Two or Three Things I Know About Her…
Saturday 3 December 2022 / 8:30 p.m. / Ponrepo
Director: Jean-Luc Godard / Hrají: Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Jean-Luc Godard, Yves Beneyton etc./ Year of Production: 1967 / Country: France / Runtime: 87 min. / Language: French, Italian, English / Subtitles: Czech, English / 15+
An intellectual erotic-political social critique by one of the most admired filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century.
“There exists a filmmaker whose works are absolutely unlike mine, but who has been my friend for years. He does things I would never have thought of doing in my life. He can create an image of cosmic beauty just by filming a cup of coffee into which someone tosses a sugar cube.” Such was the great director Eric Rohmer’s beautiful compliment for his younger colleague. The mentioned scene is from Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a groundbreaking example of Godard’s early work. Just a few months after the triumph of Pierre Le Fou – a film that, though told in a highly untraditional manner, was still more or less linear and allowed audiences to identify with its protagonists – Godard first dared to undertake a true and fundamental break with “traditional cinema” and to create a strange kind of essay-like study in which little was left of plot in the usual sense of the word. Today we know that it was a point of no return for Godard. His film is based on a sociological study of modern low-income housing projects on the urban periphery, known in France as HLMs, whose lower-middle-class female residents earn extra money through occasional prostitution. We follow twenty-four hours in the life of one such woman, a wife and mother living out an “ordinary” life in the age of consumerism, Americanization, and the war in Vietnam. Interspersed amidst the ever-present sounds of the big city, we hear Godard’s whispered observations and short fragments of Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, a work by a composer who was no less important for Godard that his above-cited friend.