filmcommentA D I G I TA L A N T H O LO GY | O C TO B E R 2 0 1 4 | P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E F I L M S O C I E T Y O F L I N C O L N C E N T E R

FROM BREATHLESSTO FILM SOCIALISME

MULTIPLE INTERVIEWS

PLUS: GODARDS EIGHTIES JEANSCOMMERCIALS ANALYZED

THEGODARDCOLLECTION

filmcomment A Digital Anthology 2014

contents Published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center/A Digital Anthology October 20144 THREE FILMS FROM PARIS BY FREDERICK WELLINGTON

Three concurrent New Wave tales of adultery, including Godards Une Femme Marie, are contrasted and exam-ined as studies of contemporary mores (from Summer 1965, pgs. 30-33)

8 WIND FROM THE EAST BY JOAN MELLENA review of this Maoist micro-epic provides a framework for discussion of Godards newly politicized work andstances on other artists attempting to document revolution (from Fall 1971, pgs. 65-67)

11 JOURNAL: PARIS BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUMA meditation on the appeal of Jerry Lewis and particularly Lewiss mentor, Frank Tashlin, to French cinastesincluding Godard, who considers them stylistic innovators par excellence (from March/April 1973, pgs. 2, 4 & 6)

13 TOUT VA BIEN BY STEVEN S IMMONSGodards struggle to achieve a revolutionary film grammar in the 1972 work is discussed alongside reflectionson the political utility of advanced art (from May/June 1974, pgs. 54-59)

19 IN DEFENSE OF ART BY ROBIN WOODA probing of the Marxist-semiologist school as embodied by Godard, exposing its dogmatism and contradic-tions, such as the outwardly revolutionary Vertov groups resolve to make films for a small, educated Marxistelite (from July/August 1975, pgs. 44-51)

27 REALISM AND REVOLUTION BY ROBIN WOODGodards Numro Deux and fellow Cahiers du Cinma critic Jean-Louis Camollis La Cecilia are compared withregard to attitudes toward bourgeois tradition (from May/June 1977, pgs. 17-23)

34 JOURNAL: LONDON BY GILBERT ADAIR Two epic-length television productions by Godard are subjected to close analysis of his methods, from his visualsignatures to his epigrammatic scripting (from May/June 1981, pgs. 4, 6)

36 BLUEJEAN-LUC GODARD BY H.A . RODCHENKOIn his inimitable style, Godard takes on the advertising industry from the inside by making jean commercials forGirbaud (from November/December 1987, pgs. 2-4)

38 SOUND TRACK: OPERATUNITIES BY MICHAEL WALSHIn the omnibus film Aria, 10 directors return to the original mass entertainmentopera. Godards features mod-els flitting around bodybuilders in a gym (from May/June 1988, pgs. 76-77)

40 AWARD-WINNING CORRESPONDENCE BY JEAN-LUC GODARDAfter declining to accept a Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle, Godard provides a short list ofgrievances against the film industry (from March/April 1995, pg. 2)

41 DOUBLE-HELIX BY ARMOND WHITEA softer, spiritual, more humane side of the enfant terrible of the New Wave emerges in his video works Nou-velle Vague, Hlas pour moi, JLG/JLG, and Histoire(s) du cinma (from March/April 1996, pgs. 26-30)

46 JEAN-LUC GODARD INTERVIEWED BY GAVIN SMITHIn an extended interview, the director discusses video as an art form, his revulsion for Spielberg, getting old,painting, and how filmmakers arent as good as they were in the Forties (from March/April 1996, pgs. 31-41)

55 GODS IN THE DETAILS: GODARDS CONTEMPT BY DAVE KEHRContempt is one of the directors most penetrating works about gender, the film industry, mythology, and therelationship between words and cinema (from September/October 1997, pgs. 18-24)

61 PLAGIARIZING THE PLAGIARIST: GODARD MEETS THE SITUATIONISTS BY BRIAN PRICEGodards appropriation of Situationist aesthetics infuriated Guy Debord, but was the director actually a morefaithful critic of the society of the spectacle than Debord? (from November/December 1997, pgs. 66-69)

filmcomment A Digital Anthology 2014

contents Published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center/A Digital Anthology October 201465 GODARD IN THE NINETIES: AN INTERVIEW, ARGUMENT, AND SCRAPBOOK BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

