Bookcover as Intertitle in the Cinema of Jean-Luc Godard

Abstract

Jean-Luc Godard used books in his early films as part of his mise-en-scène, and numerous volumes with clearly legible cover titles appear as part of the diegesis of these films. Starting with Pierre le Fou, however, Godard began to display extreme close-ups of bookcovers that were not part of the diegesis. He turned the cover titles into texts akin to silent film intertitles. His tentative use of these extradiegesis books in Pierrot le Fou became much more thorough in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle. In this film, Godard used several extreme close-ups from Gallimard’s Idées series, making the cover into found texts that serve to interpret the images that frame them. Most of these book titles in Deux ou trois choses have gone unidentified — until now. In subsequent films over the next few years, Godard continued to use bookcovers as intertitles, but, by that most im-memorial year of 1968, he began to question the value of print culture for expressing the truth.