perception, affection, and opinion, sometimes referred to as “conception”), making possible the exploration of the active sensations of percept, affect, and concept that constitute the immediate forms of art. When speaking of a painting, for example, “the material” refers to the paint itself—its color, its shine, its thickness on the canvas, and the lines of brushstrokes almost imperceptibly carved into it. With writing, materiality is the words used—the patterns of sound, sibilances and cacophonies, the infinity of associative significations that rush out of each term. For Deleuze, the privileged artistic medium is unquestionably cinema, a choice that seems almost paradoxical with reference to materiality. Unlike other media, where the material is painted, sculpted, or printed, cinema achieves its materiality in projection: its matter is machine-produced light and recorded sound. And yet Deleuze never doubts film’s materiality; for him, cinema is material because it captures sensation perfectly, because it alone can achieve immediacy through its capacity to project movement and time—pure energy, pure sensation.

If cinema is to be considered the Deleuzian medium par excellence, then Jean-Luc Godard can easily be considered the Deleuzian cinéaste par excellence. Godard’s films resist representation and signification, resist reduction to a single narrative, sometimes to any narrative, arguing cinematically for Deleuze’s model of the rhizome, a space wherein signifying structures are broken down. Godard’s resistance to fixed—and therefore limiting—strategies of representation seems most evident in the presentation of women in his films. Although the female characters of Godard’s works are by no means identical, they can in many ways be seen as functioning similarly, often literally embodying Deleuze’s concepts of materiality, immediacy, and the rhizome. These concepts seem to merge on the screen in Godard’s actresses, as they become, in Deleuze’s words, planes of immanence. But what is fascinating about this immanence is that, although these planes are produced through the presentation of women’s bodies, their materiality is not a corporeal one, their immanence must not be understood as the kind of immanent essence that, according to Simone de Beauvoir’s astute analysis throughout The Second Sex, and especially in the chapter on “Myth and Reality,” relegates woman to the confining space of myth, and thus denies her access to the agency that, for the existentialist Beauvoir, is conditioned by an existence that must precede essence. Instead, the materiality that Godard’s women achieve is a manifestation of the pure sensations, affects, and percepts that Deleuze advocates and finds uniquely located in the entirely projected matter of cinema, that matter that produces the immediacy of tangibility in the absolute intangibility of beams of light and shot angles. By examining four films by Godard, Masculine/Feminine (1966), A Married Woman (1964), Contempt (1963), and Breathless (1959) this paper will identify the women of Godard’s movies as cinematic material in the Deleuzian sense I have just outlined, and, with Mulvey’s critique of Godard in mind, will evaluate the feminist consequences of this materiality, in order to determine to what extent and under what circumstances the female object of the camera can be an active subject, can “call the shots.”

Masculine/Feminine (1966) begins, like many Godard films, with text. The opening credits present the title of the film in two parts: first, the French “Masculin” is fragmented into “ma/scu/lin”; second, “Féminin” appears in its own frame as one uninterrupted word. This is not particularly revelatory, only interesting, until later in the film, when Paul, the protagonist, and his friend discuss the term “masculin”. They note that two words are contained in it: “mask” and “cul” (ass). They try to think of words from which “féminin” might be composed, and find themselves at a loss: “rien” (“nothing”). The feminine, then, comes to embody the characteristics of the rhizome: the connection “of an any-point-whatever with another any-point-whatever” (Deleuze, Mille Plateaux 31, my translation), so that the “any-point-whatever” of a given word need not correspond to a given signification, or at least not in such a way that “meaning” is created. The rhizome’s obstruction of any conventional signifying systemis illustrated at the very end of the film, when the intertitle “féminin” flashes on the screen, and middle letters soon drop away to leave “fin” (end), signifying the end of the film. Therefore, in order to produce signification by means of the feminine, one must, as in a rhizome, join two any-points-whatever to create a seemingly arbitrary sign system, one whose arbitrariness violates the totality we generally ascribe to the linguistic production of meaning. The masculine, on the other hand, signifies in a rather predictable fashion, as words are generated by a continuous progression of letters. And the even words that result—“mask”, “ass”—are words generally considered to be loaded with symbolic significations; masks represent exactly that duality by which language is said to be constituted (underneath every verbal sign is the actuality that it represents), while the anus has always been an area central to psychoanalytic study.