JLG answers questions about the various shift in focus in his work throughout the Ninetiesa special concernwith aesthetic beauty in war, theater, painting, and women; the dance between reality and fiction; the use ofvideo over film; and changing values in film criticism and culture (from September/October 1998, pgs. 52-63)

73 (SOUND) TRACKING GODARD BY KENT JONESWhen a blind woman wrote a poignant essay about Nouvelle Vague, Godard released a copy of it with thesoundtrack; for Histoire(s), EMC publishes five volumes of text and the full soundtrack on five CDs (from Sep-tember/October 2000, pgs. 17-18)

75 GODARDS IN PRAISE OF LOVE BY CHRIS NORRISGodards soundtracks can be jarring and cerebral, but, on a deeper level, they are carefully composed and moreakin to Debussy than Schoenberg (from November/December 2001, pg. 14)

76 IN THE SHADOW OF MEMORY BY AMY TAUBINIn Praise of Love articulates the limitations of an artists vision (from January/February 2002, pgs. 50-52)

79 HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL BY JEAN-YVES GAILLAC, T ISSY MORGUE & JEAN-PHIL IPPE GUERANDA brief interview about In Praise of Love touches upon memory and genocide, and reveals what happened toJuliette Binoches voiceover (from January/February 2002, pgs. 53-54)

81 STUCK ON LAKE GENEVA WITH THE PARIS BLUES AGAIN BY KENT JONESIn Praise of Love traps visual beauty in the frame, though his handle on philosophy is a little shaky (from Janu-ary/February 2002, pg. 55)

82 FROM PROJECTOR TO PARADE BY SERGE DANEYA 1989 essay on how movie spectatorship has changed, and a discussion of Godards return to the freeze-frameand his theories on montage (from July/August 2002, pgs. 36-39)

86 THE JOY OF BEING SWISS BY FRDRIC BONNAUDGodard blends mediumsthe paintings of Aim Pache, the music of Beethoven, and film clips of the Vaud coun-trysidein his new video essay Liberty and Homeland (from September/October 2003, pgs. 14-15)

88 VIVE LA RSISTANCE! BY J . HOBERMANColin MacCabes biography offers a unique portrait (from January/February 2004, pg. 76)

90 CHAPTER AND VERSE BY RICHARD COMBS & RAYMOND DURGNATHow to pick apart Godards approach and reconfigure it through an analytical lens (from January/February2005, pgs. 35-36, 39, 42-43)

95 OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS BY FRDRIC BONNAUD A glimpse of JLG behind the scenes as he films Notre musique (from January/February 2005, pgs. 37, 40-41)

98 HEAD TRIP BY AMY TAUBIN Chaotic enclosures: Godards installation for the Pompidou Center (from July/August 2006, pg. 17)

99 AN IDEAL FOR LIVING BY GEOFFREY OBRIEN A masterpiece through the ages: tracing Godards Breathless back to its origins (from May/June 2010, pgs. 28-33)

105WIPING THE SLATE CLEAN BY AMY TAUBIN Sonatas and socialism: Godard takes high command of digital media in Film Socialisme, a film in three move-ments shot entirely in HD video (from September/October 2010, pgs. 44-46)

I wrote most of what follows sitting

on Jean-Luc Godards bed in Voy-

age(s) en utopie, the installation

Godard created for the Pompidou

Center in Paris. I say Godards bed,

not because he slept in it or

because it might resemble his

actual bed but rather because the

installation is as autobiographical as

the film JLG/JLG and as much a per-

sonal essay on image/sound, his-

tory/memory, and ideology/politics

as Histoire(s) du cinma.

Voyage(s) en utopie, subtitled

la recherche dun thorme perdu, is

not one installation but two, one

inside the other. According to the

mock-up poster, hand-lettered and

designed in Godards deliberately

schoolboy style, and positioned just

outside the entrance to the

museums mezzanine-level south

gallery where Voyage(s) en utopie is

housed, Godard had proposed

another installation, titled Collage(s)

de France, archologie du cinma

daprs JLG, but the Pompidou

rejected it because of artistic, tech-

nical, and financial difficulties.The

words technical and financial are

crossed out, suggesting that argu-

ments continued even as the show

was being installed, and that

Godard wanted the public to know

that the Pompidou had played Jack

Palance to the artists Fritz Lang.

