Je Sais Research Articles

Multimodal action formats for managing preference: chais pas ‘dunno’ plus gaze conduct in dispreferred responses to questions

This paper investigates speakers’ use of the French epistemic expression je sais pas (JSP) ‘I don't know’ and its variants (e.g., chais pas ‘dunno’) in dispreferred responses to questions – i.e., responses that disagree or disalign with the terms set up by the prior speaker's action. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, I identify two distinct uses of the expression in the same sequential environment that systematically differ in terms of the respondent's gaze conduct and features of prosodic and morpho-phonological delivery: [JSP + gaze averted from recipient], comprising a semantically bleached and formally reduced JSP (chais pas), serves to project an incipient dispreferred response – JSP here works as a particle-like disagreement preface; [JSP + gaze on recipient], comprising a fully epistemic use that tends to be produced in fuller form (je sais pas), serves to accomplish a dispreferred response of the ‘claiming lack of knowledge’ type. The two multimodal assemblies hence represent two distinct social action formats, pertaining to two different practices involved in the management of preference organization. The findings deepen our knowledge of the type of turn-initial particles and of the multimodal practices pertaining to preference organization, and shed further light on how grammar and bodily conduct interface in social interaction.

„Cadre de vie”. Jean-Luc Godard’s „Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle” (1967), French TV and Architectural Discourse

The article demonstrates how Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) contributed to the contemporary critical discourse on (social) housing estates (grands ensembles). With his work, the filmmaker aimed to show the grand ensemble, or ‘the big(ger) picture’ of what it meant to live in contemporary consumerist oriented France. The protagonist Juliette Johnson represents the French citizen and simultaneously the metaphor of the Paris Region that underwent a huge transformation. The main interest of the text lies in the use of the 360-degree pan shot and the notion of cadre (frame), as they connect film theory and the contemporary discourse about how the décor, i.e. the (built) environment, influences people’s cadre de vie (living conditions). A close reading of two film sequences and a historical contextualisation of architectural discourses and theories is completed by a comparison with documentary TV programmes. While they had fostered the critical discussion about housing estates already before, they used the panorama shot only after Deux ou trois choses…

7. Echoes of Romanticism in Violin and Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 45 by Marcel Mihalovici - Analytical Landmarks for an Upscale Interpretation

Abstract The evolution of the genre of violin and piano sonata in the Romanian composition creation in the first half of the 20th century, marked by the tendency towards getting close to the European musical phenomenon by assimilating stylistic influences of Romanticism, especially, of Enescian Romanticism, distinctly manifesting in Violin and Piano Sonata no. 2, op. 45, by Marcel Mihalovici, one of the most renowned Romanian composers settled in Paris, appreciated by the famous contemporaries, such as M.Ravel, V.d’Indy, F. Poulenc etc. Sonata (1941), preceded by a motto in the sonnet of Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval Myrtho: „Je sais pourquoi lá bas lé volcan s’est rouvert…”, impresses through the high emotional tension, metaphorically expressed by the image of the “woken” volcano, figurative suggestiveness of the musical language, architectonic innovativeness, spectacular capitalization of the violin technique in the formula of a violin-piano choir.