Therefore we see the beginnings of a characterization of women as rhizomatic. This is also reflected in the number of female protagonists in Masculine/Feminine; although Madeleine is the object of Paul’s desire and should therefore be the film’s lead actress, her two friends, Catherine-Isabelle and Elisabeth, are highly privileged in the movie as well. In a voice-over heard early in the film, we hear, “Today. Paris. What do young girls dream about? But which young girls?” This suggestion of plurality, that “there is no typical girl”, as the voice says a few moments later, is echoed in the multiplication of the leading actress role between Catherine, Elisabeth, and Madeleine. In fact, as the voice remarks that “there is no typical girl,” an intertitle reading “3” flashes on the screen, to introduce the third section of the film. This “3” directly repudiates the expectation of a singular heroine (or “typical girl”), and as the film continues we see this repudiation materialized in the characters Madeleine, Elisabeth, and Catherine.

Not only do we see the female rhizomatically pluralized in Masculine/Feminine, we also see the masculine almost completely singularized. In Paul, Godard finds his male protagonist, and although his friend Robert appears in several scenes, he never seems to attain the significance that Madeleine’s companions do. Even as he flirts with Catherine, trying to seduce her, he seems certain that Catherine desires Paul instead, and is therefore relegated to a sphere secondary to that occupied by the three girls and Paul. And Paul, with his devoted fixation on Madeleine, his inability to pluralize, and his division between exactly two social spheres—the romantic and the political—cannot be a rhizome. Furthermore, while the actress portraying Madeleine (Chantal Goya) made her film debut with Masculine/Feminine, the actor playing Paul is perhaps the greatest icon of the cinematic movement known as the French New Wave. Having portrayed the young protagonist Antoine Doinel in what is considered to be the groundbreaking film of the Nouvelle Vague, François Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (1959), Jean-Pierre Léaud leaps off the screen as an obvious symbol of the cinematic trend to which Godard belongs. And in case that we might doubt Léaud’s symbolic role in the film, Godard makes sure to bring attention to it when Paul calls for a car to pick up Madeleine, assuming the pseudonym Général Doinel.

Paul’s potency as a character, therefore, depends upon his past. He is able to procure a ride for his girlfriend because of his identification with Doinel. Madeleine, on the other hand, is building a successful career in the pop music industry, a business whose time is decidedly the present. Madeleine defines herself as a member of the “Pepsi Generation,” a much newer new wave than Paul’s. In the second volume of his extensive analysis of cinema, Deleuze theorizes what he calls the crystalline image, wherein the actual and virtual (present and past) coexist. The crystalline image appears manifest in Godard’s film by the different temporalities represented simultaneously by Paul and Madeleine: “this point of indiscernibility, it is constituted by precisely the smallest circle, that is to say the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the bifacial image, actual and virtual at the same time” (Image-Temps 93, my translation). This indiscernibility is the moment which, as we discovered in the passages from What is Philosophy? discussed above, allows an eternity to be expressed in a short moment, crystallizing time, and conflating artistic material with the sensations it produces. Godard’s portrayal of the masculine as past time, and the feminine as present time, creates a perfect time image, releasing eternity through the simultaneous progression of two different temporalities. For Deleuze, art is the production of an infinity of time in a present materiality, and it is Godard’s women—here, Madeleine in particular—who, because of their existence as rhizomatic, impermanent material in the present, create the plane of immanence so favorably theorized by Deleuze. Again, this immanence is not manifest in the tangibility of the female flesh, but rather in the immediacy of the female time, in the presentness that Madeleine, Catherine, and Elisabeth materialize in their projected bodies.

The notion of the present as the temporal space of the woman is also explored in Godard’s film A Married Woman (1964). The female protagonist of the film, Charlotte, explains her preference for the present in a sequence in which she, her husband, and their dinner guest address their views on various issues directly to the camera, which, in its almost completely uninterrupted focus on each speaker, sets up an interview scenario. Charlotte speaks about the present: “What’s most important for me is to know what’s happening, I mean, to be aware of what’s happening...It’s difficult in the present, that’s why I just love the present because, because the present gives you no time to think. I can’t think.” With these lines, Charlotte seems practically to speak in Deleuze’s terms, to describe her own function the need “to be aware of what’s happening”—a privileging of “actual” time, of events and occurrences. Her declaration that “she can’t think” in the present is analogous to Deleuze’s repudiation of substantive forms of sensation; art deals not in perceptions, but in percepts, the activity of perceiving rather than the having-perceived. Continuing her monologue, she says, “But certainly what I’m interested in is this thing that escapes me, that I’m not able to control in the present.” The present necessarily resists control; it is the progression of sensations in a material. Thus Charlotte’s statement that she is “not able to control in the present” reveals her materiality since, like the material of any art, she cannot control the sensations expressed through her. She is wholly under the control of these sensations, and this appears to resonate doubly here: as an actress, she is Godard’s material and is under the control of his direction; at the same time, in the world of the film she is the material of her men. Throughout the film, the caressing hands of her husband and lover designate her as purely material, pure surface.