The poster is part of a grouping of

images and objects that function,

like a cinematic title sequence, as a

preview of the elements and strate-

gies involved in the work proper.

The other key object here is a col-

lage of four female heads in close-

up, cropped from photographic

reproductions of master paint-

ingsamong them a Godard

favorite, Girl with a Pearl Earringall

of them illustrations in Andr Mal-

rauxs The Voices of Silence. Since

Malrauxs concept of the museum

without walls is the touchstone for

all of Godards cinema, it was almost

inevitable that he would bring his

version of Malraux into the bastion

of the museum itself.

The space of Voyage(s) en utopie

is divided into three rooms, labeled

in order of access:-2,3,and 1.

Visitors enter -2first, one of several

negations to come. Initially, the

installation seems visually chaotic,

and the cacophony from the speak-

ers of several dozen monitors adds

to the assault.The effect is of a circus

gone out of control or, because of

the many wire and wooden fences,

an internment camp for art and

ideas.The sheer number of

thingsmost of them familiar

Godard fetishesis overwhelming.

There are monitors ranging in size

from two to 60 inches running clips

from films by Godards favorite

directors (Bresson, Renoir,Welles,

Chaplin); by Godard himself, includ-

ing half a dozen made specifically for

this installation; and by some

loathed directors as well.There are

wires attached everywhere, big lad-

ders, small ladders, a bag of potting

soil thats part of a video garden

(shades of Nam June Paik), generic

home furnishing including the afore-

mentioned bed, and books nailed to

tables, fences, and floor.Toy electric

freight trains run on tracks that tun-

nel through the wall between room

-2 and room 3how can you see a

freight train and not remember the

Holocaust, especially with a sentence

from Bergsons Matter and Memory,

one of the nailed books, spilling on

to the nearby floor? And then there

is Collage(s) de France, rejected for

whatever reason but smuggled into

Voyage(s) en utopie nevertheless, in

the form of maquettes. Miniatures

of the nine rooms Godard originally

proposed, they are handmade and

hand-painted, and as detailed as

Joseph Cornell box collages. Some

have films running on tiny video

screens.To look inside their glass

enclosures, one has to keep shifting

positions, as if one were an editor

cutting between angles. And from

certain angles, one sees through

the glass walls so that the interiors

of the model rooms are superim-

posed onto the exterior space.

The play of projections and reflec-

tions summons The Large Glass of

Marcel Duchamp.Theres no way to

enter the museum without raising

his ghost.

Godard is so successful at set-

ting a tone of anger and frustration

at the front door that its not until

youve immersed yourself in the

piece that you sense the improvisa-

tional energy and formal discovery

involved in exchanging cinemas lin-

earity for simultaneity and three-

dimensional relationships. It is as if

Godard, in the face of his mortality,

had split open his head, and strewn

not the illusionistic space of film

but an actual space with the

objects and ideas of his 75-year-old

imaginary museum.The real

museum, wrote Malraux,is the

presence in life of what ought to

belong to death.

PH

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BY

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Head TripA recent Godard installation expands analready massive oeuvre into innitedimensions BY AMY TAUBIN

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ECTION

AN IDEAL FOR LIVING For Geoffrey OBrien,

Breathless will always be more than a movie

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that Breathless should have reached its50th anniversary is a bit hard to accept, in partbecause it serves to remind just how much time haspassed since I first saw it, within a year of its NewYork opening. It is also more than a little unsettlingto think that, had I looked back half a century in1960, when at age 12 I was just getting immersedin movies, I would have been contemplating aninconceivably remote film world whose path-breaking work was being done by the likes of D. W.Griffith and Louis Feuillade (who had not yeteven hit their stride). How could so much havechanged in that earlier 50-year span, and so rela-tively little since? Breathless still seems very mucha live influence; it has remained continuously avail-able, most recently in a pristine Criterion restora-tion, and will be re-released theatrically this month.That the iconic images of Jean-Paul Belmondo inhat and shades and Jean Seberg in New York Her-ald Tribune T-shirt have never gone away make iteasy to pretend it was all the day before yesterday.

