„Cadre de vie”. Jean-Luc Godard’s „Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle” (1967), French TV and Architectural Discourse

Jacqueline Maurer

jacqueline.maurer@uzh.ch
University of Zurich (Switzerland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1722-1593

Abstract

The article demonstrates how Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) contributed to the contemporary critical discourse on (social) housing estates (grands ensembles). With his work, the filmmaker aimed to show the grand ensemble, or ‘the big(ger) picture’ of what it meant to live in contemporary consumerist oriented France. The protagonist Juliette Johnson represents the French citizen and simultaneously the metaphor of the Paris Region that underwent a huge transformation. The main interest of the text lies in the use of the 360-degree pan shot and the notion of cadre (frame), as they connect film theory and the contemporary discourse about how the décor, i.e. the (built) environment, influences people’s cadre de vie (living conditions). A close reading of two film sequences and a historical contextualisation of architectural discourses and theories is completed by a comparison with documentary TV programmes. While they had fostered the critical discussion about housing estates already before, they used the panorama shot only after Deux ou trois choses…


Keywords:

Jean-Luc Godard, French cinema, housing estate, architecture, Cité des 4000 Sud, panorama shot

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Published
2020-05-25

Cited by

Maurer, J. (2020) “„Cadre de vie”. Jean-Luc Godard’s „Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle” (1967), French TV and Architectural Discourse”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (109), pp. 68–85. doi: 10.36744/kf.274.

Authors

Jacqueline Maurer 
jacqueline.maurer@uzh.ch
University of Zurich Switzerland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1722-1593

She studied Art History and German Studies at the University of Basel and at the University College London. After teaching at the Chair of the Theory of Architecture at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, she is completing her SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) funded PhD project entitled (In)appropriate Scales? Research in Film, Architecture and Urbanism with Jean-Luc Godard at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Since November 2019 she is a research fellow at the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Muttenz near Basel. She has been working in art education at Kunstmuseum Basel and co-curated the exhibition gta Films with films about architecture from archives in Zurich and Lisbon. She is a member of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and GfM (Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft).



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