L'étrange affaire Tiburce Petitpas by Gérard Netter

Reviewed by: L'étrange affaire Tiburce Petitpas by Gérard Netter Alain Ranwez Netter, Gérard. L'étrange affaire Tiburce Petitpas. L'Harmattan, 2019. ISBN 978-2-343-16667-4. Pp. 199. Thematically the concept of the double has been treated a number of times throughout literary history, but Netter adds an interesting and existentialist twist to his intriguing plot. The protagonist Petitpas awakens after a night of nightmares evoking surrealistic fears of a loss of identity. The nightmares also inform him that existentially one cannot be objectively determined by others' definition, that one must continuously move on in the process of discovery of the self without assurances of achieving the final goal of that determined self. Therefore, Tiburce decides to act in a different manner. Since his wife has just left him, he chooses to explore new adventurous ways. This new search most unfortunately does not last long. As he meanders in his neigh borhood that very morning he is assaulted by a gang, resembling one on Kubrick's cinematic A Clockwork Orange. He is sent to a hospital with serious head and leg injuries, loses his smartphone, his bank card, and official information required for any financial transaction which would be used by Tiburce personally according to official agencies. It is at this early point in the novel that the story evolves and deepens within the intricate plot of this "étrange affaire." A journalist named Oscar Leroux recounts odd and divergent details in the local newspaper Sombre époque about the attack, which Leroux himself ironically witnessed, but his professional reporting is neither a factual description of what occurred nor a true description of those responsible. Furthermore, the reporter, who stubbornly claims to be Tiburce's intimate friend, continues to publish articles not only distorting the truth but leading the newspaper's readers to wild assumptions and theoretical propositions. Other characters with bizarre and opinionated views humorously appear, such as the inspector Confus-Lenormand in charge of the Petitpas case, the concierge Madame Jacasse, and Margaret Lovato who in a most motherly manner informs Tiburce about classical literature involving the theme of the double. There are also others who evoke various and divergent opinions on both Petitpas and his immediate threatening world. Due to the details gathered by the police, Tiburce quickly comes to understand that his identity has been usurped by another or a double, and this loss leads him into a world of extreme anxiety, depression, and anguish. He becomes haunted by this intimate double [End Page 207] of his existence, whether real or imagined, and must now descend into his own hellish voyage of self-discovery in order to find his authentic inner self: "La question, c'est de savoir qui je suis, puisque je sais ce que je ne suis plus" (18). This is an intriguing novel, deserving to be read especially for the description of the characters, the well-thoughtout plot, and Netter's cultural and philosophical introspections. Alain Ranwez Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Grammatical change in Paris French:in situquestion words in embedded contexts

ABSTRACTThis article will review the parameters of a grammatical variable within the putative variety ‘Multicultural Paris French’, i.e. its distribution and use within a group of youngbanlieuespeakers. The structure in question stands out as it has rarely been found in previous corpora in France: indirect questions following verbs likesavoir, where the question word is post-verb (je sais pas il a dit quoi). We discuss which groups use the new forms in Paris, referring briefly to some comparable changes in London. This structure appears to be an instance of ‘change from below’ (Labov, 2007), which seems to have emerged in the speech of young people of immigrant background. It might also, on the other hand, be a long-standing vernacular variant, which has re-emerged, with specific identity-related significance, in this particular group of speakers. Its exceptional character in the Paris context highlights a lack of evidence for the emergence of a more wide-ranging, distinct multiethnolect, as found in London and other European capitals.

Ce que je sais de Vera Cándida: Tema y motivos del creador de Macondo

Este artículo de reflexión parte de observaciones generales acerca de lo que la literatura comparada permite, en tanto disciplina enmarcada dentro de los estudios literarios. Enfatiza la necesidad de fomentar la comparación entre obras pertenecientes anuestro continente con otras provenientes de regiones del mundo distintas a la nuestra. En este sentido, propone el análisis de los vínculos existentes entre Ce que je sais de Vera Candida de Véronique Ovaldé, La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada y Cien años de soledad. La novela francesa hace suyo el tema de la Cándida Eréndira, recreando paraello un espacio latinoamericano imaginario y valiéndose de algunos de los motivos presentes en la narrativa de García Márquez, por ejemplo, la melancolía, la soledad, las marcas de cruces en la frente y el incesto. Lo anterior permite vislumbrar no solo en qué obras del creador de Macondo ha focalizado su atención la autora al escribir su novela, sino también de qué forma las ha actualizado en el contexto literario francés mediante su ficción. El análisis que se propone se sustenta principalmente en la teoría de Luz Aurora Pimentel sobre la tematología y la transtextualidad.. También, integra planteamientos de pensadores y analistas culturales que han reflexionado sobre los puntos en común encontrados entre García Márquez y Ovaldé.

More than an epistemic hedge: French je sais pas ‘I don’t know’ as a resource for the sequential organization of turns and actions

This paper examines the interrelatedness of grammar and social interaction in relation to speakers’ use of the construction je sais pas ‘I don’t know’ in French talk-in-interaction. Based on qualitative and quantitative evidence, the study documents an interconnection between the syntactic and morphophonological properties of the construction, its epistemic meaning, its placement within turn and sequence, and its interactional functioning, specifically elaborating on its use in responses to questions. Syntactically and morphophonologically full forms tend to be used as epistemic disclaimers while reduced forms tend to be discourse marker-like. The latter occur in various sequential environments in mid-turn position, accomplishing interactional purposes such as hedging, floor-holding or indexing approximation. By contrast, in turn-initial and turn-final position, they occur predominantly in responses to questions, and are specifically implicated in the sequential organization of turns and actions: In turn-initial position, they project a non-fitted response; in turn-final position they function as turn-exit devices at a moment when a responsive action has not reached conditional relevance. Results show the grammaticization of je sais pas as an interaction-organizational device that cannot be reduced to the role of epistemic hedge or stance-marker, but is profoundly implicated in the sequential organization of turns and actions.

