Purpose of Foregrounding

Agh. I just managed to delete my blog post.... time to start from scratch!

What I found most striking about Godard's counter-cinema was the way in which the hierarchy of the three looks was destroyed. In Weekend, the audience is made fully aware that they are watching a film, because of internal references to the film itself, writing on the screen, and the camera movement and angles. This idea of foregrounding leads the audience to be more critical of the content in the movie, but it does not provide the audience with much empathy or involvement with the characters or the

In traditional, first cinema & Hollywood movies, the audience is fully immersed in the film. The audience is not aware of the presence of the camera. The camera serves as a "technological means toward achieving a perfect perspective construction" (Wollen). This coincides with the idea of cinema as providing a window into a different world. Godard chooses to expose the camera. He uncovers the means through which the audience is able to see through this window.

Godard does so to transform film into a "process of writing in images, rather than a representation of the world" (Wollen). It is necessary for the audience to become aware of the camera, aware of the separate worlds, and critical of the differences between reality and film/language that is being presented to him or her.

I wonder, though... does this foregrounding work to further engage the audience by forcing them to think critically about the film? Or does it simply detach the audience, thus negating its very purpose?