"Un femme est infâme": Godard’s Writing Lesson

Abstract

The first of Godard's films to feature Anna Karina, Une femme has often been described as a love letter to Godard's soon-to-be wife. Ostensibly about the biological and social repercussions of sexual relations, the film prompts reflection on intercursive, and discursive, relations of all kinds, and of the cultural codes that authorize them. Godard's film hieroglyphs take both diegetic and nondiegetic form. The link between linguistic felicity and sexual difference is invoked throughout the film. Flashes of exoticism hint at the broader implications of the film's references to the interwoven nature of gender and language. A generation before the age of biotechnology and digitization, Godard revealed the insistence on the legibility of the human body inherent in discourses of sexism and exoticism, which turn the body into a rebus, making it mean something beyond itself.