La Malédiction: The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe

La Malédiction:The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe Avital Ronell (bio) The thought-poem, phrase, wants to end itself, stop its complaint, but risks drowning in affect—it has been enraged and must stop. Organized around a plaintive cry, the text, whose title I would be tempted to translate as “Sentencing,” tries to contain an encroaching sense of rage, uncontrollably on the take. The complaint must not tip over into hate speech, a constant temptation and vanishing point for its signatory. Poetic thinking strives instead to offer protection, securing the terrain from which the Hölderlinian gods, ever dependent on language, have fled. Yet, anger competes with the complaint, threatening to disrupt its course of relative incapacitation, as if two types of impotence were in mortal rivalry. The poetic “I” must cut itself off due to a rising swell of anger, an invasive intonation of revolt, the spectacle of which he/she/ it wants in fact to spare us, or “you:” “je sens monter une colère sans nom, je préférerais vous en épargner le spectacle. Mais je sais bien que la violence est inévitable, il n’y a jamais d’apaisement” (p. 107).1 Livid, unappeasable, the poetic stance pitches a place in the book of inevitable violence and dissipation. The “inevitable” on which it wagers takes a tumble, however, when it states a turnaround: the only thing left to announce, it contends, concerns whatever advent we await—the advent has already arrived. Lacoue carries this temporal collar to the furthest extreme, to an end already attained. As wounded being, we are already dead: “Nous sommes déjà morts, nous le savons. Même les enfants le savent, et du reste ils en pleurent. Il n’y a là aucun secret” (p. 107). [End Page 579] I do not know what children—whether those of the German Romantics, historical revolution, or of more empirical vintage—do and do not know concerning mortal being, and his remark makes me think that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ought to know better when it comes to the little ones. Does a child’s lacrimose complaint play to the modernist beat of a mortality timer? He has addressed children before in his work, teaching them philosophy, telling them not to be afraid of “big words.”2 These minoritized beings are said to sniff out death. Children, unleashed: They cry about playtime’s last call and squirm at having to go to bed before everyone else, shut out. Maybe such abrupt expulsions, each time an ambush of the mainmise and experience of injustice, draw the child to the horror of extinction, and Lacoue was right all along about the fearful taunt of relentless exposure.3 Not to mention that he was such a child himself, in fateful line with self-surrender and keyed to the powerless acceptance of children. The child that Lacoue-Labarthe was—the one (or many) carried in the hollowed place of a Self—was felled, in his time, by a mother’s finitizing curse. Intersecting in a dreadful way with German calamity, as its own little homegrown allegory, she went after him as an envoy of historical erasure. For a long while, maybe forever, she continued to burn him up in the living hell that pulsed catastrophe in his life and works—two motifs that cannot stand up to the fatal curse, “life” and “works.” By means of destructive phrasing, she dealt him out. Anger—which, Lacan reminds us, Freud never handled—prowled in the wings, as extended life-span of the curse’s pounce. In fact, the oversized anger “sans nom” issues from a facet of Mother that cuts into history, an modus operandi that psychoanalysts of the archetype call the Death Mother.4 Let me back this up. The revolt of rage settles on having death apportioned to us, and “ces viatiques ridicules” in order only “to make us vaguely forget that we will never know it” (p. 107). The voice, interrupting itself, apologizes, breaking the grip of anger, adding a tinge of irony released to the air of atheisms: “Mais voici que je m’emporte. Excusez-moi, je vous en [End Page 580] prie” (p. 107...

