A Married Woman

(Une femme mariée, Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964)

Introduction 2025. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, I was often called upon to lecture on Jean-Luc Godard, as well as myself including his work in my university courses. For my more general, contextual approach (at that time) to this auteur, see my 1986 lecture on Alphaville. For this text, I draw upon a 1991 (August 12) guest lecture for University of Melbourne, supplementing it with points from my 2009 DVD audio commentary on the film released by Madman (Australia). By the by, A Married Woman remains a relatively under-analysed Godard film; the most interesting and complete study of it in recent times is the 80-page booklet accompanying the 2009 Masters of Cinema DVD edition, featuring Luc Moullet, Bill Krohn, Macha Méril, Andy Rector and editor Craig Keller.

A Married Woman presents itself, in its complete title, as exactly what it is: “Fragments of a film shot in 1964 in black and white”. There are few interpretive mysteries, of the traditional sort, in Jean-Luc Godard’s work. If there is something mysterious for us to unravel, it is in relation to the status of each fragment – which is usually some form of intertextual quotation. Do we take it as a meaningful reference to plumb, a statement of the author’s position – or merely a joke, word play, an impulsive doodle? Doubtless, all the modes apply at one moment or another.

One thing is crystal clear: instead of a straightforward ‘expression’ of his own viewpoint, the material gathered in this or almost any Godard film obeys the systematic law of what Luc Moullet calls “endless dialectics”: one thing is always pitted against another, everything meets its reversal, paradoxical oppositions rule. Which is the only law in Godard (and no wonder Fredric Jameson, with his commitment to relentless dialectical critique, admires Godard and his working method so much). It extends to genre, and the filmmaker’s feelings about restrictive genre divisions: A Married Woman constantly pings between action and reflection, adventure and ‘art film’ (Ingmar Bergman-style, The Silence [1963] being a specific reference in play), high (Beethoven string quartet) and low (“Sad Movies Make Me Cry”) music cultures.

The film was conceived, shot and post-produced cheaply and in record time, basically in two months between June and September 1964, because Godard wanted to honour his connection, already well-established by then, to the Venice Film Festival. The financing came from Columbia in the USA, who had previously acquired Bande à part (1964) for distribution: Godard, in his characteristically perverse way, threw the company various underwhelming (from a commercial viewpoint) proposals, but an ‘unfaithful wife’ premise duly triggered the cash flow.

Macha Méril, still at a very early point in her career, stepped in hastily when Stefania Sandrelli became pregnant; Méril gave her all to the auteur’s sometimes cryptic directions (she suspected, not negatively, that it was the specific photogénie of her body parts that won her the job). There was even a subsequent, intriguing multimedia spin-off: the 1965 photo-text book Diary of a Married Woman (Denoël), assembled by Méril, somewhat realigning the film to her character Charlotte’s viewpoint. She writes about the editorial process in the 2006 Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Centre Pompidou), alongside James Williams’ useful account. She also claims the film as an important moment on the path to France’s Women’s Liberation movement, in which she participated.

Although much of the resulting film is indeed fragmented and often quite abstract – in particular, the stylised, strangely chaste scenes of lovemaking, anticipating the ‘eternal return’ of one man’s gestures in another in Chantal Akerman’s sublime Night and Day (1991) – A Married Woman is, in some sense, among Godard’s most ‘classical’ works. It has a unity of dramatic time – ‘24 hours in the life of a married woman’ – that is rare in his œuvre.

Several key interior dialogue scenes more-or-less obey standard rules of découpage, such as eyeline cues (even as dialogue mutates into monologue – a device later to become prevalent, in a more markedly ‘Brechtian’ mode, in his late 1960s and ‘70s career). Although proceedings tend to inevitably ‘warp’ inside their classical form (Godard constructing conversations as interrogations, and speaking literally into the ear of the actors, via a radiophonic earpiece, as the camera rolls), these scenes are relatively coherent ‘building blocks’ – the utter pulverisation of the material shot for Made in USA (1966) is still an eternity (2 years in Godard-time!) away.

The modernist treatment of A Married Woman’s dialogue/monologue/interrogation scenes come not only in the various intertitles and montage-flurry interruptions, but in a general procedure of free or open structuration: what Alain Bergala calls a tabular style, in which (within the general 24-hour constraint) the scene-blocks can be moved around at will in the editing. We can speculate as to whether the many directors who subsequently took advantage of this particular freedom – Robert Altman, Wes Craven, Abel Ferrara – took their inspiration from Godard.

Modernism also enters via an almost perversely dialectical notion of mise en scène: a virtuosic exterior tracking shot in which two professional actors (Méril and Philippe Leroy) flawlessly deliver their walk-and-talk, while two non-professionals (filmmaker Roger Leenhardt and little kid Christophe Bourseiller) either seem at a loose end or manically perform a repetitive gesture; and an ‘earthy’ monologue (derived from Céline) which Godard described (well before this phrase had its day) as “so bad it becomes good”.

It is too easy to take A Married Woman (per Richard Brody’s Godard biography) as a purely personal, secretly autobiographical work-over by Godard of his marital situation (i.e., on the rocks) with Anna Karina. There is doubtless a trace of that in the film – Méril was very aware of it, as Godard was writing agonised letters to his ‘unfaithful wife’ all during the shoot. But, in fact, this project announces an almost-definitive break in Godard’s evolution, wedged between Bande à part and Masculin féminin (1966), away from psychological characterisation. From Made in USA onward, ‘types’ and figures will predominate in place of characters. Godard conceived the anti-psychology of A Married Woman in a prescient fashion: he spoke at the time of the film as an accumulation of data that would best have been structured by an IBM computer!

