A Critique of the Film Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (۱۹۷۲), Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
Written by: Mojtaba Bayat
Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a still (۱۹۷۲), directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, was initially conceived as a postscript—an addendum to Tout va bien (۱۹۷۲)—to be screened at the New York and San Francisco film festivals. Made on a modest budget of just three hundred dollars, the film was later released in a fifty-two-minute format on DVD. Godard and Gorin reconfigure the boundaries of documentary and fiction, constructing a layered critique of the relationship between cinema, the world, and the spectator’s role in interpreting them. The film’s core gesture is not merely its raw examination of a single photograph but its deeper interrogation of representation, the aesthetics of filmmaking, and the intersection of politics and art.
Letter to Jane belongsto cinéma de combat, a militant documentary movement in French cinema(1968–۱۹۸۱)shapedby the aftermath of May ’68. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker challenged the notion of the auteur, embracing collective filmmaking as a means of political resistance. Marker, with Far from Vietnam (۱۹۶۸)—a collaborative film in which Godard also participated—and Cinetracts (۱۹۶۸), brought a renewed energy to militant cinema. He later founded the SLON group, which would evolve into ISKRA, while Godard, alongside Jean-Pierre Gorin, established the Dziga Vertov Group. The Dziga Vertov Group, inspired by Vertov’s montage theories, saw cinema as a form of critique—built through editing, not storytelling. Rejecting bourgeois conventions like narrative and character, they embraced a radical, image-driven dialectic influenced by Maoist thought, prioritizing contrast and contradiction over seamless continuity. This blurring of fiction and documentary disrupts viewing habits, shocks audiences, and provokes critical engagement.
Letter to Jane, with its montage of static photographs, artificial cinematic movements, voiceover narration, and sparse use of music, continues in this vein. It deconstructs Jane Fonda’s image, revealing her not as an autonomous individual but as an occupant of a fabricated position—one shaped by the ideological machinery of Hollywood. Within this system, her representation is not an act of personal agency but the outcome of a larger socio-political structure that governs the production and reception of images.
Letter to Jane has been analyzed through various lenses, including Marxist/Maoist critique, feminism, political filmmaking, anti-cinema, and the intersection of cinema, photography, and power. However, this essay approaches the film as a film essay as at the heart of the film is an ongoing dialogue between the photograph of Jane Fonda and the overarching critique of the documentary genre itself. The film employs the trope of the “letter” as both a form of personal communication and a metaphor for the ways in which cinema communicates with its audience. As such, the film becomes a letter not only to Fonda herself but to the audience, a plea for them to reconsider their engagement with images, with history, and with politics.
Unlike traditional media, which encourage passive consumption of images, the essay film challenges accepted notions of documentary and reality, prompting viewers to interrogate the forces that shape representation. By juxtaposing the still image with cinematic expression in motion, the film transforms the photograph into a practical response to the theoretical questions posed by cinema. In this structure, Fonda’s photograph serves as a bridge between cinema and photography—her stillness in the image reflecting a physical reality, while its cinematic reinterpretation constructs a narrative aura.
Godard and Gorin do not simply revisit the image of Jane Fonda or its context but places it within a broader cinematic framework that critiques the limitations of photography and cinema in capturing “truth.” While Hollywood attempts to merge cinematic elements into a seamless unity, the Dziga Vertov Group’s argument about splitting cinema into its elements becomes central in the film. In the film, the image of Jane Fonda is transformed from a mere representation of her persona into a constructed frame, as a critical voice-over challenges the viewer to see it not as a simple documentation of history, but as something manipulated by both its creator and the viewers who interpret it.
What do we see in the image side? The film centers on a photograph of Jane Fonda—an American actress and left-wing feminist political activist—taken by Joseph Kraft and published in the L’Express magazine. The image depicts Fonda during her trip to Vietnam in support of peace and anti-war slogans. In the photo, Fonda occupies the left three-quarters of the frame, looking at a Vietnamese individual in the foreground on the right. The Vietnamese person’s face is partially obscured by a non-la hat, with his gaze almost hidden from the camera. In the background, several other Vietnamese people are visible, with only one of them clearly in focus, looking directly at the camera.
