5 - Numéro deux

Summary

Abjection – at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion…. Its symptom is the rejection and reconstruction of languages.

–Julia Kristeva

Weekend does not mark the dawning of abjection – that drastic preoccupation with the low, the dejected, the discarded – or the beginning of narrative breakdown in Godard's work. He had been traveling in these directions from the beginning, picking up speed when My Life to Live brought new radicalism to his complex relationship with movie conventions. His skepticism toward linear narrative made a major leap with A Married Woman in 1964, grew more pronounced in Pierrot le fou and Masculine/Feminine over the next two years, and became a dominating factor in 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her and La Chinoise, which show their disregard for storytelling by largely ignoring it – rather than disintegrating it in full view of the audience, as Weekend does.

Pulverized beyond repair, narrative remains mostly absent from Godard's work for a dozen years after Weekend. What replaces it is an ongoing extension of the Weekend scene where the Arab and African laborers deliver their ideologically charged speeches – bringing the already tenuous plot to a standstill in order to address the spectator as an alert, thinking presence who is engaged with the film's ideas as actively as Godard himself.

Le Gai Savoir (1968), his first picture following Weekend, consists largely of political conversations held by a young man and woman who are seeking what theorist Roland Barthes calls a “degree zero” of language – a verbal “style of absence,” to use another Barthes phrase, emancipated from limiting burdens of conventional meaning.