A framed woman. An analysis of advertising language through the female character in the film A married woman (Godard, 1964)

Abstract

In the film A married woman, Jean-Luc Godard recounts the experiences of Charlotte, a young Parisian woman who is a mother and a lover. Through long shots and close-ups of billboards and adverts in magazines, the director uses the codes of the sixties advertising language as the narrative thread to emphasize the power of influence of the advertising language on women like Charlotte. Taking Charlotte's character as a reference, this article aims to explore how the advertising speech influences the way in which women perceive themselves. An analysis about the female representation in the mass media, as introduced in the work of Ann Kaplan on the subject of the «male gaze» (Kaplan, 1983), the article seeks to understand the social, cultural and economic magnitude of advertising in Western society. To this effect, an interdisciplinary approach has been chosen, taking the film A Married Woman as the basis of an image analysis of the female representation in the sixties French media. Acknowledging the spatial and temporal differences between the French society as showed in the film and the present one, such studies allow the reader to understand the influence that the advertising language has had on the formation of the archetypes of today.