Fonda’s relationship to the background, with the Vietnamese individuals, reflects the shift from focus to blur, emphasizing the contrast between the image and social reality. In the foreground, she is fully focused with a somber expression, while the anonymous Vietnamese figures, meant to reflect the reality of the war, are blurred and marginalized in the background. The positioning of Jane Fonda’s face on the left side of the frame also, shot from a low angle—a cinematic symbol of power—and her gaze directed toward the Vietnamese person, creates an expectation of a reverse shot, where the viewer would expect to see the face of the Vietnamese person. However, this reverse shot is never realized, creating a central asymmetry in the film. This hidden or unseen aspect becomes the starting point for the film’s socio-political readings, as the failure to present the reverse shot, denying visibility to the Vietnamese individual, reduces the photo to mere propaganda.
To challenge this form of representation, Godard and Gorin contrast the stillness of the photograph—frozen in a single moment—with the fluidity of cinema, which unfolds through time, change, and movement. This tension between photo and film reflects their vision of spectatorship: while Fonda, as an observer, should embody active engagement, her dominant presence in the frame instead obscures those who should be seen and heard. Just as we never see the reverse shot of the Vietnamese individual, we never hear their voice, highlighting another distinction between photographs and cinema. If active spectatorship involves a conversation, defined by the mutual exchange of speaking and listening, the film emphasizes how agency is intertwined with the act of listening. This extended narrative strategy resists surface-level viewing, shifting the question from “What do we see in this photo?” to “What is this photo refusing to show us?”
What do we hear in the voice? The duality between “subjectification” and “objectification” in the visual realm is reflected in the sound, where Godard and Gorin navigate between the second-person address of a letter and the third-person analytical tone, shaping the voices of the narrators. Through this technique, the film not only seeks to reveal the complexities of the viewer’s gaze but also splits Jane Fonda into two entities: Fonda as an individual and Fonda as a social construct. This dynamic interplay between the verbal and the visual brings the tensions of essayistic expression to life, revealing the layers of meaning in both the image and the narrative.
Godard and Gorin’s decision to shift between second- and third-person perspectives becomes a powerful tool for the film’s self-reflection, exposing the tension between their private and public selves. This duality is echoed in the two narrators’ voices, with Godard and Gorin offering contrasting, and at times, contradictory viewpoints. By employing multiple voices, they dismantle the idea of a singular, all-knowing narrator, inviting an open, ongoing conversation between themselves and the audience. The absence of a fixed authoritative voice, paired with unfiltered or even humorous narration, creates a “methodology of gaze” that dissects the film into its components, urging viewers to question their automatic trust in the medium. In doing so, the film prompts us to look beyond the visible and audible, connecting Fonda’s visual silence with the conflicting voices of the narrators, and ultimately pushing us to embrace our role as active spectators—a responsibility that Fonda herself was unable to fully understand.
Overall, Letter to Jane is not just an essay film with its invitation to reflect on the image itself, the self-reflective narrative structures, and the viewer’s responsibility in observation; it also proposes cinema as a space for rethinking, questioning, and transformation. If all forms of art shape visual systems and regimes of truth—defining what is seen, how it is seen, and why it is seen—Godard and Gorin, through the essayistic form of their film, strive to protect their work from the ideological discourses of representation. The aesthetics based on gaps—such as the gap between the movement of film and the stillness of the photograph, the gap between sound and silence, and the gap between Jane Fonda and the Vietnamese individuals—create an empty space in the film that belongs to the audience. This space resists any unifying, totalizing, or definitive force, standing in contrast to mainstream representations. In this cinema, the image is no longer merely a document of reality; it becomes a platform for rethinking, imagination, and the reconstruction of meaning from the world, appearing through the simultaneous expression of representation, critique, and imagination beyond reality.
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