Delphine de Vigan's Pathographies: Writing as a Response to Trauma and Illness

Delphine de Vigan's PathographiesWriting as a Response to Trauma and Illness Caroline Verdier (bio) Award-winning French writer Delphine de Vigan's career took off in 2008 with her acclaimed novel No et Moi, but she is now better known for her 2011 offering, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit, in which she attempted to "write [her] mother" ("écrire [sa] mère"), to tell the story of her family and how they coped with her mother's bipolar disorder.1 She had published her first novel, Jours sans faim, in 2001 under the pseudonym Lou Delvig, an account of nineteen-year-old Laure's anorexia and her stay in the hospital to overcome it.2 It later emerged, however, that this account was inspired by Vigan's experience. Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit and Jours sans faim have respectively been labelled as a family novel and an autofiction, and there is no denying that, in the case of Vigan as in that of many other writers, family is "at the origin of the need to write" ("à l'origine du besoin d'écrire").3 Nor is she the first to write about illness and/or trauma. Within contemporary literature in French, many famous names come to mind such as Annie Ernaux, Lydia Flem, Chloé Delaume, and Lorette Nobécourt, to mention but a few. Yet, the case of Vigan's writing is interesting to study, as a close reading of the two aforementioned texts reveals how both stories overlap and inform each other, and could almost form a single narrative. Indeed, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit provides the reader of Jours sans faim with a fuller picture of her mother's illness and suicide at age sixty-one, what led Vigan [End Page 87] to become anorexic, and how writing helped her come to terms with both experiences. One could almost insert Jours sans faim in the middle of Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit to expand it. Similarly, Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit provides further details to Jours sans faim, which, as Damlé points out, contains "notable gaps and ellipses in Laure's story."4 Along with illness, trauma links and permeates both narratives; as such, in this article, I would like to go beyond the family novel and the autofiction readings associated with these two texts and look at how family, transgression, trauma, illness, and writing are intrinsically linked in Vigan's writing. This analysis will also show how Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit can be labelled a pathography—a comprehensive account of one's life including illness—and Jours sans faim an autopathofiction—referring to the combined genres of autofiction and autopathography,5 and how writing these accounts helped Vigan as a patient and as a daughter. This is an approach that echoes Anne Hunsaker Hawkins's view that pathographies "are as much autobiographical accounts of the author's experience as witness as they are biographical accounts of another's illness and death."6 ________ Let us first focus on family and transgressions as roots for trauma and illness. Since, in the two narratives in question, the transgressions, both physical and mental, take place within the family sphere, it only seems appropriate to start this analysis with Vigan's view of her family: My family embodies the noisiest, most spectacular kind of joy, the unrelenting echo of the dead, and the repercussions of disaster. Today I know that, like so many other families, it also illustrates the destructive power of words, and of silence. (Ma famille incarne ce que la joie a de plus bruyant, de plus spectaculaire, l'écho inlassable des morts, et le retentissement du désastre. Aujourd'hui je sais aussi qu'elle illustre, comme tant d'autres familles, le pouvoir de destruction du verbe, et celui du silence.)7 This quotation features many aspects linked to trauma, with words such as "désastre," "pouvoir," and "silence." Indeed, in Rien ne s'oppose à la nuit the various transgressions—along with the traumas they caused—remain unspoken, and all the family members (at least before Vigan) abide by [End Page 88] the omertà that is implicitly dictated by Vigan's...

A new model for Spanish cinema. Authorship and globalization: the films of Javier Rebollo

This essay explores a new model of Spanish cinema established by a group of filmmakers who have entered the field in the last decade. These new film practices are related to changes in technological, cultural and social processes in a transnational context and to how some film critics understand film aesthetics. To illustrate these issues, we will examine the case of Javier Rebollo, a filmmaker and producer of three feature films, the coproductions Lo que sé de Lola/Ce que je sais de Lola (2006), La mujer del piano (2010) and El muerto y ser feliz (2012). The essay will engage with questions of reception and auteurism and with the construction of the cinematic canon in Spain.

Mourning and loss in the work of Pauline Martin and Dominique Goblet

This article discusses the portrayal of loss and bereavement in the work of two female comics artists. It focuses first on three short books by the French artist Pauline Martin, La Boite (2000), La Meilleure du monde (2001), and Ce que je sais de ma maman (2007), and then analyses Faire semblant c’est mentir (2008) by the Belgian artist Dominique Goblet. It considers how these artists deploy the resources of the medium to give expression to states of grief and loss by which their textual selves are submerged, and to the stages of mourning that allow them to attain some resolution, a process that includes the production of the books themselves. It notes that the work of both artists alludes, in indirect ways, to ambivalent feelings toward the mother.

Literary cinema? 2 or 3 things I Know about Anne Hébert’s Le Premier jardin

This essay explores the narrative connections between Jean-Luc Godard's cinema (mostly represented by 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, 1967) and Anne Hébert's complex novel, Le Premier jardin (Éditions du Boréal, 1988), and establishes that the style of the latter is inextricably linked to the cinematic techniques of the former. These connections transform Hébert's writing into a surrogate visual narrative. Literary and visual narratives overlap in the work of both authors, though, which leads to an aesthetic identity crisis for both novel (writing) and film (filmmaking).

