F 2 F

In the cinema of Godard, the camera as well as the face and the gesture disrupt "the classical notions of the journey and the stroll" (Situationist International Anthology, 50), so that, instead of being determined by the urban situation, the character is formed in an any-space-whatever which announces a break between him/her and the milieu. Godard's hero is "[t]he character [who] makes a theatre for himself" (Cinema Two, 194). In Pierrot Le Fou--a film that Deleuze points to as the clearest example of the movement from wandering (balade) to ballad (song)--Anna Karina's character taunts her companion Ferdinand by saying, "Look at the crazy little man. He's driving down a straight line and he has to follow it all the way." Ferdinand opens up a new space for experience by driving their recently stolen Ford Galaxie into the ocean. Deleuze's time-image is all about convertible galaxies, mechanical transmutations of the universe that break from the logic of the earth, and this is probably why this model car has such resonance for Godard (it appears also in Alphaville). When one submerges the galaxy, space becomes negligible, and the world instead becomes a sequence of comic book cells. The body's time subordinates cosmic time and the galactic proportions of historical time ("countless centuries fled into the distance like so many storms"); the experience of boredom becomes central. In the end, it does not matter where the characters wind up, but what matters is their ability to exhaust spaces in order to rejuvenate themselves. Ferdinand's driving off the road is not an aberration--a type of turning-away; rather, as Godard makes explicit through his playing with neon text, it puts the vie in Riviera.