But in this latter materiality it would seem that Godard encounters theoretical difficulties that Deleuze does not. Laura Mulvey comments on how “the image of Charlotte is distanced, re-presented as the problem of woman’s image in consumer society” (54). Deleuzian materiality is not a “problem” in this sense; it is in fact what rescues art from distancing and representation in consumer society. A Married Woman demonstrates how women are commodified and essentialized because of the very materiality that Deleuze characterizes as necessary for beauty. When Charlotte’s husband or lover tells her to take off her clothes, she obeys. Although their hands (and the spectator’s eyes) are on her flesh for much of the film, Charlotte almost never touches them. One notable exception occurs when she reaches into her husband’s shirt to touch his chest; still, he is fully clothed, and her hand appears as small as a child’s. Charlotte becomes objectified through the many shots of her body, which, in fragmenting her such that we see only isolated areas from which her face is excluded, denies her any status as a subject. She becomes material, pure image, and often purely sexualized. The beginning of the film consists of many shots of Charlotte’s naked body, beginning with her hand. It crawls onto the canvas of the bright white screen, and her wrist is gripped by her lover, Robert. Next her back, then her whole body, especially her legs, then one leg, her stomach, and so on. There are traces of Robert in each of these shots, but they are usually his hands, caressing her skin. This sequence of shots recalls the full title of the film: Une Femme Mariée: Suite de fragments d’un film tourné en 1964. What Godard offers the audience is exactly a “suite de fragments” (“sequence of fragments”), but Godard fragments Charlotte just as much as the rest of the film. Charlotte, then, becomes analogous to this notion of a “film tourné” (“filmed movie,” but also “warped film”); her body is material, in fact the material of the movie.

Why a “warped” film? Perhaps because of the uneasy results of Charlotte’s fragmentation. Deleuze would have us expect some empowerment from this pure materiality, from Charlotte’s becoming-art. But Godard denies her any comfortable subjectivity, because, unlike the case of Madeleine’s temporal immediacy in Masculine/Feminine, Charlotte’s immanence is not her own. It belongs to the men who touch it, who order it to undress, to reveal itself. Although we saw earlier how Charlotte’s love of the present reinforced her materiality, she admits that she feels something lacking: “I’m not happy because I’m not alive in the present.” She cannot be, when her present is possessed by others, when her body becomes the medium of others’ sensations; Robert’s and Pierre’s sensations are spread over her through their fondling hands. Rather than achieving immediacy, therefore, Charlotte’s materiality is utterly appropriated, reduced to absolute mediation.

At the same time that he demonstrates how Charlotte’s dispossessed materiality makes her unable to feel happy or alive, Godard seems to present the Deleuzian argument that materiality offers the possibility of immanence, aliveness. Just as Godard differentiates the male tendency toward signification from the female rhizome in Masculine/Feminine, A Married Woman depicts the masculine as the space of signifying systems as well. This becomes clear when Robert explains to Charlotte his career as an actor. He defines an actor as “someone who tries to interpret something, tries to sketch out, create a person, a character to get out of oneself, one’s feelings, one’s ideas.” In his emphasis on interpretation and ideas, we see clearly his difference from Charlotte, who loves the present because it liberates one from interpretation and thought. This appears to be the same contrast we saw between Paul and Madeleine in Masculine/Feminine. Robert’s need for escape from his ideas suggests that he does not reside in a present moment that precludes reflection. Charlotte insists on the impossibility of Robert’s sincerity, suggesting that he is always acting. He admits that, as he talks to her, he is “upholding his position” as an actor, but he also argues for the difference between life and theater, declaring that “in the theater, there’s a text.” This resonates ironically for the audience, since we realize that, while Robert argues for a real space where he does not speak from a written text, he is an actor on the screen, pronouncing words memorized from a written text. His words suggesting that not all of his words are text are themselves a text, and are therefore mired in contradiction. Therefore, Robert cannot be said to exist in a space of actuality, and is also deprived of the Deleuzian sense of “actual” as present. He, like Paul, is confined to virtual time, and to signification—that is, to anti-materiality.