Bête de cirque by Tiphaine Samoyault

Samoyault, Tiphaine. Bête de cirque. Paris: Seuil, 2013. ISBN 978-2-02-109826-6. Pp. 154. 16 a. The narrator of this book—let us say “Tiphaine Samoyault” for the sake of simplicity—looks back upon a period in 1995 that she spent teaching in Sarajevo, when that city was under siege. She wonders what prompted her, as a young woman barely out of school, to leave her comfortable life in Paris and to make such as gesture. She is quite sure that it was not altruism, nor any other noble quality of character.Was it a desire to emulate her elders, those people who had had the opportunity to accomplish heroic deeds during heroic times? Was it a will to affirm that not everyone in her own generation had forgotten how to live politically? Had she fallen prey to the idea of history? To that of a utopian European ideal? Bedeviled by those questions and by others equally pernicious, the only thing that seems certain to her is that she feels a profound sense of shame. Because she had wanted to see what war was like for her own purposes, and because those purposes were not pure. Because she had wished to be in the middle of something, and because she had pretended to be someone that she was not. She recognizes that it is not only Sarajevo that makes her ashamed, but also many other experiences, both before and after Sarajevo.As if shame were, for her, a chronic and absolutely constitutional state. It is hardly surprising, then, when she confesses,“je voulais écrire un essai sur la honte” (69); nor is it astonishing when she discovers that the very writing of that essay produces shame in her. After all, a writer is always on the outside, looking in, she reasons, someone who lives vicariously, telling stories about what other people do. “L’écrivain était honteux. C’est ce qui le privait parfois de toute capacité à s’engager” (76).Yet when she does put herself forward, she feels like a trained animal in the circus. In other roles, she does not fare much better. She bemoans the “ratage collectif” (53) of her generation of young intellectuals; she realizes that there is a special sort of shame that afflicts women in first-world, bourgeois society; even her maternity occasions her shame. She often feels as besieged as Sarajevo itself:“Je sais ce que c’est que d’avoir un cœur encerclé”(55). Many readers will recognize that state of siege, and many of them will find something of themselves in the account of herself that Samoyault offers here. Some readers will understand, too, that nobody is ever one thing alone, neither a‘writer,’nor a‘teacher,’nor a‘mother,’ nor indeed a ‘reader,’ but rather several things at once and many things in the course of a lifetime. People are mobile both in time and across time. Thus, when Samoyault returns to Sarajevo fifteen years after her first stay, she finds that the city has changed a great deal—and the same, undoubtedly, could be said of her. University of Colorado Warren Motte 270 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 ...

Oracles of Suburbia: French Cinema and Portrayals of Paris Banlieues, 1958–1968

The great film director Jean-Luc Godard once claimed that cinema was a kind of ‘oracle’ that anticipated grand currents of social and cultural change. This article examines films depicting the Parisian banlieues during the period 1958–68, a phase that coincided with the construction of mass housing developments in these areas. Beginning with Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle (1958), this article will chart the parallel evolutions of urban thinking and onscreen representations of the banlieues through Denys de La Patellière's Rue des Prairies (1959), Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe (1960), Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967), and Tati's Playtime (1967). These films, it will be argued, were demonstrative of the predictive powers that Godard saw cinema as possessing, as they anticipated many of the critiques of mass housing that later emerged centring on the loss of ‘traditional’ communities, social alienation and consumerism. Yet, while banlieue cinema has often been seen as merely reflecting degradation and social ills, this article will argue that films also included ‘positive’ narratives centring on notions of nostalgia.

The Victorian Counterarchive: Mikimoto Ryuzo, John Ruskin, and Affirmative Reading

The Victorian Counterarchive: Mikimoto Ryuzo, John Ruskin, and Affirmative Reading

Sherlock Holmes: une vie [Sherlock Holmes: a life] (review)

