Godard’s suburban years

Far from a simple backdrop, the lived environment was for Jean-Luc Godard capable of eliciting specific modes of cinematographic thought; choice of locations could impact the shape and feel of a film more than its screenplay. Prevalent in his works of the 1960s are suburban landscapes and locales, from the villas, cafés and roadways frequented by the characters of Bande à part (1964) to the high-rises of La Courneuve shown in the essay in phenomenology 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Without positing an equivalence between suburban heterogeneity and Godard’s jarring late-modern aesthetic, the author argues for the generative, transgressive capacity of a capitalist space in the throes of transformation and shot through with fragments of history. Shooting near Joinville-le-Pont and Vincennes in Bande à part, Godard pays homage to those pioneers who came before him, like Mack Sennett or Louis Feuillade. In other contexts, like the science-fiction sendup Alphaville (1965), he finds signs of the future in the present, showing Lemmy Caution moving through sleek, well-lit neighbourhoods of high-rises. The spatio-temporal rupture characteristic of Godard’s approach to suburban space resurfaces to surprising effect in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012).

Preparation and Properties of Recycled Polypropylene /Carbon Nanotube Composites

Recycled polypropylene (PP)/carbon nanotube (CNTs) composites with different CNTs fraction were prepared by the melting blend method. The effects of CNTs content on the thermal properties and mechanical properties were mainly investigated. The results show that the thermal degradation of the composites shifts towards higher temperatures as the concentration of CNTs is increased. With increasing CNTs content, tensile strength and elongation at break increase firstly and then decrease. When CNTs content is 3 %, tensile strength and elongation at break are 34.71 and 27.00, respectively. Moreover, a unique tensile rupture characteristic was found by SEM observations, which explained the critical broken theory of the PP/CNTs composites.