There is, then, no possibility for Robert or Paul to become art, non-verbal language, surfaces of sensation reception and projection. For Charlotte, this possibility exists, but is not realized because her pure materiality becomes pure objectification, preventing her from being “alive in the present.” In Contempt (1963), we find the female protagonist, Camille, materialized similarly to Charlotte, and yet Camille seems to evade the full fragmentation that alienates Charlotte from herself. Contempt differs in many ways from the other films discussed thus far, mostly because it is constituted more fluidly than A Married Woman and Masculine/Feminine. Contempt begins with a long traveling shot, where we see a movie camera moving toward us, filming a woman as she walks. The camera we see on the screen then turns toward the audience, catching us in our gaze, and thus calling our attention to the problem of the objectifying gaze that Mulvey argues is inherent to cinema, especially with respect to the representation of women in cinema. Combined with the devastatingly languorous score heard in the background, and the rich colors spreading on the screen (the other films discussed are in black and white), the slow, fluid movement of the camera sets a tone of measured liquidity for the rest of the film.

The next shot of film shows Camille lying in bed with her husband, with Camille asking Paul his opinion on each part of her body. Godard’s camera traces the length of Camille’s body as she speaks, as she asks whether Paul finds her feet pretty, and her ankles, and her knees. “Can you see my backside in the mirror?” “Yes.” “Do you think I have a pretty backside?” “Yes.” Camille continues to ask about her hair, her breasts, and her face, and finally asks, “You like all of me? My mouth? My eyes? My nose? My ears?” Paul replies, “Yes, all of you.” By asking Paul about his feelings for these different parts of her body, Camille fragments herself in much the same way that Charlotte is fragmented in A Married Woman. Camille’s body meets the slow, measured pace of Camille’s and Paul’s dialogue, the corresponding camera movement, and the color suffusions that change from pink and orange, to white, to blue, to establish a unified materiality of sound and sight. But it is important to note that, although a sense of immanence is produced by this highly aestheticized use of cinematic material, Godard is careful not to permit the audience members to lose the consciousness of their watching that he constructs with the movie camera in the film’s first shot. The changes in color suffusions, as well as some abrupt stops in the fluid score and a few inaudible exchanges between Camille and Paul, serve to maintain an awareness of the film’s status as such; Godard makes it clear that we are watching a film, and this emphasis on the work’s constructed status leads the viewer to a more critical understanding of the images on the screen.

For this reason among others, Contempt demands that it be watched analytically, and thus the exhibition of Camille’s nude body demands such an analysis as well. Although Camille calls attention to her body, further examination of this scene demonstrates that Camille’s materiality belongs to her, and not to the male gaze or touch. While the fragmentation of her body might be considered to enact the same false immanence as Charlotte’s in A Married Woman, the presentation of Camille’s body must be understood differently. To begin with, whereas Charlotte’s fragmentation was a product of Godard’s shot sequence, Camille’s is produced by her own words. Secondly, Camille’s face is present for most of this dialogue, while Charlotte’s is rarely seen with her naked limbs. In addition, Godard does not cut up the shots in Contempt as he does in A Married Woman: the camera in the former glides slowly down Camille’s body and back up again, instead of cutting from hand to back to neck to leg and so on, as in A Married Woman. Camille’s materiality, then, becomes a totality, where Charlotte’s remains in pieces. Camille acknowledges this at the end of her inquisition, when she asks, “Then you love me totally?”, speaking in language that is not fragmented, but rather the conclusion of a logical thought process: “You love all of me, then you must love me totally.” Camille’s body is pure material, but it is not sexualized as such; instead, her nudity, as it gels with the images’ suffused hues, the background music, and the smooth motion of the camera, becomes pure curve, color, and line, and the content of her words not only reflects this materiality, but actually directs it, as the camera follows her instructions as she narrates her body. So that the rolling, rich cadences of music, the slow camera movement, and the unity of color accentuated by the changing shades of the scene all insist, along with Camille, on her totality. Her flesh forms a continuous surface, not a disconnected one. And it would appear that this continuity, which she herself creates, accounts for Camille’s ability to reach a different status on the screen than Charlotte.