A Married Woman is part of a mid ‘60s trend in this regard: films (as well as novels and other cultural manifestaions) that, via a large or small detour into Pop Art, investigate the topic of ‘plastic people’ – psychologies (usually middle-class) invaded by consumer society and its incessant visual spectacles (Godard doesn’t ignore audio spectacles, either, including the surreal example of an ‘erotica’ album) – and, within that glacial terrain, the particular case of the ‘neurotic woman’ cracking up at its centre. This loose trend takes us all the way from Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) to Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) via George Perec’s novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), and right through to a magnificent last gasp in William Klein’s The Model Couple (1977).

Let us look more closely now at a specific aspect of the film. There are two important precedents for the Nouvelle Vague evident in A Married Woman: Roberto Rossellini (who is the source and subject of one of the film’s numbered monologues) as model fiction-documentary; and Jean Rouch as model documentary-fiction! I simply mean that Rossellini, at least in the 1940s and ‘50s, starts from fiction and then introduces elements of documentary; while for Rouch, throughout much of his career from the late 1940s to the early 2000s, it’s the other way around.

In a sense, these are two versions of Bazinian realism subjected to the fragmentations of modernism in Godard’s swiftly evolving career of the 1960s. But also note the pre-postmodern Hitchcock pastiche in A Married Woman! Jacques Aumont suggests that, in 1963, Godard was midway between a “belief in documentary revelation and an unavoidable knowledge of the imaginary nature of film” (in French Film: Texts and Contexts, 1st edition, p. 224). Or, as the man himself once gnomically put it: “The sign and the death of the sign”.

This dual lineage – Rossellini/Rouch – can also serve us in understanding the psychic-projective process of narcissistic duplication in the Nouvelle Vague auteurs’ general approach to their female protagonists. For it’s a more general phenomenon than Godard alone: see also Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) or The Soft Skin (1964) or – a nastier, crueler variant – Claude Chabrol’s Les bonnes femmes (1960). Narcissistic duplication, as a psychological dynamic, tends to come in two waves: identification then exclusion, or introjection followed by rejection.

In the Rossellini lineage, the women characters tend to the sublime: they are driven by feeling and intuition; they provide mirrors of the auteur’s soul – just look at all the shots in A Married Woman where Méril looks sadly into the camera, ‘at us’ (or the director). (Beyond the Nouvelle Vague, we can find echoes of this sublimity model in some films by Woody Allen, Éric Rohmer, or Australia’s Ian Pringle). Hollywood cinema, especially the melodrama genre, provided Godard with certain models or inspirations: recall Shirley MacLaine in Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958), for instance. Or, from art cinema, Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), so adored and much-cited by JLG. Remember, in this context, the stern but apt warning issued in the early ‘60s by the anti-Bazinian critic from Positif magazine, Gérard Gozlan: for a particular religious sensibility tinged with irrecuperable misogyny, “the only good woman is a dead woman”! (Although nobody dies in A Married Woman, as distinct from many a Godard film and also The Soft Skin.)

The Rouch legacy points us toward both anthropological documentary and cinéma-vérité reportage – since he was bound up intimately with both of these histories. Woman as object (“subjects are seen as objects”, Godard boasted), once more – but, this time (although with inevitable overlap with the previous model), as a sociological object, a ‘case study’, a sign of the changing, modernised, consumer-society times under President de Gaulle. Until he was forced to change it, Godard’s original (and not exactly modest) title for the project was The Married Woman – a type, not a singular case. He had already drawn upon a strange sociological study (complete with discreetly ‘deframed’ photos) of prostitution for Vivre sa vie (1962); such social surveys, at varying levels of sophistication, were all the rage in this period, as the amazing ‘text & photo’ book Girls of Paris (1962) evidences.

A later extension-transformation of Godard’s attitude as ‘reporter on the state of woman’ can be seen in the work of David Hare, such as the strikingly stylised tele-drama Dreams of Leaving (1980): woman, there, studied like a bug under glass, is the handy repository of everything in the world and society that is blocked, repressed/repressive, socially naïve, finally rather stupid … Fassbinder, too, presents his own distinct variation on this impulse.

What strikes us, today, as the deep similarity between Godard’s two ways of looking at and considering his heroine, Charlotte, is the tendency to quasi-moral (and sometimes quite confused) judgement. Indeed, Godard (in a curious metaphoric association) referred to his ‘freedom’ in making this film (“the cinema plays happily, delighted to be only what it is”), his ability to include anything and everything in it, as a process of being “both judge and litigant” (Godard on Godard, p. 208). What a bind! If you (as a woman) are not harshly judged, then at least you must be strongly defended. But in relation to what crime or sin, exactly? The original sin of being born a woman, maybe … (I pursue this connection between documentary cinema and the inescapably patriarchal judgement imposed upon women in my essay on Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok [1991].)

A Married Woman is therefore intriguing as a catalogue of objectifications. However, beyond its sex/gender projections and undertones, it also provides a striking (even if semantically excessive, not quite ’just’) preview, via a thread of references throughout, of a major concern of Godard’s cinema from the late 1980s onwards: Nazism, the Auschwitz war trials, the Holocaust. Indeed, Godard and at least one of his champions in ’64 insisted that the “occupation” of woman that he documented here (and would take further in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) took place within a “concentrationary universe” – a discipline-and-punish ‘society of control’ (Deleuze’s term) bequeathed to us by the Final Solution of the concentration camps.

MORE Godard: À bout de souffle, Contempt, Hélas pour moi, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1A & 1B, For Ever Mozart, Soigne ta droite, Éloge de l’amour, Sauve qui peut (la vie), La Chinoise, Film Socialism, Tout va bien, Ici et ailleurs, Aria

© Adrian Martin August 1991 / June 2009