The Language Barrier and its Influence on the Experience of "Weekend"

In the context of a film such as "Weekend", in which its director envisioned a complete redefinition of the filmic ideal based upon the seven oppositions cited in Wollen, it is important to realize that nearly everything is done for a conscious and premeditated purpose. Within the bounds of the tried and true Hollywood film language that has long been standard and therefore "natural", any small tweaks to the formula are absorbed into the greater whole; they do not in any way define the film that contains them, which is itself comfortingly contained by a preordained and familiar lexicon of style and language. For Godard, on the other hand, the very idea of the creation of a "counter-cinema" necessitates that there be no such breathing room, no relaxation into the dangerous realm that is the mainstream. When a work of art is rooted not in any previous aesthetic, but in the definition through itself of an entirely new one, there is nothing to fall back upon, and therefore every detail is intensely relevant to the overall effect of the film and the future of the movement.

This is all well and good when the film is displayed unedited and unmodified, as in Godard's native France, but problems arise as soon as it enters the hands of foreign audiences and distributors, who are not used to addressing the challenges of preserving these seemingly innocuous details, and may not understand or represent the director's intent. In "Weekend", it is primarily the ham-handed use of subtitles that fails to take account for Godard's stylistic choices as director. The idea of translation is always a difficult one even in mainstream film; it is difficult to preserve the particular meaning of a phrase, idiom or dialogue passage in a language for which it was not originally intended. Yet this issue takes on even more relevance in "Weekend", where Godard often can be seen to manipulate the audience connection through sound and speech. Particularly interesting is the interrogation scene, where Corinne recounts a bizarre sexual experience. In the background is an ebb and flow of cacophony, centered upon the honking cars outside and supported by a score that swells dynamically with bizarre and calculated jarringness, frequently obscuring the audible dialogue. This parody of melodrama in film and its accompanying music is also designed to further distance the audience from the characters, especially through a renewed awareness of the ridiculous nature of the filmic illusion. When screened without subtitles for audiences fluent in French, this effect can be fully realized, but much of this effect is lost for American audiences, where the included subtitles helpfully but counter-productively illuminate every line, even those that would be completely incomprehensible to the French audience it was intended for. We learn more than we are intended to, the narrative of the scene is given a flow and coherence it does not warrant or intend, and a key revealing element of our distance from the film is at least temporarily deferred.

This is just one example of the threats faced to some of Godard's techniques in the hands of those who do not fully comprehend them; but how would the director himself have addressed this issue in preparing his film for foreign audiences? Of course, this sort of question can be only speculation, but it is likely his approach to subtitles, the visualization and imagization of spoken language, would mirror his strict and calculated control over the image, as presented in the film itself. Indeed, his use of blinking, manipulated and cut-up words implies a familiarity with this visual interpretation of language and its potential uses to further his aesthetic ideal. One imagines a sort of visual "white noise" obscuring the subtitles to represent the sound that obscures dialogue, an aggravating gesture that would sit perfectly with a director never afraid to aggravate, disturb or jar his audience into greater attention and perception. While there are any number of ways he might have gone about this, one thing is clear: the language barrier creates a distinct challenge for a film such as "Weekend", challenging the many subtleties that make it what it is. We are left, then, with a question: who else but a director is qualified to make the sort of decisions that will influence the experience of his own work?