Godard’s 1959 film, Breathless, offers another example of women’s resistance to objectification through the character of Patricia, although in this case subject status is achieved not so much by Patricia’s control over the materiality of her body through self-fragmentation, but rather by her embodiment of a different Deleuzian concept. In their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari discuss Franz Kafka’s work, attributing his genius to his writing in a language that was not his first language, which, they argue, allowed him to reproduce the dominant language of German in an inflected, peripheral form—a “minor language.” In Kafka’s work, they explain, “Language stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or its limits” (Kafka 23, their emphasis). This unrepresentative quality of a minor language can also be found in the language of Patricia in Breathless. Jean Seberg, an American actress, plays Patricia, and although her French is nearly flawless, she speaks the language without any attempt at a French accent. The result is a kind of minorized French that initially grates the ear. However, as the film progresses and the American accent persists, the audience adjusts to the sound of the language, and it becomes almost charming.

Discussing the music (or non-music) found in Kafka’s work, Deleuze and Guattari remark that “everywhere, organized music is traversed by a line of abolition—just as a language of sense is traversed by a line of escape—in order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form” (21). In this way, Patricia’s American French seems to liberate her into a vital sensory materiality, thus creating an immanence similar to the expressiveness of Camille’s materiality in Contempt. Patricia creates for herself a line of escape through her use of what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “deterritorialized” version of French, and she thereby insists on her own deterritorialization. I say her French is deterritorialized because, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest about Kafka’s German, Patricia’s grating American accent de-situates the French language, relocating it into a kind of any-space-whatever, or rather dislocating it altogether. After refusing to sleep with Michel many times, she finally justifies her refusal by telling him that she is pregnant with his child. However, she soon retracts this statement, claiming that she mentioned it only to see how Michel would react. It is never particularly clear whether or not she was, in fact, lying about her pregnancy, and it is in this obscurity that we find an example of the unrepresentativeness of Patricia’s minor language. Her language seems to signify—its grammatical structure is perfect with the exception of a very few mistakes—but the statements she makes are rhizomatic in the sense that they create arbitrary meaning. Their connection to reality is unclear and thus irrelevant. In this way, Patricia creates a “line of escape” that constitutes her as sensory material—percept, affect, and concept, rather than the perception, affection, and conception represented by Michel.

In one illuminating scene that consists of a long traveling shot around a room in an apartment where Michel and Patricia are hiding from the police, waiting to escape from Paris to Rome so that Michel can avoid arrest for the murder and various thefts he has committed throughout the film, the differences between the two characters are highlighted in ways that strongly recall those gender roles I discussed in Masculine/Feminine. The camera first follows Patricia, then Michel, as they pace in turn around a room whose space is divided by a beam, separating the two characters for much of the shot. Patricia and Michel mostly talk at, rather than to, each other; their words run parallel to each other, but do not intersect in actual responses until the end of the conversation. Here, Patricia’s words seem to epitomize the rhizomatic femininity addressed in so many Godard films. Her statement that “nothing...and everything” is wrong again situates her in the realm of the material, indicating that her decision not to leave with Michel is based on pure sensation, on a feeling that something is wrong. She cannot identify exactly what is wrong, locating her uneasiness in an “any-space-whatever” wherein the sensation of doubt exists, but cannot be attributed to a definite cause. Patricia attempts to validate her decision with logical reasons, but, as Michel remarks, what she comes up with is “the damnedest argument.” She first tries to demonstrate that she is not in love with Michel, and presents the profoundly unconvincing proof that, because she is mean to him, she must not be in love with him. She states, “That’s why I turned you in,” but it remains unclear whether the “that” to which she refers is her previous statement (“maybe you love me”), or Michel’s (“and you don’t love me back”). Michel realizes Patricia’s inability to offer any legitimate reason for her change of heart, and shifts from the rhetoric of romance to anger and exasperation. By comparing Patricia to “a girl who sleeps with everybody” except for the one who loves her, he points out the rhizomatic nature of her reasoning, illustrating her deterritorialization from structures of logic, from language whose signification would refuse arbitrariness. His “I’m superior to you” resonates as an attempt to reterritorialize the conversation, to retreat into traditional gender roles wherein Patricia’s self-assertion would be impossible.

But Patricia, speaking her minor language, refuses this reterritorialization. When she talks about deciding whether or not she is in love with Michel, she uses the phrase “amoureuse de toi” (“in love with you”) several times. Because she utters this phrase, like all her lines, in an American accent, it becomes denatured from Michel’s French. Her American “r” sticks out in amoureuse, catching the audience’s ear each time she says it. The effect of this minorization is a pulling away of the signifier from its signification; although we understand the words Patricia says, our ears are caught in the repeated American “r”, such that meaning starts to be effaced. Deleuze and Guattari write that “Kafka tells how, as a child, he repeated one of his father’s expressions in order to make it take flight on a line of non-sense: ‘end of the month, end of the month’” (Kafka, 21). Patricia’s repetition of amoureuse creates a similar line of non-sense; she draws our attention to the minorization of her French, rather than to the words she is saying as signifiers of meaning.

