'To Think the Home in Terms of the Factory' Social Reproduction, Postproduction and Home Movies in Godard and Miéville

Drawing on theories of social reproduction, this article explores how Jean-Luc Godard’s metaphor, to ‘think the home in terms of the factory’, plays itself out within his and Anne-Marie Miéville's 1975 film Numéro deux (Number Two), as well as their film-making practice more broadly. In particular, we focus on how their use of video and their foregrounding of the space of film postproduction serves to challenge traditional notions of film production, editing and authorship, briefly examining the editing room as a historically gendered place of work. We conclude by reading Godard and Miéville's television works, particularly their strategy of amateurisation and their investment in the domestic, in relation to the category of the ‘home movie’. The place of the home and their practice of small-scale film production, it is argued, represents an attempt to test an alternative mode of production to the one that the metaphor of the factory typically designates.