Hail Mary

Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

Developed for RMIT Media Arts

Profile: JEAN LUC GODARD

Key figure of the French New Wave from the sixties (along with Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut, et al) whose films varied from the didactic to the dialectial, always concerned with communicating as much about the problematics of film language as their stories. Godard's output was considerable throughout the sixties (averaging two films a year) ; from 68 to 72 he worked with Jean Pierre Gorin, working in more of a documentary tradition (via the Russian Dziga Vertov) and making films primarily concerned with Marxist dissemination. While the latter seventies weren't a particularly productive period for Godard, he resummed making rich and intensely complex films from the eighties on, mostly with sound recordist/designer/editor/mixer Francois Musy. These films include: PASSION (1982), PRENOM CARMEN (1983), HAIL MARY (1985), SOFT & HARD (1986), KING LEAR (1987), KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP (1987), NOUVELLE VAGUE (1990), O WOE IS ME (1993), IN PRAISE OF LOVE (2001), OUR MUSIC (2004).

The New Novel versus New Wave

Whereas The New Novel style of filmmaking is concerned with its form as constructed out of a generation of pleasure, a mobilization of desire and a playing out of suspense and mystery in an intellectual relationship with the viewer, the New Wave approach to filmmaking is probably more fundamentally concerned with its contents, in that there actually is a reality to be intentionally depicted and a narrative to be constructed in order to communicate its contents. In comparison to LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, HAIL MARY does not 'lie' or promote simultaneous yet conflicting points of view. The New Novel treats the communicative process " as a play with meaning ; the New Wave treats the communicative process as a struggle with meaning. With Godard's films, this is articulated through a thorough analytic break-down of how sound and image form the dynamic base for the construction of meaning.

Close analysis

1. Throughout the film, there is extensive sound and image cross-cutting: sounds from multiple scenes will generally appear in the one visual/physical scene, or one sound atmosphere or a single piece of music will accompany a sequence of images from different times and/or places. Rarely do things perfectly match, synchronize, or describe each other. This is the crux of the film’s audio-vision. Also throughout, a black inter-title card “At That Time” appears. This is a sign of the simultaneity of the film’s story (Joseph and Mary’s ‘conception’ paralleling Eve and the professor’s intellectual querying of life) and its audio-visual structure.

2. Baroque music plays over montage: grassy hill at night (wind); moon reflected in water as rock is thrown in (splash & water fowls)

3. Joseph and Juliette’s (Mary’s friend) communication breakdown at the café. Amidst background café chatter and clinking, she says “With you, silence can be unbearable”. Cut to dramatic Bach fugue and her staring at him in silence. Later, he replies “Can’t you see I’m not listening?”. They continue talking throughout this scene: sometimes the music overwhelms her dialogue, other times the background noise. The sounds around them do not privilege their ‘human drama’: life continues despite them; life is greater in scope and presence, and the soundtrack throughout the film evidences this.

4. Mary at her basket ball match. The soundtrack is heavy with the noise of teenage girls’ bodily exertion. The space intensifies their panting, calling, ball-bouncing, squeaking, running, applause, whistles. It's like a pagan fertility ritual. Baroque piano music is introduced – it continues with the images, while the atmospheres and off-screen incidental dialogue cut in and out sharply. We see Marie concentrating on the game. She is visibly present and connected with her social space, but the sound reflects her inner turmoil and disconnect from the action around her. In voice-over, she says “I wondered if some event would happen in my life.” Like her, the audio-vision is simultaneously present and absent.

5. Visual interplay between Mary holding the basketball, and the full moon at night. Her voice-over makes analogies between her unfulfilled sex life – “a shadow of love” like “the reflection of a water lily pond, not quiet, but shaken by ripples in the water.” She is the the image of a chaste body; her sex life is that image modulated by waves of vibrational contact. Sounds of basketball bouncing and whistles accompanies the full moon.

