Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about Her/Deux ou trois
chases que je sais d'elle (1966) clearly equates the Her/elle in the title with both the
city of Paris and a young housewife living in a modern apartment on the
outskirts of the city. Godard has insisted that this 'elle' is only Paris and not
Juliette—the housewife whose daily activities the film documents. Yet the
movements of Juliette within the film are inseparable from the knowledge
imparted by the filming of the city's public and domestic spaces. Further, her
quotidian route through these sites must constantly negotiate an almost
excessive overabundance of consumer images. This film, and much of the work
of the so-called French New Wave, attempts to articulate the problems posed by
the 'Modern City' and the conditions of post-war capitalism. Weekend (1967) and
Fahrenheit 451 (1966) envision a city in which the status quo delineated by
consumer culture sets the pattern for all forms of urban life. Fahrenheit 451, a
dystopic science fiction film directed by Francois Truffaut, describes a world in
which the very structure of the home is conflated with technologies of mass
culture and consumerism. Technology enters the domestic sphere in this film as a
'screen interface' that 'spectacularly' produces gendered and sexualized modes
of identification almost exclusively for the suburban housewife.
This thesis explores the gendered spaces of the cinematic city, particularly
how architecture, technology, and consumerism are spatialized. In chapter one I
address how the spaces of consumerism and the domestic are conflated, leaving
it up to the suburban housewife to bear the burden. In chapter two I turn to the
formation of female desire as it is reconfigured in the exchanges between the
spaces of technology and the domestic. How are these intersecting spheres
represented as potential sites of communal transformation? How do they serve
to reveal the limits of transformation? The possibility for social change within
this cinematic space is ultimately relocated outside of the urban. All three films
offer a significant re-appraisal of the 'Modern City,' and in the process reveal its
profound links to women's bodies and female desire. I conclude with a
discussion of the failures of the post-war 'Modern City' which, in these films, is
rejected in favour of a move 'into nature,' a going 'back to zero,' as a possible site
for reimagining new patterns of social and sexual relations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/11630 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Bercov, Kimberly Dawn |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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