For me, as doubtless for many who caught itthe first time around, it still feels that way. On afresh viewing, after a few moments of initialdetachmentbut then that opening car theft inMarseille was always disorientingthe deeplyingrained associations begin to kick in. I dont so

much recollect my first reactions to Breathless as find myselfinvoluntarily possessed by them, or rather inextricably embeddedin them. I cannot report on Breathless as it looks now because itwill never lose for me its original mesmeric fascination. To havecome upon Seberg and Belmondo exactly as they were may not bequite like getting youth back, but its the best that movies can do.At the time it seemed to promise an era of wonders to comeunimaginable movies, inventions, pleasureswith Jean-LucGodard a new name for astonishment. There was perhaps moremagic in the anticipation than in all that followedthere gener-ally is. Its impossible to watch it now without thinking, forinstance, of the later history of Jean Seberg; but likewise impossi-ble not to be once again taken over by her just as she takes overher supposedly hardboiled lover, and the movie itself.That first viewing was followed by many more. Breathless

became the indispensable text to which anyone who had notalready seen it had to be dragged. It became part of the furnitureof life; promenades and parties and love scenes (real or attempted)were for a long time all more or less remakes of Breathless. Everysecond of its running timeevery stray reference and physicalgesture and cinematic devicewould be shared and parsed and

rehashed. Every peripheral glimpse or overheard fragment of con-versation was somehow indispensable. The first time I sawBreathless on videoon a tape that looked as if it had been struckfrom the very print that had made the rounds of Manhattanrevival houses in the SixtiesI was amazed to recognize each flawand scratch. The tiniest peculiarities of film grain were like oldfriends. (The restored DVD makes the film clearer but at the costof some of those cherished associations.)Breathless was the first film I had watched that way, atten-

tive not only to plot or dialogue or deliberately grand composi-tion but to everything that came, however briefly or marginally,into the audiovisual field. Everything seemed potentially impor-tant, from a glimpse of wall poster or comic strip to the expres-sion on the face of a passerby on the fringe of the frame. In thesame way that every photograph in Robert Franks The Ameri-cans (another overwhelming product of that moment) was bothoffhand and monumental, Breathless turned any courtyard orcaf into a site as resonant as the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.It was not like watching a movie of the world, but rather as ifthe world itself had forced its way into the movie theater. I find it easier to reconstruct my own first take on Breathless

than to grasp, even now, its effect on my elders. To look back toBosley Crowthers New York Times review is to re-enter a lostworld: [S]ordid is really a mild word for its pile-up of gross inde-cencies . . . It is emphatically, unrestrainedly vicious, completelydevoid of moral tone, concerned mainly with eroticism and therestless drives of a cruel young punk to get along. (He mighthave been describing, more or less accurately, a drive-in movie ofthe same period like The Beat Generation or Platinum HighSchool.) Pauline Kael perceived something not altogether dissimi-lar, although in subtler and more suggestive terms, finding Bel-mondo and Seberg as shallow and empty as the shining youngfaces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and innewspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And youre leftwith the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos.

If it was a new race, then my contemporaries mustbelong to it. To those of us entering adolescence, Breathlesswas like the trailer for what we hoped our lives would be:hilarious, exhilarating, bracing, and filled with allusionsyou could happily spend a lifetime tracking down. ReadingDashiell Hammetts The Glass Key one might come upon

the same line about not wearing silk socks with tweeds, and, yearslater, watching Otto Premingers Whirlpool, finally realize it hadbeen the voice of Gene Tierney crying out in that Parisian movietheater: You dont want to know the truthyou wont let me tellityou think Im lying! These bits of Godardian citation weretalismanic street signs, pointing toward hidden alternate worlds: if,as Godard said in a 1961 interview, Breathlesswas more like Alicein Wonderland than like Scarface, it was a wonderland constructedfrom pieces of what was then just beginning to be described aspop culture. The phrase had not yet worn out its welcome.We took Breathless as a manual of how to move through the

>> in focus: The 50th anniversary restoration tour of Breathless kicks off at New Yorks Film Forum on May 28.

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WHAT SEEMED TO BE HAPPENING IN BREATHLESS AMOUNTED TO A REVOLU-

TION: THE PEOPLE WATCHING THE MOVIES HAD ASSERTED CONTROL OVER THEM.

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world in cool balletic fashion, pausing for brief indelible poses, anddropping the occasional gnomic observation after the fashion of Jean-Pierre Melville as the aphoristic novelist Parvulesco. ParvulescoscredoTo become immortal and then to dierepresented a per-fect fusion of Walter Paters injunction to burn always with thishard, gemlike flame and the teen punk epigram of Knock on AnyDoor: Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. Ifyou didnt want to be Belmondos Michel Poiccardthat is, if theromance of self-destruction was not altogether temptingyoucould always aim for Parvulescos exquisite contempt.Breathless figured as a series of directives: wear sunglasses.

