By Joanna Walsh.
PIERROT LE FOU—CYAN
Karina: You were crazy to do this?
Belmondo: No, I’m in love.
Karina: It’s the same thing.
Cahiers du Cinéma: There is a good deal of blood in Pierrot.
Godard: Not blood, red.
i
Sometimes I spend an hour in aesthetic re-education, trying to see blue in things.
In lockdown I am trying to see the colour of my kitchen. The colours I mean: to find an aesthetic position that can make me see things good. I mean, that can make me see the good in things. I’m trying not to design my life, but to see its design, the underlying tone and rhythm of its colours. I’m trying to take Instagram photos as though what I have were already ideal. I am trying not to make my life into a movie, but to see the movie in my life.
Pierrot le fou is blue: blue skies, blue seas, Ferdinand/ Pierrot/Belmondo’s blue face. Unlike Technicolor, Eastmancolor film corrupts: cyan fades first: blue skies
become white. The colour that lasts longest is magenta.
When Pierrot/Ferdinand describes Marianne as a ‘jeune femme en technicolor’, it’s translated as ‘a woman who looks like a movie star’. I look for the tiny clue of the
non-aesthetic. In her, in her surroundings. This is in no way looking for imperfection, which is perfectly part of beauty.
ii
Belmondo’s wife wears a girdle. This is why he must leave her.
Karina, if she does, has the indecency not to mention it.
(Perhaps she wears one but preserves the illusion.)
Only at certain angles can I begin to see that Karina and I might be the same species.
I’m fit but my body is deformed — I might say formed — by childbirth. Like Pierrot/Ferdinand’s wife, I could wear a ‘scandale’. Godard does not admire such women. But
nor does he admire women who might wear a girdle but refuse. He only admires women who do not have to make that choice. This is no sort of choice. I am aware that in watching Godard’s film I am doing myself another obscure violence.
I had waited so long for my moment to become beautiful
I watched out for it carefully but, if it came, I did not see it.
Now I know it has passed me by
But when I look back at old selfies
Maybe I was.
Beauty is never inhabited by the beautiful.
Well.
One of the quickest ways to shut women down is to make them afraid to speak publicly from their imperfect bodies. The trick (le truc) is that capitalism had already made bodies a synecdoche for selves. Refuse the mental squeeze of beauty’s girdle and my formless self has no boundaries. The temptation to call myself ugly hovers like revolution: it wouldn’t take much to accept the challenge. What would be the nature of that revolution: revolution facilitated by the image or a revolution of the image? Or. Also.
Or is ugliness, like beauty, a game no woman can win? There is no zero sum for feeling ugly which is an ugly feeling: shameful, blameworthy. Could I win by refusing to play? Instagram Karina, old, her trademark boater, mascara, and fringe applied to a face that has changed: is this defiance or compliance? I am not the same person as I was even a few years ago, years during which I was trying to make it, years I wore makeup, the time I was younger because I had to be. A man in Mexico paid attention not to me but a press-call photo of me photo’d by many photographers: ‘You look like a movie star!’ I was transformed in his eyes because the cameras looked at me. He did not turn to me but continued to stare at the photo. My work was no longer my work but a lens through which I could be looked at.
What do I really look like? I have no idea.
The animals in Pierrot and Madeleine’s magical land are caged.
In Godard movies
People betray each other.
Karina and Belmondo on their horrible cannibal isle.
In self-isolation.
The sand, the lack of shade.
Wouldn’t they rather be in Paris?
Whose paradise is this?
Driving out of Paris (as he drove into it in À bout de souffle) lights play across Belmondo’s face: red, green, and yellow.
Like green-eyed people, my blue irises, reflecting the camera’s glare, turn red.
My Life as a Godard Movie (2022) is available from Transit Books.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of eleven books (several co-written with AI), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. Her installations and interactive projects have been shown at galleries, festivals and in public spaces throughout the UK and Ireland including the ICA London and IMMA Dublin. She is also an editor, university teacher, and arts activist. She is a Markievicz Awardee in the Republic of Ireland and a UK Arts Foundation fellow. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as ‘a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers’. She currently runs @noentry_arts. She can be found on twitter and mastadon @baudade.