6. Eve holding a Rubik Cube looking out a window at daytime, while we hear the voice of her professor ruminating on the origin of life – whether it occurs through chance or design, from earth or space. He then is seen in front of a cosmological chart of electromagnetic field activity and points to a ‘dip’ and claims it can only be explained “by something in this cloud intercepting light at a specific wavelength” and that this bacteria has left “its special mark on the electronic field” as does every organism. In a sense, this is a metaphor for how sound is encoded by a disturbance of frequency upon an encodable medium. Baroque choral music cuts in and out after this as he continues talking about ‘programmed intelligence’. Baroque music – an early sign of advance musical intelligence – is employed throughout the film to musicologically represent an advanced language transmitted through sound.

7. To demonstrate his theories of transmitted intelligence, the professor instructs one student to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a blindfolded student attempting to solve a Rubik Cube. We see her but not the cube, and hear her saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ , then we see the cube in the other student’s hands as her voice continues over. Baroque organ music is heard.

8. The baroque organ music continues as the professor in close-up but with his face in darkness. An off-screen voice asks “Were you exiled for these ideas?” He replies “Yes these and others.” He has a god-like aspect to his appearance and tone – a voice from above, discussing the complexities of life beyond mortal comprehension. Off-screen student: “Is the law of falling bodies because life fell from space?” The professor seems to support this: he’s a ‘secular heretic’ by hypothesizing UFOs.

9. Night thickets with whistling wind. A plane passes over the trees – it looks like a UFO. Dramatic orchestral music. Cross-cut to Mary in her bathroom; the music peaks, the jet roars past, the whistling wind resumes. Cut to a large dawning sun with a tiny plane in the distance: it resembles the electromagnetic field diagram from the professor’s lecture. This is the delivery of the Archangel Gabriel to the mortal world, descendent from heaven. This audio-vision sequence details the connection between Gabriel and Mary. He arrives at the airport with his child assistant.

10. Joseph in his taxi reading a book on existence and the meaning of life. Gabriel and his child assistant jump in. Note the criss-crossing dialogue – typical of Godard’s directions of actors – based on all actors quoting from books, slogans, aphorisms, texts, etc.

11. They arrive at Mary’s father’s petrol station. Arguments ensure, replete with chopped-up music cues, location sound and dialogue. The drama is rendered almost slapstick at some points due to the abrupt editing of the music. Gabriel makes his annunciation off-camera: “It’s you, Mary.” Mary looks down at her stomach as we hear the sound of wind howling at night. Cut to a crescent moon. More arguing and fractured sound/music, then the taxi exits with Gabriel yelling “Whatever goes in comes out!”

12. The professor’s field trip. A student mentions how one of them conducted a project to heat ants in winter so they would have extra time to invent things – like music. The implied hypothesis could be that the music of Bach has been transmitted by ants, or that Bach was visited by alien intelligence. Baroque music seems to scatter around the film soundtrack like a rummaging ant, on a mission of some unknown purpose.

13. Joseph’s taxi: he often beeps the car horn – it symbolizes his bull-headed personality. He barks at people rather than communicates. He gets worse as he attempts to deal with Mary’s mysterious pregnancy.

14. Back at the field trip, the professor says “ A prior intelligence programmed life”. We see the setting sun behind clouds, hear rocks splashing the water and distant water birds. As he says “A pitiful universe” we see Joseph attempting to kiss the chaste Mary. The professor’s lines here (and as part of 11 and 12) comment ‘from above’ on the mortal anguish Joseph and Mary are undergoing. He continues ruminating about programmed existence while his student Eve looks up at the sun through the thicket. As he talks, various shots of the sun appear from different viewpoints and time-frames: his soliloquies carry across this ‘time-space’ flux of the cosmos, indicated by the edits of natural phenomena.

15. When the professor talks of messages being transmitted in and by nature, she replies “Maybe the message has always been clear.” He replies: “Yes, that voice deep in our consciences whispers, if we listen: you’re born somewhere else, in heaven.” His sentence is in complete silence; she then looks up and listens to the water birds. Their language is an example of transmitted messages all around us, but which we never understand. At this point Eve symbolizes the woman who is starting to understand the cosmos – not its secrets, but its existence. She is often seen looking at and listening to nature while at the field trip. The sounds start to link to her point of view.