Smoke cigarettes (as many as required to give every interior anelegantly evanescent haze). Learn French (if only to find out whatdgueulasse really meant). Go to Paris. Go to the movies, espe-cially the ones with Humphrey Bogart. Behave, when movingamong the spaces of the city, as if your movements were contin-ually underscored by the endlessly repeated phrases of MartialSolals score. Wear hats indoors. Make faces in the mirror. Play afavorite piece of music with the understated reverence of Bel-mondo for the Mozart clarinet concerto. Live in discrete, care-fully measured takes, leapfrogging from jump cut to jump cut.And aspire to the company of someone just like Jean Seberg, withthe hope that she would not finally betray you to the policeor,more plausibly, betray you with a rival like the mysteriouslycreepy Herald Tribune editor incarnated by Van Doude.In the long central scene between Belmondo and Sebergthe

scene that in retrospect was the movie, all the others merely

orbiting around itwe imagined the possibility of love as play.This constant discovering of expressions and gestures, thisdeployment of hats and posters and quotations from Faulknerin the service of some ineffable higher communication betweenlovers, was what life was to be about. How many times wouldwe emulate the staring contest in which Seberg gazes at Bel-mondo to know whats behind your face? The answer to herquestion might well be nothing, perhaps. We were duly joltedwhen Michel, in response to Faulkners Between grief andnothing I will take grief, opted decisively for nothing: Le cha-grin cest idiot. Je choisis le nant. (Grief is idiotic. Id choosenothingness.) But if this was nihilism, it was a nihilism thatlooked very much like fun.

Given the advanced level of game-playinggoing on, all that other business of murder andbetrayal and final brutal rejection seemed like-wise a game. Each role could be tried on andreversed and changed for another. Back then Idont think I believed for a moment that the

Michel who gunned down the cop and mugged the unfortunatefellow in the mens room was the same Michel who clowned socharmingly and was moved by Mozartno more than I believedthat the Patricia who slept her way to journalistic success andratted on her boyfriend was the same Patricia whose American-accented French was so indescribably charming. Each characterconsisted of a series of moves, perversely changeable, and hardly

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adding up to anything like a coherent personality. The flitting,whimsical zigzags that Michel and Patricia engaged in with everymove looked like supreme freedom, the freedom not to be acharacter in what Bosley Crowther might have called a three-dimensional, psychologically nuanced film. They were free tomake themselves up as they went along, and this promised to beno game but the most serious thing in the world.

Movies had always provided materials for improvisationalrole-playing; that was in fact their chief function. As kids we had

played Lost Patrol or King Kong in the back yard, replaying fan-tasies brought to us courtesy of Million Dollar Moviescriptsfor the imagination, all the more powerful because in pre-videodays they had to be reconstructed from memory. If we had learnedto stare attentively at movies, it was only in order to retain asmuch as possible for subsequent use. What seemed to be happen-ing in Breathless amounted to a revolution: the people watchingthe movies had asserted control over them. If Godard became animmediate hero, it was because he had reversed the power rela-tionship between mesmerized viewer and entrancing spectacle.

The wall separating movie from audience had been smashed,right from the moment when Belmondo launched into monologuemode while driving along in his stolen car. It wasnt that headdressed the audience directly (Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, andothers had done that for comic effect) but that he didnt: he treatedthe screen as a space in which a private freedom might be indulged.In Godard, the moviegoer had taken over the movie; and where hehad gone any of us might follow. The moment-to-momentexchanges of Breathless were not exotic or extraordinary in them-selves, they became so because they had been filmedor rather,they existed in the first place in order to be filmed. This was notfilm as a record of ordinary life but as cinematic utopia: a contin-uous process of inventing the world by turning it into a movie.

Geoffrey OBrien is editor-in-chief for The Library of Amer-ica. His books include Hardboiled America, Dream Time, Sonatafor Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears, and Red Sky Caf.

