This is the Music Video Treatment For Solo

The Inspiration for Solo stems from Eva’s love of foreign indie films.

Specifically the French New Wave that started in the 1950’s because they represent a rejection of traditional big budget hollywood conventions of the time in favor of independent film making, artistic experimentation, and a spirit of iconoclasm. 

We felt that this spirit embodied Eva shaw and her music, in the way that she produces her music independently and seeks to subvert a lot of the iconographic music and imagery of pop music in favor of experimentation and exploration of visual style in all things including film, music, and fashion. 

Below is a gallery of still images from Godard’s Films

Some notes on the films

Godard’s films analysis notes:

Pierrot le Fou (pierrot the fool)

The plot follows Ferdinand, an unhappily married man, as he escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by OAS hitmen from Algeria.

It seems to be a gangster picture: Jean-Paul Belmondo leaves his wife and goes to live with his former girlfriend, Anna Karina. She has apparently killed a man. They go on the lam in a stolen car, wind up on a deserted island, play the Robinson Crusoe bit for awhile, and then go back to the mainland to face the music.

The core of the film is a scene that takes place in the tranquil natural splendor of unspoiled lands in the south of France: Ferdinand and Marianne live off the land, hunting and fishing (albeit cartoonishly—like most of the film’s narrative action), while Ferdinand (sitting with a parrot on his shoulder) begins to keep a journal, which appears in extreme close-up on-screen, and which is in fact in Godard’s handwriting. Among the passages that Ferdinand reads aloud is a description of his ambitious plans for a new form of novel: “Not to write about people’s lives anymore, but only about life—life itself. What lies in between people: space, sound, and color. I’d like to accomplish that. Joyce gave it a try, but it should be possible to do better.” The sequence is the crowning moment in Ferdinand’s dream: the couple will exist together, in isolation at a wild seaside, where the setting and the romantic idyll will inspire Ferdinand’s artistic creation. The glory of nature and a life of shared purpose with a beloved woman are, in Godard’s personal mythology of that period, a natural pair. But soon thereafter—in the famous scene in which Marianne wanders past him and whines repeatedly, “What can I do? I don’t know what to do”—the dream, and the art, are destroyed, by Marianne’s demands and, it turns out, her duplicity. She drags him back to a corrupt civilization and pulls him from his contemplative isolation into a vortex of unwanted action.

Una Femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman)

The film centers on the relationship of exotic dancer Angéla and her lover Émile. Angéla wants to have a child, but Émile is not ready. Émile's best friend Alfred also says he loves Angéla, and keeps up a gentle pursuit. Angéla and Émile argue about the matter; at one point they decide not to speak to each other, so continue their argument by pulling books from the shelf and pointing to the titles. Since Émile stubbornly refuses her request for a child, Angéla finally decides to accept Alfred's plea and sleeps with him. This proves that she will do what she must to have a child. She and Émile finally reconcile, so he has a chance to become the father. The two have sex, then engage in a bit of wordplay that gives the film its title: an exasperated Émile says "Angéla, tu es infâme" ("Angela, you are horrid"), and she retorts, "Non, je suis une femme" ("No, I am a woman").

Vivre sa vie (my life to live)

Is about a woman who gets a divorce and leaves her married life to pursue acting.

But she can’t find work and is broke and becomes a prostitute. She Learns the ways from a pimp named Raoul and eventually finds love with a young man she met in a bistro who read’s a passage from “The Oval Portrait” By Edgar Allen Poe.

The film’s meaning is connected to The power which is about a woman who sits for her husband’s painting and he spends so much time gazing at the painting that he doesn’t notice that she dies while he was painting it. 

Nana tries to leave her life of prostitution for the boy, but Raoul planned to sell her to another pimp, and the sale goes awry and she dies in a shootout.

A film motivated by events rather than action, ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ is a deeply philosophical and thought-provoking character study that refuses to engage in melodrama. Instead, ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ offers a matter of fact attitude to life, an attitude that Nana herself seems to hold.

‘The Oval Portrait’ is a cautionary tale about an artist who paints a portrait of his wife as she sits for him. Upon finishing his painting, the painter is amazed at how lifelike it is, exclaiming ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ Stepping back from the finished painting in triumph, he averts his gaze to his wife. She is dead.

‘The Oval Portrait’ displays, thus, the immortality of art juxtaposed against the mortality of love. However, it also makes reference to the lifelike manner in which Godard shoots his films. Just as the painter in Poe’s story manages to embody life within his painting, Godard strives to embody life in his films. ‘Vivre Sa Vie’, as many of Godard’s films do, contains a great deal of improvisation. Even the film’s non-diegetic music, which swells at seemingly random points in the narrative and ends just as abruptly, follows this improvisational structure. Godard also largely used first takes to construct ‘Vivre Sa Vie’, a technique which can be seen in the naturalistic spontaneity of Nana’s actions.

As Godard recites ‘The Oval Portrait’, close-up shots frame Nana’s head and shoulders as though she herself is posing for a portrait, her fate at the end of the film foreshadowed by the words of Poe. Nana, too, will die as she chooses love over her career. The final scene of ‘Vivre Sa Vie’, where Nana is shot and killed as Raoul attempts to sell her, is both unexpected and inevitable. It is inevitable in the way that her downward spiral over the course of the film suggests she cannot have a happy ending, but unexpected as it comes at a point in the film when Nana seems, finally, at peace with herself. The juxtaposition between the deterioration of her external situation and her mental and emotional growth is excellently posed by Godard. Is it really Nana’s life to live?

The ending of ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ can be cyclically linked back to the film’s beginning, which opens with a quote from Montaigne:

‘Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

Bande à part (A band apart)

its French title derives from the phrase faire bande à part, which means "to do something apart from the group". The film is about three people who commit a robbery. It received positive critical reviews, and its dance scene has been referenced several times in popular culture.

A Band Apart is a tale of a heist gone wrong. 

Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), are down on their luck and looking for a way to make some easy money. Falling in with Odile (Anna Karina), they devise a plan to rob a cache of loot hidden in a lodger’s room in her aunt’s house outside Paris. Killing time before the robbery, a love triangle develops between them. Meanwhile, things get really complicated when Arthur’s criminal uncle finds out about their scheme, forcing them to act out their plan before they’re ready, leading to disastrous consequences.