I

		In contrast, Jean-Luc Godard has often covered the background behind his characters with colorful advertisements, photographs, and posters. At other times he has chosen to interrupt the diegetic flow of images with large graphic displays aimed directly at the viewers. By bouncing visual or printed data back at us, he foregrounds his own films within a general social, political, and ideological context, confirming their own status as discourses to be appraised rather than slices of life happening without anyone's being responsible for their unfolding. Godard is also partial to arranging groups on a single frontal plane facing the camera rather than in depth, in Ford's manner. This flatness, this refusal of composition in depth, according to Brian Henderson, amounts to nothing less than "a demystification, an assault on the bourgeois world-view and self image." 45 Insofar as the technique denies our gaze a compensatory release for the lack of freedom we may experience in real life, it can indeed be said to form a political critique of society. While all this sounds like an invitation to dull, pedantic filmmaking, Godard's genius is such that his flat graphic images often end up being more exciting than conventional three-dimensional pictures.

		XI

		Not all perspective views though should be construed as producing the same effect. Panofsky once pointed out the differences between what could be called the long view and the short view of a given subject. In Antonello da Messina's St. Jerome (ca. 1475), we look at a picture that represents the saint from far away, isolating him in his cabinet. The saint is clearly allowed to remain in his own world. We have a peek at it but our place is distinct from his. We may be given a view of it but we are certainly not invited to come in. Although no guide is physically present in the picture, he or she could easily be imagined just off to the side, telling us all that is important to know about the holy man. While we may look freely into the room, our gaze is probably synchronized to the guide's comments as they bring our attention to this or that detail. In that way, the guide becomes an important intermediary or mediator in our understanding of the scene. In opposition to this, in Albert D rer's St. Jerome (1514), the holy man is closer to us. As Panofsky explains it, the saint's cabinet and our own space are now one: "We imagine that we ourselves have been admitted to it, because the floor [of the saint's cabinet] appears