The name is absent

between signified and signifier is unequivocal, and it is complicated to
replace the association (Wollen, 1972: 78-81).

Godard is one of the directors who most emphatically investigates the
possibilities of the image and cinema as a medium of communication. Godard
makes the most of a medium that is semiologically complex. He achieves a
satisfactory mixture of the Linguistic, Iconic and Symbolic levels of cinema in
his continuous research into the nature of the perception of the (un)reality of
cinema. His films are the result of a style of filmmaking in which the
conceptual meaning of the film coexists with the visual beauty of the image
and the documentary ‘truth’ (Baecker, 1996: 567 and Wollen, 1972). Godard’s
films can be defined as ‘metacinematic’. This is to say, he makes cinema
speak about cinema, ‘manipulating’ cinematic language to undress and reveal
his ideas about it. He frequently questions the very reality of cinema, as we
can see in films such as À bout de Soufflé (1960), Le Petit soldat (1963) and
Le Mépris (1963). In these films, Godard conceives a cinema where the only
reality that it is possible to stage is a reality that is paradoxically immersed in
fiction. In films such as Une femme est une femme (1961) Godard suggests
that the consequence of breaking the traditional fictional artifices that
configure the (un)reality of cinema is that the distance between the
characters and the audience is reduced, initiating a dual phenomenon of
proximity between the director/medium/content/material and the audience.
When the characters evade the cinematic conventions, the audience feels
disturbed, as the expectations about the narrative are anomalous. In fact, in
films such as À bout de soufflé and Le Petit soldat we are encouraged to
consider the act of having characters occasionally talking to the
camera/audience, breaking the traditional laws of cinema.²⁴ Reflecting the
(un)reality of films in this manner, Godard emphasizes cinema’s conventions
and, as a result, the distance between reality and fiction, the (in)visible filter
that separates them, is now evident and therefore it is possible to ignore it.

Following, then, the cineliteracy of directors of the nouvelle vague, a
post-classical American director like David Lynch in films such as Blue Velvet

²⁴ We find a similar, highly self-reflexive technique in films such as Play it Again, Sam (Ross, 1972) and
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Allen, 1985).

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