AT A HISTORICAL CROSSROADS: REVISITING DEUX OU TROIS CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D'ELLE (1967)

I begin this chapter with a rumination on Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1967), his cinematic treatise on the transformation of Paris in the 1960s. Godard's city is one that is slowly being made to the measure of late capitalism, as is also suggested by Tati's Playtime and other films of the period including Godard's own Alphaville. What makes Deux ou trois choses unique in this regard is its reflexive rendering of the modes of displacement, affinity and reconfiguration already outlined in the Introduction as three ways of discerning the traces of empire within the post-imperial landscape.

Paris in this film is depicted in what Timothy Corrigan has denoted as the essayistic version of the classic “city symphony” film, which explicitly stages the very problem of the post-war, post-imperial modernization of Paris while also gesturing obliquely towards its impending transformation into global city. My approach to this exceptionally canonical film will explore these suppositions while further determining how some of the cast of characters affiliated with ninteenth-century urban modernity, including the figure of the flâneuse, make significant appearances in this film in a way that tells the story of Paris in the post-imperial moment, in a rather fitting renewal of the city symphony genre.

My brief meditation on this film, which I take as exemplary of a number of films of the period, serves three overarching purposes as a prologue to this chapter. The first is that the reflexive nature of Deux ou trois choses allows it to assume the status of “theoretical document”, a term that I borrow from D. N. Rodowick, in order to situate the film as a cinematic counterpart to much of the scholarly material that resurrects the submerged nature of the imperial past in its pivotal role in the transformation of the Parisian cityscape at this historical juncture. As such, Godard's Paris emerges as a city of the crossroads, hovering somewhere between past and future.