16. The group walk through the thicket, silhouetted against the trees: we hear the roaring sound of an airplane taking off.

17. Joseph with Mary at the basketball court. He questions her again about her pregnancy. She sticks to its mystery: “Maybe the words come wrong, or it’s my voice, but it’s the truth.” When Joseph insists that babies must come from somewhere, we see a shot of the full moon behind clouds. By this stage, the moon is continually being linked to Mary’s pregnancy. It is the elemental affecting the personal (Mary). This is overlaid upon the standard symbolic connections between the moon, the female womb and menstrual cycles.

18. Mary at the doctors. In the waiting room, windy trees are heard from outside. Mary undressed, fretful: harpsichord and string ensemble. She asks her doctor “Does the soul have a body?” He corrects her “The body has a soul.” She is thinking from the inside out due to her pregnancy changing her world; he thinks from the outside looking into the body. She insists on her pregnancy throughout the consult. He laughs about the mystery of women, but later is confronted with Mary’s special mystery.

19. Joseph picking up a ride (Eve and the professor by coincidence) and he has image flashes of Mary getting into a bath. The intercutting makes it like they see each other. But he has had a vision of the archangel Gabriel. Then we see Mary in her bath: the sound of the water is gentle – the opposite of the rock splashing the water for the professor’s field trip. She is a symbol of life happening; he represents life being interrogated. We hear Mary’s voice reading from the bible – a section describing God’s powerful presence like the scope of nature itself. Cut to the setting sun.

20. Mary on the phone to Joseph: he says “I’ll go jump in the lake”.

21. Eve with the professor at the villa by the lake. She bites into an apple. We hear her clear bite plus the ticking clock in the background. She seems momentarily transfixed by her simple sensory action; it is framed by silence. Then the professor’s lights up a smoke: “A smoke, a sax solo, that’s all a man wants.” She wonders that although we marvel at a phrase of music, there might not be anything there. Wind whistling is heard: it’s the sound of emptiness, of humans not registering anything beyond their immediate surroundings. Yet this is the same wind sound for when Gabriel annunciates to Mary, therefore it – as a natural sound effect – is also (symbolically) a transmitted message. She seems to sense this; it passes unnoticed by the professor.

22. Later after they have had sex, a John Coltrane sax solo recording plays in the background; Eve smokes a cigarette. We hear Mary’s voice reading a book: “I think the spirit acts on the body, breathes through it (…) for what is flesh alone?” She is reading while at her father’s petrol station.

23. Joseph being interrogated by Gabriel: “What’s the common denominator between zero and Mary? Mary’s body.” Orchestral music fades up: image of the ocean, then a full setting sun.

24. Mary and Joseph at his place, arguing a bit. Piano recital music fades up, cuts in and out with the reverberant opening and slamming of doors and feet in echoic corridors. These sounds not only interrupt the music, they represent the noise of people in space moving without being silent and respectful in the space of ‘sacred’ (Baroque) music. Psycho-acoustically, these are the sounds of human ignorance, not capable of listening to the transmitted message in the music. This also symbolises how Joseph just doesn’t get Mary’s state and her changing view of her life and the world in which she now lives. At this point, the savagery of the edits has accrued to represent the noise of those who cannot hear.

25. Joseph and Mary at the marina. Their mostly naturalist scene is intercut with images of the moon reflected in the rippled water and the sounds of nearby water fowls.

26. Mary in pain in bed: the sound of her thrashing the bed sheets is matched with random short fade in-outs of Baroque string music. She contemplates her belly: we hear masses of morning birds – it's like the sound of the world inside her.

27. Joseph at the Marina reading a book quoting ancient views of the planets and the stars. It goes on to propose: “Maybe the best explanation of our origins is the idead of another world”. We see images of a setting sun, swirling water, a full moon. As he reads about those contemplating the planetary influences upong the earth, he does not see their signs around him. The text he reads reference’s to Horla’s dogs knowing about existence since ancient times: cut to shot of Joseph’s dog Dick calmly looking at the world around him.

