Ferdinand Torn Apart: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” within the Field of Culture
Abstract
The author reflects on the phenomenon of the extraordinary reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot le Fou – an extremely emotional and subjective reception. Critics have very often identified the character of Pierrot-Ferdinand with Godard himself – an unhappy artist in the clutches of passion in troubled times, unfavourable to individuals not susceptible to the dictates of social life enforced by modernity. Pierrot le Fou is a masculinist vision of the world, passionate and deadly – as Esquenazi writes. Ferdinand’s resentment of consumerist and industralist culture, however, is tinged with hypocrisy. It is a kind of game of ‘love and hate’. The protagonist ‘doesn't believe in reality’ and is only able to communicate with his surroundings through non-committal participation in the game. Esquenazi proposes a higher meta-critical level – an analysis of the protagonist’s motivations in the context of the humanist methodologies fashionable at the time: structuralism, linguistics and psychoanalysis, which, as it were, construct the protagonist while isolating him from the world. Conceived in this way, the protagonist reflects the situation of the Western intellectual, and in this sense one can speak of the self-reflexivity of Godard’s film.
- The text is a translation of the chapter from the book Godard et la société française des années 1960 by Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Armand Colin, Paris 2004 © 2004 by Armand Colin.
Due to copyright restrictions the article is available in the print version only.
Keywords:
Jean-Luc Godard, consumerist culture, structuralism, linguistics, psychoanalysisReferences
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Authors
Jean-Pierre Esquenazikwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Université Jean Moulin Lyon III France
Profesor na Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. Opublikował m.in.: Film perception et mémoire (1994), Le Pouvoir d’un média: TF1 et son discours (1996), Télévision et démocratie – le politique à la télévision française 1958-1990 (1999), Hitchcock et l’aventure de „Vertigo” (2000), L’écriture de l’actualité: Pour une sociologie du discours médiatique (2002), Sociologie des publics (2003), Godard et la société française des années 1960 (2004).
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