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These fragments I have shored against my ruins.t.s . eliot, The Waste Land

I think ive used this quotation beforeperhaps inrelation to Histoire(s) du cinmabut it has never seemed asappropriate as it does now, applied specifically to the movierumored to be the last by Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme. But ifindeed this is an ending, it is not a summation. The phrase des chosescomme a (things like that) is repeated throughout. This is thework of art as provisional, approximate, relativenot ideal. And so,here are some thingspitifully fewabout des choses comme a aschosen by Godard in what might or might not be his last film.

(A note about viewing circumstance: absent from Cannes thisyear, I missed the opportunity to see Film Socialisme projectedon the big screen, Godards preference, according to one of sev-eral interviews he gave prior to the premiere. What follows isbased on DVD viewinguseful for analysis, less than satisfac-tory as cinematic experience.)

Film Socialisme is a movie in three movements, their relation-ship, particularly in terms of tempo and the statement and recapit-ulation of themes, corresponding more or less to classical sonataform: a fast-paced first movement, a slow second, and a third thatis faster and shorter than the first. The opening movement takes

place on a huge ocean liner cruising the Mediterranean, with briefside trips in various ports of call. The second movement is con-fined to a small house and an adjacent gas station somewhere inthe south of France. The third recapitulates the Mediterraneanjourney of the first, depicting places where what Godard termsour humanities were bornEgypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas(i.e. Greece, hlas), Naples, Barcelonalargely by scavengingthrough banked images of 20th-century horror.

T his is the first feature-length movie that godardhas made entirely on video. While he has often fashioned adialectic with film and video, here the kinetic montage of the cruiseship section is created through abrupt juxtapositions (straight cuts,relatively little overlapping sound) of high- and low-tech digital.Four principal cameramen, Godard among them, are credited, andthey seem to have wielded every variety of video camera from cellphone to state-of-the-art HD. The chaotically pulsing pixels andoverly saturated, smeared colors of the low-tech images result inbusy, garish near-abstractions, and when they collide with the high-tech imageshyperreal, flattened fields of fauve blues and yellows,bisected and trisected like lessons in geometry or, in the case of theoverhead shots of the sea, filling the entire screen with eddies andwaves of blues and whitesthe visual drama is extraordinary. All

>> in focus: Film Socialisme will be screened on September 29 in the 48th New York Film Festival.

Wiping the Slate Clean With Film Socialisme,Jean-Luc Godard embarks on an unsentimentaljourneyand asks Quo Vadis? by Amy Taubin

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is representation, but not all representation is equal. It is the breath-taking HD images that prove Godard as much a master colorist indigital media as he has been in celluloid.

Generous as the movie is with visual beauty, it is equally with-holding of linguistic meaning. The cruise ship is a floating LasVegas. Godard cites Fernand Braudels great history of the Mediter-ranean as a source, but one might also think of Venturi, Brown, andIzenours pivotal 1972 text on postmodernism, Learning from LasVegas. The several thousand actual passengers on the cruise linercommandeered by Godard function, unwittingly, as extras. Theyare making a putative tour of the roots of Western civilization as away of escaping the pressures of capitalism in its final throes. Theyeat, drink, gamble, exercise, pray, and watch movies together, andthey constantly record their activities with all manner of cameras.As far as one can discern, they never look at what theyve recorded,and they are seldom seen engaged in conversation. At one point, thephilosopher Alain Badiou is shown lecturing on geometry and phi-losophy to an empty auditorium. (Godard explained in an inter-view that he placed an announcement of the lecture in the shipsdaily activities calendar, but no one came.) One interpretation of themovies title, which remains obscure (to use one of Godardsfavorite words) to the very end, is that the artificial communityformed aboard the boat, solely for the purpose of R&R, is inca-pable of entertaining the possibility of socialism because they canneither communicate with one another nor reflect on themselves orthe reflections of themselves they mindlessly produce.

The fragmented textwhich largely consists of non sequiturs,gnomic pronouncements, chains of associations broken off beforetheyve barely begunis spoken by about a dozen actors, posed invarious parts of the ship, their voices often masked by the soundsof wind whistling across unshielded microphones, the cacophony ofthe passengers, and bursts of music. The actors present themselves

less as characters than as familiar Godardian mouthpieces andarchetypes: the war-criminal hunter, the Jewish banker, the youngwoman accompanying the powerful and much older man, the seri-ous young African who says she doesnt want to die until she seesEurope happy, and another serious young woman who says thesame about Russia. Good luck to those last two. In response,Godard throws the Latin title Abii Ne Viderem (I departed lestI see) in block letters across the screen.