Patricia, then, finds herself always in a process of flight, since she deterritorializes language, lives outside of territories. However, at precisely the moment that Patricia’s deterritorialization is realized, the audience recognizes also that Michel is incapable of flight. Even though he knows that Patricia has told the police where he is hiding, he refuses to leave. Without Patricia, who seems to be his motivating force throughout the movie (the film opens with Michel’s returning to Paris for her), he is paralyzed, flightless. His lines in the scene described above present an obsessive need to understand Patricia’s action, as he tries to follow her path of non-logic only to find himself trapped, immobile, in her rhizome. She tells him to leave but he cannot, and the film ends with Michel’s feeble effort to outrun the police after he has been shot. In a remarkably long shot, the camera follows Michel as he threatens to fall down several times, but resists until he eventually collapses between the two lines of a crosswalk, as though he had been searching for the right place to die and had finally decided on the demarcated space, so as to be literally reterritorialized. Patricia, however, illustrates her deterritorialization by falling outside of signification altogether. Just before he dies, Michel says to her, “you really are a little bitch.” Patricia cannot decipher the muttering of his muffled voice, and asks the policeman what he said. The policeman repeats: “He said, ‘you really are a little bitch [dégueulasse]’.” Patricia looks right at the audience with a stony expression and offers the last words of the film: “What does that mean, dégueulasse?” As Michel reaches his ultimate reterritorialization within the lines of the Paris street, Patricia reaches exactly the opposite point, her minor language having deterritorialized her so far that words no longer signify for her at all.

By the end of Breathless, Patricia has become entirely rhizomatic, divorced from language and deterritorialized from structures of meaning, as were the other women we have examined thus far. In this way, Patricia, Camille, Charlotte, and Madeleine all constitute part of the materiality that locates Godard’s cinema, in Mulvey’s words, as “existing on the sharp edge between observing the world taking and changing shape and, in giving it concrete form in representation, being part of the changing shapes” (49-50). Although Mulvey does not find that Godard’s representation of women participates in the sphere of those “changing shapes,” I would argue that a reading of his films through Deleuze’s notion of materiality posits a potential liberation for Godard from Mulvey’s critique, as women are able to exist outside of the inequality inherent in subject-object relations. By being materialized (not sexually, but rather as formal elements of the entirely projected, illusory medium of film), Godard’s women characters have always been planes through which percept, affect, and concept can be relieved from perception, affection, and conception. Susan Sontag argues that “Godard is the first director to grasp the fact that, in order to deal seriously with ideas, one must create a new film language for expressing them” (207), and, whether through their verbal deterritorialization or their bodily immanence, the women of Godard’s films must be understood as rhizomatic signifiers of that “new film language.”

However, these characters themselves have not always reached the deterritorialization that would liberate them. Although both are presented in the very vivid exhibition of their bodies, Charlotte and Camille are very different figures. When Camille fragments herself, materializes and exhibits herself, marriage is bliss for her and Paul. But when this process comes from the outside, when she becomes constituted as an object by the character of Prokosch and by Paul himself, she is forced into reterritorialization, violently and disastrously. In Breathless, Patricia resists dispossession of her materiality, and finds herself deterritorialized to indestructibility. By allowing his women characters to be understood as cinematic material, therefore, Godard invites the possibility of a Deleuzian materiality that “undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions” without undoing the women themselves, and even offering the potential for agency such as Patricia’s. He reminds us, however, that this agency is never a guarantee, but only a possibility, and one that depends upon the deterritorialization, or rather the possession by the women themselves, of that materiality.

Therefore, a woman who calls the shots, as Camille literally does in directing the camera on her body, possesses authority, but a woman like Charlotte, whose body is fragmented and appropriated by others, calls no shots at all, in either a literal or figurative sense.

Bibliography

A Married Woman. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Macha Méril, Bernard Noël, and Phillippe Leroy. 1964.

Beauvoir, Simone de. Le Deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard, 1949.

Breathless. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg. 1960. DVD. New Yorker Films, 2001.

Contempt. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, and Jack Palance. 1963. DVD. Criterion Collection, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Masculine/Feminine. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya. 1966. VHS. New Yorker Films, 1998.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Sontag, Susan. “Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.