It also critiques the often counter-productive role of Western media
coverage. The story here was not the Vietnam War but Fonda’s presence.
Audiences identify with her and not the North Vietnamese. The ‘con-
cerned star’ is so easily converted from well-meaning interventionist to
containable media commodity. The film’s reading of the image is very
close. It looks at the consequences of Fonda being in focus while her
expression is, politically speaking, out of focus. By contrast, the face
of the North Vietnamese man behind her is fuzzy, while his daily life
is stark. The filmmakers ask why the caption inL’Expressdescribes her
as questioning when she may well be listening or inwardly absorbed.
LikeLes Carabiniers,Letter to Janeis relentless. Its hectoring tone blends
Brechtian counter-caption with Situationistdétournement, pushing the
function and the meaning of the photograph back on the viewer over and
over. Godard and Gorin shared the voice-over duties, realizing perhaps
that just one voice alone would dominate the still. Even so, they speak as
one, and several critics suggested that the film lapsed into the very kinds
of political shortcuts it aimed to unmask. Either way, to listen while a
mute photograph undergoes an hour of solid attack, to which of course
it cannot respond, is uncomfortable, if deliberately so.^16 The film’s argu-
ment is that whatever small meanings such a photograph may contain 105
92 Les Carabiniers(Jean-Luc Godard,
1963), frames.