Most of the films text is in French with a smattering of German,Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. For the Cannes screen-ing, Godard added subtitles in what he termed Navajo English atthe bottom of the frame, which were as unhelpful as they weremeant to be. If you are fluent in French, you may think you have anadvantage, but you dont because this is a film about the failure oflanguage and meaning. Indeed, the pair of parrots in the opening,pre-credit imagetheir iridescent feathers a hint of visual splendorsto comeand the pair of cats, meowing in unison in a YouTubevideo that we see slightly later, communicate far better with eachother and with us than do the humans. And yet, in a movie that wentinto production four years ago, Godard, ever the Cassandra, makesglancing references to the global financial meltdown, the economiccrisis in Greece, the destruction of the waterways by deep-seadrilling, and more. Nothing in Film Socialisme, however, has theclarity and wit of Godards argument that if you believe in intellectual

property rights, then logi-cally the entire Westernworld owes a thousand bil-lion dollars to GreeceforPericles, Sophocles, and Aris-totlerather than Greeceowing Europe anything atall. Which is to say that

Generous as themovie is with visualbeauty, it is equallywithholding of lin-guistic meaning.

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despite the visual pyrotechnics of the first section, the mood is omi-nous and despairing. How could it be otherwise?

T he title quo vadis europe is the segue from thefirst to the second section, in which we find ourselves in themodest home of the Martin familyfather, mother, 10-year-oldboy, and teenage girl. The Martins keep a llama on a painfullyshort leash, tethered in front of their gas station, along with thellamas donkey sidekick. Otherwise they seem like nice people.The wifes decision to run for local office brings a two-personTV crew to their door. There are echoes of Wind from the East(70) and, in the insistence on putting children first, the televisionseries France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (77). After the razzle-dazzle of the opening movement, the extended fixed-camerapositions of this adagio section seem a bit too grounded, until ashot in which the boy is holding onto his mother as she washesthe dishes. Their bare arms seem illuminated as in a de la Tourpainting, the flesh made lightan HD miracle indeed. The boythen sits on a couch alone, scratching his arm as if to confirm itscorporeality. Part of the slow movement of a Beethoven pianosonata plays on the radio, then a bit of Chet Baker, then a polit-ical debate. Gradually you might realize that these scenes of raretenderness and exquisite beauty are fragments of a portrait ofthe filmmaker as a young boy, an idea confirmed somewhat laterduring a scene in which the boy sits on an outdoor staircase,painting an early Renoir from memory. (Braudel wrote the firstvolume of his history of the Mediterranean from memory dur-ing the years he spent in a German prison camp.) The TVreporter, a stunning African woman, asks the boy what hesthinking about and he answers, Your ass. Does that reallyinterest you? she asks, to which he answers, No comment.

No comment, written in large letters, are also the words

that conclude the film. They come at the end of the third move-ment, which reiterates the Mediterranean journey of the first inthe form of a montage of footage of the horrors of the 20th cen-tury. That weve seen this film before is precisely the point. It isthe unsparing proof of Freuds theory of the death instinct andrepetition compulsion. Godard revisits footage of wars andatrocities, including his own reedit of Eisensteins Odessa Stepssequence. When he slams the door on Film Socialisme with twowords, first spoken as a joke by a cheeky boy (English, it turnsout, is good for something), it comes as a relief.

No comment is a shifter, referring back not only to thisenigmatic, painful, off-putting, ravishing Film Socialismebut toall the Godard films that preceded it. Yet one cant help but feelthat it also refers to what is to come, especially since the few sec-onds of black that follow the title give way to an empty field ofwhite. Black signifies nothing; white makes one think aboutwhat nothing means. Is this a last film? Godard claims he hasgiven up his production studio and is in the process of disman-tling his library of videos and books, making it likely that thisfilm brings to a close at last his extended raids on the image

bank. But he has alsohinted at starting againfrom zero with a pencilcamera and three photos.Interviewing himself for thepress book that accompa-nied the Cannes screening,he queries, A last film?The reply: Only the title,Farewell to Language.

But is that not the movieIve just described? AL

L PHOTO

S W

ILD BUNCH

If you are fluent in French, you maythink you have anadvantage, but youdont because this is a film about thefailure of languageand meaning.

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