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SOFT & HARD

In 1985 on late night television, C4 broadcast Soft & Hard collaborative videotape

by Anne Marie Mieville and Jean Luc Godard. The two appear in their Paris Flatconversing. Voice-overs and musical scores vie for ascendancy.

TALK BETWEEN

TWO FRIENDS

Slowly image, action, source sound and overdubs merge in their simultaneity.

This is a small multiverse of many strands caught in a domestic interior withtelevision

SOFT TALK

HARD SUBJECT

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Anne Marie arranges flowers in a vase.

Jean Luc talks over a deal on the phone.Anne Marie loops a film into a Steenbeck

Jean Luc disinterestedly watches television

Anne Marie does the ironingJean Luc practices squash in the hallway.

His voice over says: So Im making pictures instead of children.Does this stop me being a human being?

HARD DREAM

The sea. The sky. The clouds.

HARD STREAM

Pitiless Art! What an undertaking! Merciless art, lacking all pity

for human pain which is nothing to it

A SOFT CONVERSATION

ON HARD SUBJECTS

BETWEEN TWO FRIENDS

They continue a discourse on the image and television.

J-L: You could say I like T.V. because it doesnt show things.

So you probably dislike it for the same reason.

A-M: Thats not it. Television never shows things, yet it makes you think

that it never stops showing them and this is what showing things is

and theres no other way to show them!

J-L: So they shouldnt be shown?

A-M: Yes but T.V. is profoundly dishonest. It justifies its own smugness by itspretence, convincing itself that it does show things.

J-L:I think that it knows that.

A-M:Do you really?

(They both laugh)

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To watch this video essay questioning images and the rule of television via the very

medium it was critiquing was an epiphany! Unaccustomed to the rigours of art school

or self criticism I marvelled at two artists expressing doubts about their own work andreservations on where to go next. The atmosphere of gently probing a subject through

tentative discussion and real uncertainty was wholly unfamiliar to me yet came as a great

thrill. I felt as though my own misgivings about the consensual reality around me were notmere figments.