Trois metteurs en scène, une même chanson - Jean-Luc Godard illustre Faut pas rêver, 1977
Featuring a child and Anne-Marie Miéville (off) In 1977, as part of the musical show “On ne manque pas d’airs”, public television commissioned three filmmakers to make a video for a song by Patrick Juvet composed by Jean-Michel Jarre, “Faut pas rêver”. Jean-Luc Godard was one of them. In two shots, the filmmaker created a political object, in the form of a small essay on television in France under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. First shot: a child sitting at the kitchen table eating an apple while distractedly watching a television situated in the off-screen space, playing Patrick Juvet’s song. At the same time, the child answers his mother’s questions – she is also off-screen (we recognise the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville). She asks him about his day (the exercises to do for a class, the competition at the pool) and reproaches him for not putting away the dishes. Second shot: a question scrolls across the screen. “Quand la gauche aura le pouvoir, est-ce que la télévision aura toujours aussi peu de rapport avec les gens?” (When the left is in power, will television still have so little connection to people?) Radically anti-spectacular, maintaining the vehicle of dominant imagery (the television) and the source of the dialogue (the mother) off screen, Faut pas rêver records everyday life in all of its simplicity and passivity. By creating a small breather in the televisual flow that is usually bound up in spectacles and stagings, this polemical, experimental and dialectic essay poses a political question – that of the ideological use of television. In this way, it formulates the purpose of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s work during a period in which they aimed to propose a different kind of television, one that is close to social realities and capable of critique, namely through their series Six fois deux, sur et sous la communication (1976) and France tour détour, deux enfants (1979). Judith Revault d’Allonnes Translated by Anna Knight
