Jean-Luc Godard is a French film maker who was a major figure associated with the movement French New Wave, a film movement characterized by its rejection of the era’s traditional film-making conventions in favor of experimentation and iconoclasm (the breaking/destruction of images.) Godard’s films are a philosophical analysis of image itself and the reflection of expression in film.

“Not a just image, but just an image”.

His thoughts were that most films of the time were created with the idea of a ‘just image’, where the shown material goes beyond the image itself into metaphor and backstory and deep emotional expression. Just ideas, or expanding on the word itself – Justice ideas, are ideas which are laboured with predetermined wieght and background, where the audience has the feel a certain emotional or have a certain response becasue that is what the image has trained them to do. This is predominant in film and often associated with musical scores; sad violin or tense drumming provoking a preconceived response.

Godard wanted to allow images to be themselves with no weight or baggage on the image…. ‘just an image’. He wanted to leave an opening for the audience to experience his film themselves, to leave a space of encounter with no predetermined feelings or ideas. New and open. Giving his audience the choice to feel their own emotions and have their own thoughts.

I like this idea a lot as I have grown up with my high school English classes saying the classic line ‘the author made the curtains blue because the man living there is sad’ but in many cases creatives just make something the way it is because they want to, there is no underlying metaphor of backstory.

My lecturer spoke of a specific example of Godard’s philosophy coming into play from her own experiences as an ethnic film director. “When you learn a language, you learn their culture and you see what the culture puts emphasis on. That is how it is in film.” In many Pasifica cultures, their language is built heavily around their connection with nature. Thus that is what they put emphasis on in the rest of their culture, especially in representation through literature and film and my lecturer often finds herself leaning into that naturally in her own film work. After this realization, she began to work more with the idea of making images of ‘just a thing being a thing in the world’.