Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Woman Is a Woman
1961 · Jean-Luc Godard · A Woman Is a Woman on Sightlines
Two people have sworn not to speak to each other, so they fight with books. Angéla pulls one off the shelf and thrusts the title at Émile. He finds a better title and thrusts it back. It is a joke about a couple too proud to talk. It is also the film's whole method compressed onto a shelf: nobody acts, nobody speaks, and the quarrel gets transposed into a row of objects and handed to us to read.
The other thing everyone remembers is the song that never arrives. Michel Legrand's score swells exactly the way a score swells right before a number starts. Then a cut kills it. Silence, and two people in a small Paris apartment. Godard reportedly called the picture a neorealist musical, a contradiction he clearly enjoyed, and the joke is structural. The film wants to burst into song every few minutes and declines every time.
This is where Deleuze becomes useful rather than decorative. His first big division is between cinema built on movement and cinema built on time. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, acts, and the situation changes. The chain holds. The Hollywood musical is that chain at its happiest: Kelly is in love, it rains, he dances, and the feeling is completely spent in the dancing. No remainder. Deleuze even names the instant the number takes over, when the dancer stops producing the movement and the movement of the world starts carrying the dancer. Minnelli's Paris does it. The Freed unit did it as a matter of course.
Godard's lineage runs straight through those films. An American in Paris feeds his Eastmancolor palette and his idea of an apartment as a stage set awaiting a number; Singin' in the Rain supplies the impulse to break into song at any domestic moment. He borrows the entire apparatus (Franscope, colour stock, a bankable cast, Legrand) and then cuts the circuit at the last possible instant, over and over.
What is left over when the discharge is blocked also has a name. Deleuze calls it the affection-image: a feeling that has registered and has nowhere to go, normally held in a close-up for a few seconds. A Woman Is a Woman runs that state at feature length. Angéla wants a baby now. The want cannot be converted into an action, so the film converts it into other currencies — bluff, jealousy, the threat of going to Alfred, and finally into books, colours and poses. Causality goes slack; digression takes the running time. The plot is openly a pretext.
Anna Karina is where you watch this happen. Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of face. One is a reflecting surface holding a single quality steady: wonder, coyness, mischief. That is the face Karina turns to the camera when she curtsies at us mid-scene. The other is a face of features under pressure, small movements building toward a release that never comes. She switches between them inside one shot, petulant to wounded and back, and the Berlin jury gave her a prize for it. That whiplash is the film's argument, carried on a face.
Between acting and thinking Deleuze puts a hinge: the reflection-image, where the image stops performing an action and stages it as a figure for us to weigh. The book quarrel is precisely that. So is Karina's club number, staged with a coyness that comments on the striptease convention instead of delivering it. So is the surname Godard hangs on Belmondo: Alfred Lubitsch, a dedication spoken aloud inside the fiction. Borrowing from Brecht, Deleuze calls a posture that exposes its own social theatre a gest. Angéla performs being looked at, and lets you see her performing it.
Raoul Coutard shoots all of this in blocks of primary red and blue, figures isolated against them, conspicuous empty space left in the wide frame. Where MGM used scope to organise dancers into balanced friezes, Godard uses it to hold one woman against a wall of colour while nothing happens. The colour carries the charge the number would have carried; Deleuze's colour-image, where a hue absorbs the scene and its feeling instead of describing a room. Neon, signage and props are arranged flat, as graphic elements, so the frame stays legible as a composed image rather than a window. Deleuze's word for an image that has given up its automatic obviousness and asks to be deciphered is the lectosign, the readable image. You do not only watch this frame. You read it.
That matters historically. Godard came out of Cahiers du cinéma and André Bazin's conviction that the camera's gift is transparency, its opening onto a world that existed before the shot. Godard keeps Bazin's real apartment and real streets, then turns the frame into a page. His neorealist musical gag sits exactly on that fault line.
The specific invention here, the thing a filmmaker can steal, is the interrupted promise. Godard treats the soundtrack as detachable hardware: music starts and stops mid-phrase, ambient noise drops out and returns, sound bridges begin and are guillotined. Image and sound tell slightly different stories and neither gives way. He discovered that anticipation alone will do the work of a number, and that you can build a rhythm out of what you refuse to hand over. This is not parody. Parody imitates the payoff; this keeps the machinery running and removes it.
The craft debts are precise. Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise works by ellipsis, skipping the consummation and letting innuendo do the labour. Godard takes the identical device and aims it at song instead of sex. The Merry Widow had already treated singing as knowing costume rather than emotional overflow; The Pirate had actors openly playing at playing; Renoir's The Golden Coach had let curtains and colour blur the border between a stage and a life. Godard's addition is to make the withholding systematic, and to do it using the genre's own luxury equipment. Forward, it opens the Karina cycle: Vivre sa vie, Bande à part, and Pierrot le Fou, where the comic-strip colour goes further still. More broadly it proved a genre could be dismantled in front of the audience without contempt and without sliding into spoof.
Is the film a valentine or an interrogation? Karina is the reason it exists and simultaneously its specimen, pinned in colour and scope and asked, repeatedly, what a woman is. Godard married her around this time. The film never settles it, and that unsettledness is the ache under the gags, the reason a farce about a baby can actually hurt. Watch it again with your ears. Notice where Legrand's music stops. Each of those cuts is a small refusal, and by the end you will have felt an entire musical that was never shot.
Concepts in play
- affection-image — Angéla's demand for a baby is never discharged into an action; Legrand's score swells as if to launch a number and is guillotined by a cut to silence, leaving the feeling registered with nowhere to go for the length of a feature.
- attraction-image — The 'book quarrel': having sworn not to speak, the lovers pull titles off the shelf and thrust them at each other, so the fight is staged as a figure to be read rather than acted.
- the-gest — Karina's striptease is staged with a deliberate coyness that comments on the striptease convention instead of delivering it, and the actors curtsy and wink directly at the camera — postures that expose their own theatrical and social relation.
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Karina shifts on a dime between a reflecting, presentational face turned out to the audience (coy, mischievous) and a face of features under pressure (petulant, wounded) — the farce-to-pathos whiplash the Berlin acting prize recognised.
- affective colour — Coutard's bold primary reds and blues in Eastmancolor and Franscope, with figures isolated against big blocks of colour and conspicuous empty space, so the colour absorbs the scene's feeling instead of describing the room.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Godard treats the soundtrack as detachable and manipulable: sound bridges start and stop abruptly, ambient noise drops in and out, the score surges and is cut, so what we hear and what we see are repeatedly out of joint.
- the readable image — Objects, colours and neon signage are arranged as flat graphic elements, keeping the frame legible as a composed image rather than a transparent window; intertitles and direct address ask the viewer to decipher rather than simply follow.
- consciousness-of-cliches — The film inhabits the Hollywood musical as commentary — Godard's own 'neorealist musical' description, Belmondo's character named Alfred Lubitsch, the genre worn openly as costume.
- weak-links — Narrative causality is loose and subordinated to digression, mood and the pleasure of watching Karina; the thin premise is acknowledged as a pretext, with abrupt tonal switches and elliptical cutting carried over from the jump-cut logic of *Breathless*.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A wish (a child, now) that no available action can resolve, played out through bluff and tit-for-tat in a cramped apartment while the genre's promised resolution — the musical number — is withheld at every turn.