2 or 3 Things I know About Her (France: Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

 

In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, language, war: in a word, everything. Among the legendary French filmmaker’s finest achievements, the film takes as its ostensible subject the daily life of Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady), a housewife from the Paris suburbs who prostitutes herself for extra money. Yet this is only a template for Godard to spin off into provocative philosophical tangents and gorgeous images. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is perhaps Godard’s most revelatory look at consumer culture, shot in ravishing widescreen color by Raoul Coutard. (source)

2 or 3 Things I know About Her (France: Jean-Luc Godard, 1967: 87 mins)

Barnhart, Scotty. "The Wave Surfs Me." The Cine-Files #2 (Spring 2012)

 Bredin, John. "2 or 3 Ways Godard Taught Us How to Speak and Live." Acidemic (2013) ["Shy people take notice. Sometimes we become shy (and I myself still feel shy at times, depending, naturally, on who I'm with, or the situation), better still, let me phrase it a different way: we say that we're shy, or inarticulate, or afraid to talk, when in reality we're simply numbed by over-exposure to the prepackaged speech of movies and television shows: talk that's fakely fluid in the Hollywood sense. After watching actors speak brilliantly, dashing off hilarious applause lines as if they were talking naturally when, in reality, they spent days or weeks memorizing a pre-written script by comparison, our own conversational offerings might appear flat and boring to us. Certainly too, in a media-saturated age such as ours, because of our overexposure to glib, slick, oily-tongued, sonorous anchor people and celebrities, one could easily see how a person might get the false, even monstrous impression that this is how real people should talk. Unable to achieve such a bizarre standard of faux eloquence in our own speech, we clam up. Philosopher Maxine Greene, critiquing such indurations in the mundane, talks about the need to resist passivity, to, partly through reflective art encounters she says, escape submergence in the everyday, the routine, the banal. Such submergence ought to include our current mass drowning, if you will, in a sea of pop cultural and media kitsch: a filling up of our heads, like the white cream inside a Twinkie, with a combination of advertisements, pop cultural fluff, and the grave pronouncements of the talking heads. Might such an inexorable assault on our cognitive and aesthetic apparatus tamp down our capacity to generate our own unique and creative thoughts, disabling our ability to write (and speak) our own essays to the world?"]

Brody, Richard. "An Exile in Paradise." The New Yorker (November 20, 2000)

Brody, Richard, Héloise Godet and Lawrence Kardish. "Discussing Godard." The Close Up #3 (November 2014)

Ford, Hamish. "Two or Three Things I Know About Her." Senses of Cinema #66 (March 2013)

Houston, Shaun. "2 or 3 Things I know About Her." Pop Matters (August 3, 2009)

Kogonada. "Godard in Fragments." The Current (February 10, 2016)

Taubin, Amy. "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her: The Whole and Its Parts." The Current (July 21, 2009)