Jean-Luc Godard and Photography, Part 2: ‘Letter to Jane: An Investigation about a Still’ (made with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1972) is a 52-minute film centred on just one image, a news photo that had appeared in L’Express in 1972 captioned ‘Jane Fonda interrogeant des habitants de Hanoi sur les bombardements américains’ (‘Jane Fonda questions Hanoi residents about us bombings’). When Fonda went to North Vietnam to protest against U.S. foreign policy, her visit was covered extensively by the media. The film takes the rough newsprint image as a ‘social nerve cell’, and through voice-over examines its political functions. Fonda is seen as ultimately limited by bourgeois liberalism, whether her own or that of the newspapers’ readers. The story here was not the Vietnam War but Fonda’s presence. The ‘concerned star’ is so easily converted from well-meaning interventionist to containable media commodity. The film 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 out of focus, while his daily life is stark. Godard and Gorin ask why the caption in L’Express describes her as questioning when she may well be listening or inwardly absorbed. ‘Letter to Jane’ is relentless. Its hectoring tone blends Brechtian counter-caption with Situationist détournement, pushing the function and the meaning of the photograph back on the viewer over and over. Both sides in the war made use of this picture for their own ends. A photograph does not ‘speak’, or ‘say 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. To listen while a mute photograph undergoes an hour of solid attack, to which of course it cannot respond, is uncomfortable, if deliberately so. (From my book ‘Photography and Cinema’).