Reviewed by: Sherlock Holmes: une vie [Sherlock Holmes: a life] Nadia Boucheta Translated by Hasmig Chahinian Sherlock Holmes: une vie [Sherlock Holmes: a life]. André-François Ruaud, Xavier Mauméjean. Lyon: Les Moutons électriques, 2011. (Series: La bibliothèque rouge, n° 20). 523 pages. “La bibliothèque rouge” [the red library] series celebrates the great figures of popular literature. Each volume is a character’s biography, conceived as if the character was a real human being. Researchers draw on the authors’ original texts to highlight this life. The editors have decided to renew the series to mark its sixth anniversary. André-François and Xavier Ruaud Mauméjean had previously co-authored a biography of Sherlock Holmes, Les nombreuses vies de Sherlock Holmes [The many lives of Sherlock Holmes], published in 2005 as the second title in this series. In 2011, they decided to return to the character and carry out a more thorough biography, attempting to reach the man behind the legend. In order to achieve their goal, they used the established canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which consists of four novels and fifty-six short stories published between 1887 and 1930. But to further detail their research, they expanded their study to additional texts published by Adrian Conan Doyle1 and Maurice Leblanc1 as well as texts written by the original author but not included in the canon. The chapters cover minutely the imagined life of Sherlock Holmes in chronological order. His parents, his brother (Mycroft), his childhood, his adolescence are reviewed. Then comes the meeting with Dr. Watson, followed by a description of the years they lived in Baker Street. The separation years and the consequent return to Baker Street are also mentioned. Finally, the last years of the detective’s life are fully documented. This biography, illustrated by a rich iconography (posters, drawings, photographs) includes a bibliography and texts that pay tribute to the character. The authors have managed to bring out the man behind the legend, a man with his flaws and his qualities, a truly human character, depicted with such strength and power that some readers might be led to believe that Sherlock Holmes really existed. [End Page 83] This acclaimed and imitated emblematic detective has had an impact on generations of readers and is still a role model, carved in our collective memory. This biography pays tribute to him, and, through him, to the formidable writing skills of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose hero has surpassed his creator in fame. Hasmig Chahinian Bibliothèque nationale de France, CNLJ-JPL Notes 1. Adrian Malcolm Conan Doyle was the youngest son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He wrote, with the assistance of John Dickson Carr, additional Sherlock Holmes stories, gathered in a volume titled The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Adrian Malcolm was his father’s literary executor. (Translator’s note). 2. Maurice Leblanc, a French writer, is the creator of Arsène Lupin, “the gentleman thief.” Sherlock Holmes first appears in his work in Sherlock Holmes arrive trop tard [Sherlock Holmes arrives too late], a short story published in the journal Je sais tout [I know everything] in 1906. After a formal protest from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes was changed to Herlock Sholmès. He reappears in Arsène Lupin contre Herlock Sholmès [Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes] featuring two adventures in which the characters are engaged in a match of wits. (Translator’s note). Copyright © 2012 Bookbird, Inc

Review: Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, by Guy Debord; 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, by Jean-Luc Godard; and Playtime, by Jacques Tati

Review: <i>Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes</i>, by Guy Debord; <i>2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle</i>, by Jean-Luc Godard; and <i>Playtime</i>, by Jacques Tati

Calvino's Non-Knowledge

This essay proposes a psychoanalytic reading of several works by Italo Calvino. Indebted to Octave Mannoni and Slavoj Žižek for their theorization of fetishism as a logic that binds together a knowledge and a non-knowledge, and in particular to Mannoni's formulation of that logic in the phrase 'Je sais bien, mais quand même', the essay tracks the theme of the 'void' in Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, Le Cosmicomiche, and La strada di San Giovanni, and examines the model of desire as 'universal cannibalism' in 'Sotto il sole giaguaro'. It reads the thematization of the 'void' as an attempt to master the constitutive lack that ideological fantasy works to cover over, and argues that the fantasy of reciprocal cannibalism is an attempt to render transparent an opacity in language that the desiring subject cannot know.

Smell and the City: Miasma as a Code of Crisis in Postwar French Cinema

ABSTRACTThis essay focuses on the role the sense of smell plays as a moral barometer in the urban imagination. Smell has long been a tool by which to determine proper hygiene in the city, whether locating the potential of physical disease by foul odor or, more metaphorically speaking, cultural pathology in the form of prostitution and poverty. The essay deploys the sense of smell within architectural contexts according to the latter definition, that is, with respect to allegory. The postwar French suburban housing type known as le grand ensemble, or large housing estate, is the setting of social malaise and corruption in two postwar French films. Jean-Luc Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966) is the story of a prostitute whiling away her time in La Courneuve, a suburban housing project outside Paris, and Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) follows the hapless and violent existence of three young men, an Arab, a black and a Jew, in one 24-hour period as they move between city and suburb, life and death.

Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image

Jean-Luc Godard's incorporation of paintings, comic strip images, and print advertisements in two of his seminal 1960's 'collage' films, Pierrot le fou (1965) and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967), prompts a number of intriguing questions concerning the re-presentation and re-contextualization of pre-existing (in this case, mechanically reproduced) images in film and the plastic arts.