they are always subject to the wider political and economic forces that
put it to work. Both sides in the war made use of this picture for their
own ends. A photograph is useful not because it ‘speaks’, or ‘says a
thousand words’; rather its silence makes it useful. ‘A photograph talks
through the mouth of the text written beneath it’, declares Godard at
one point. He points out that the silence is restated in the muteness of
Fonda’s own face. Her expression operates as an abstracted and reified
‘concern’, insulating audiences from meaningful political reflection.
Her face suggests that she knows a lot about things without saying what
or how much. Godard traces her expression back to depictions of the New
Deal in American cinema. After the stock-market crash of 1929 , which
was also the first year of sound in cinema, actors’ faces carried into the
‘talkies’ the exaggerated visage of concern honed in the silent era. In 1940
Jane’s father, Henry Fonda, had starred in the film of John Steinbeck’s
novelThe Grapes of Wrath(John Ford). A story of destitute sharecroppers
moving west to California in the 1930 s, the film derived its visual style
from the documentary photographs of the Farm Security Administration.
That facial expression is consistent throughout the famous images by
Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Horace Bristol and others.^17
For decades, Henry played the common man caught in circumstances
beyond his control who triumphs not through politicized action but stoic
patience. By the time he came to star in Hitchcock’sThe Wrong Man
( 1956 ), it was almost a caricature. A false accusation of murder stuns his
character into passivity, and for most of the film he remains virtually
inert. It is an exaggeration of that neutralized style of acting that in
principle allows the audience to project their own emotions. But Fonda
is almost too vacant, too blank. In the film his wife cannot cope with his
docile demeanour, as if she is trying to converse with a mere image of
his former self. Eventually it sends her mad.
Sustaining a long, unbroken look at a single photograph can be
difficult. Even Godard and Gorin cut away from the image of Jane Fonda
from time to time. Just before Agnès Varda began her first film,La Pointe
courte, in 1954 , she took a photograph on an Egyptian shore. It shows a
naked man staring out to sea, while a sitting boy looks into the camera
106 and a dead goat occupies the foreground. Its composition is crisp and
93 Letter to Jane: An Investigation about
a Still(Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre
Gorin, 1972), frame.
94 Italian poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Wrong Man(1956).
