Economies of Love. Part 5: Commodified Life

Image: Jean-Luc Godard, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (still), 1967.

Join us on Tuesday, September 23, 2025 at e-flux Screening Room for the fifth installment in the series Economies of Love, presenting Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) preceded by Mako Idemitsu’s Kiyoko’s Situation (1989).

Two or Three Things I Know About Her follows Juliette, a Parisian woman navigating middle-class suburban life in 1960s France. Advertising images and consumer infrastructures script her routine; housework, shopping, childcare, and occasional sex work are driven by the same logic of economic transaction. Meanwhile, Kiyoko’s Situation focuses on Kiyoko, a Japanese painter, whose creativity has been stifled by years of self-sacrifice to norms imposed on married women in modern Japan. Kiyoko is portrayed as an immobilized woman. A TV monitor within the frame replays her domestic tasks—shopping, laundry, pouring milk, serving tea—while the visages of her mother and mother-in-law on the screen admonish her to sacrifice art for family.

While Godard shows how the bodies of women are compromised when societal expectations are organized by advertisement logic where intimacy is converted into transactional value, Idemitsu exposes how patriarchy normalizes the division of labor and devalues artistic work when it yields no immediate profit. Both works cast a critical eye on late-capitalist metrics of worth based on fake equivalence between personal and economic desires, and show how mass mediation does not merely reflect the commodification of life but helps to produce and regulate it.

Economies of Love is a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. More information and an archive of previous screenings can be found here.

Films

Mako Idemitsu, Kiyoko’s Situation (1989, 24 minutes)Kiyoko's Situation articulates the deeply embedded cultural roles of Japanese women through the parallel stories of two female artists, Kiyoko and Tani. In Idemitsu's narrative-within-a-narrative, Kiyoko's “situation” is played out on a television monitor within Tani's drama. Tani is paralyzed in her attempts to paint by her feeling that, as a single woman, she has failed in society's eyes. Kiyoko, a young mother viciously criticized by her husband and family for her fierce determination to paint, eventually compromises her art for "maternal duty." As Kiyoko complies with the family, Tani, isolated and despairing, is driven to suicide. Idemitsu's chillingly omniscient television monitor, which acts as the psychological "other," metaphorically and literally condemns Tani to death. In the final cruel irony, she hangs herself, using the television monitor as a jumping-off point.

Jean-Luc Godard, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967, 87 minutes)Godard’s portrait of Paris in the 1960s follows Juliette, a young mother in the suburbs who supplements her homemaking by engaging in sex work. Derived from a newspaper report about housewives in the new vast housing projects around Paris, the film is a lyrical, self-reflexive, philosophical examination of both mass media and consumer society in the mid-60s. Juliette’s intimate life becomes a site of economic exchange—shopping, child-rearing, and clandestine encounters—blurring natural affection with transactional relations.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.– For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Host or Publisher e-flux Screening Room