28. Joseph being instructed by Mary how he can touch her. Mary starts acting very melodramatically, like a possessed woman: orchestral music cuts in at crescendo levels. The music operates like a series of unfounded irrational mood swings, mimicking her hormonal changes and disequilibrium. Joseph attempts to touch Mary by bring his hand toward her abdomen: she says “No!” firmly each time.

29. After Gabriel appears to firmly train Joseph how he can touch Mary, Joseph places his hand on her abdomen, then retracts it: Mary says “Yes.” Joseph has learnt to reverse his penetrative motion, and, by extension, his way of thinking. (In 2, he had said to Juliette that “all men want to enter women”.) This motion of pushing into and pulling back – of penetrating and of delivering – relates not only to the Mary’s contractions, her breathing, and her conception and birth of her baby, but also to how sound works as a series of expanding and contracting waves of energy. Humans (particularly men in this case) are positioned to symbolize the penetrating concave aspects of life (e.g. the rock splashing the water); women with expelling convex aspects of life (e.g. the water achieving equilibrium). Here, sound waves are perceived as symbols of the dynamic principles of energy and hence life.

30. Mary’s bodily inhalation/exhalations are like contractions: each breath is itself a microcosm of her bodily transformation through her pregnancy. As per the cosmological discussions by the professor, parts of her bodily dynamics are represented at varying cosmological and morphological levels. Her body, then, can be perceived as a series of waves, breathing in and out, undergoing menstrual changes, being impregnated and delivered – all of which are rhythms of life operating at interlocked ratios of existence.

31. By this stage, the rhythms of life become evident through their editing throughout the film up to this point. Nature is depicted/documented in terms of seasons, tides, night/day cycles, periods (relationships, menstruation, conception), etc.

32. The basketball match: the ball and its ring are the womb and its development of life: the loud bouncing of the ball is the moment of conception – a microcosm of the big bang theory of the creation of life. Mary is now clearly with child. In pain she leaves the match and rests beside a large light orb. We hear the sound of a brewing storm: the weather/atmosphere becoming pregnant, signalling a change and a delivery of effects.

33. The dump master truck with its flashing light is the Star of David guiding them to a farmhouse for the delivery. More violin concerto music combined with images and sounds of farm animals. The baby in the car: choir music starts. At a farmhouse later we see a montage of plants in full bloom: the world is being born, symbolically synchronising to Mary’s birth.

34. A triumphant Baroque track over images of Mary teaching the infant to swim. The baby’s voice echoes loudly in the indoor pool. More images of the moon and water.

35. The young child at the breakfast table tucks himself under Mary’s night shirt. He touches her vagina, nipples, breast and asks what they’re called: she replies they are the lawn, the bells, the loaves. He uses language to understand her body: she explains it through elemental/natural/physical analogues.

36. When the child rebukes the father and leaves the car, we hear the sound of thunder: God’s wrath.

37. The Way, the Word, the Voice.

38. When the professor drops off (and ends his relationship with) Eve, he justifies his uncaring emotional exploitation of her as a separation typical of how life is formed according to the laws of nature. She retorts “You really are a nothing.” This occurs at the train station: the sounds of multiple trains are heard, symbolizing the criss-crossing of people’s paths. Like the crowd chatter in the café, the birds by the lake, the morning birds, the basketball match noise, these environmental sounds operate and perform in accordance with ‘the laws of life’ by transmitting energy levels which reflect, encode and reveal the passing of life. Again, humans are ‘swimming’ in this ‘aural primordial soup’ which contains the meaning of life they so desperately seek.

39. When Gabriel audibly says “Je vous salue Marie” Mary ‘refinds’ her sexuality. She hears bells, lights up a cigarette. Choir and jet planes are heard. She leas back in the sunlight, sitting in her car. Gabriel’s word has returned her to the mortal/physical/sexual world from she had been barred during her pregnancy. She applies red lipstick; the camera penetrates her open mouth like a vagina, a cave, the cosmos.

Text © Philip Brophy.