Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (Lettre à Jane) (1972)

Letter to Jane consists of a series of still photographs in which filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin read aloud a letter to actress Jane Fonda. The occasion for Godard and Gorin's letter is a widely publicized photograph of Fonda in North Vietnam which caught the filmmakers' eye because Fonda had appeared in a previous film of theirs entitled Tout va bien. The filmmakers criticize what they see as Fonda's attempt to lend aid to the North Vietnamese using only her celebrity status. In Letter to Jane, Godard investigates the politics of image by using the cinema to interrogate photographs. Godard's and Gorin's reflections are strongly marked by the ideology of their Maoist film collective, the Dziga Vertov Group. ~ Louis Schwartz, Rovi