FROM BREATHLESS

TO FILM SOCIALISME

MULTIPLE
PLUS: GODARDS EIGHTIES JEANS
INTERVIEWS COMMERCIALS ANALYZED

filmcomment
A 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

THE
GODARD
COLLECTION

contents

Published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center/A Digital Anthology October 2014

THREE FILMS FROM PARIS BY FREDERICK WELLINGTON

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

WIND FROM THE EAST BY JOAN MELLEN

A review of this Maoist micro-epic provides a framework for discussion of Godards newly politicized work and
stances on other artists attempting to document revolution (from Fall 1971, pgs. 65-67)

11 JOURNAL: PARIS BY JONATHAN R OSENBAUM

A meditation on the appeal of Jerry Lewis and particularly Lewiss mentor, Frank Tashlin, to French cinastes
including Godard, who considers them stylistic innovators par excellence (from March/April 1973, pgs. 2, 4 & 6)
13 TOUT VA BIEN BY STE VEN SIMMONS
Godards struggle to achieve a revolutionary film grammar in the 1972 work is discussed alongside reflections
on the political utility of advanced art (from May/June 1974, pgs. 54-59)
19 IN DEFENSE OF ART BY R OBIN W OOD
A probing of the Marxist-semiologist school as embodied by Godard, exposing its dogmatism and contradictions, such as the outwardly revolutionary Vertov groups resolve to make films for a small, educated Marxist
elite (from July/August 1975, pgs. 44-51)
27 REALISM AND REVOLUTION BY R OBIN W OOD
Godards Numro Deux and fellow Cahiers du Cinma critic Jean-Louis Camollis La Cecilia are compared with
regard to attitudes toward bourgeois tradition (from May/June 1977, pgs. 17-23)
34 JOURNAL: LONDON BY GILBER T ADAIR
Two epic-length television productions by Godard are subjected to close analysis of his methods, from his visual
signatures to his epigrammatic scripting (from May/June 1981, pgs. 4, 6)
36 BLUEJEAN-LUC GODARD BY H.A. R ODCHENKO
In his inimitable style, Godard takes on the advertising industry from the inside by making jean commercials for
Girbaud (from November/December 1987, pgs. 2-4)
38 SOUND TRACK: OPERATUNITIES BY MICHAEL WALSH
In the omnibus film Aria, 10 directors return to the original mass entertainmentopera. Godards features models flitting around bodybuilders in a gym (from May/June 1988, pgs. 76-77)
40 AWARD-WINNING CORRESPONDENCE BY JEAN-LUC GODARD
After declining to accept a Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle, Godard provides a short list of
grievances against the film industry (from March/April 1995, pg. 2)
41 DOUBLE-HELIX BY ARMOND WHITE
A softer, spiritual, more humane side of the enfant terrible of the New Wave emerges in his video works Nouvelle 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 SMITH
In 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 KEHR
Contempt is one of the directors most penetrating works about gender, the film industry, mythology, and the
relationship between words and cinema (from September/October 1997, pgs. 18-24)
61 PLAGIARIZING THE PLAGIARIST: GODARD MEETS THE SITUATIONISTS BY BRIAN PRICE
Godards appropriation of Situationist aesthetics infuriated Guy Debord, but was the director actually a more
faithful 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 2014

65 GODARD IN THE NINETIES: AN INTERVIEW, ARGUMENT, AND SCRAPBOOK BY JONATHAN R OSENBAUM

JLG answers questions about the various shift in focus in his work throughout the Ninetiesa special concern
with aesthetic beauty in war, theater, painting, and women; the dance between reality and fiction; the use of
video over film; and changing values in film criticism and culture (from September/October 1998, pgs. 52-63)
73 (SOUND) TRACKING GODARD BY KENT JONES
When a blind woman wrote a poignant essay about Nouvelle Vague, Godard released a copy of it with the
soundtrack; for Histoire(s), EMC publishes five volumes of text and the full soundtrack on five CDs (from September/October 2000, pgs. 17-18)
75 GODARDS IN PRAISE OF LOVE BY CHRIS NORRIS
Godards soundtracks can be jarring and cerebral, but, on a deeper level, they are carefully composed and more
akin to Debussy than Schoenberg (from November/December 2001, pg. 14)
76 IN THE SHADOW OF MEMORY BY AMY TAUBIN
In Praise of Love articulates the limitations of an artists vision (from January/February 2002, pgs. 50-52)
79 HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL BY JEAN-Y VES GAILLAC, TISSY MOR GUE & JEAN-PHILIPPE GUERAND
A brief interview about In Praise of Love touches upon memory and genocide, and reveals what happened to
Juliette Binoches voiceover (from January/February 2002, pgs. 53-54)
81 STUCK ON LAKE GENEVA WITH THE PARIS BLUES AGAIN BY KENT JONES
In Praise of Love traps visual beauty in the frame, though his handle on philosophy is a little shaky (from January/February 2002, pg. 55)
82 FROM PROJECTOR TO PARADE BY SER GE DANEY
A 1989 essay on how movie spectatorship has changed, and a discussion of Godards return to the freeze-frame
and his theories on montage (from July/August 2002, pgs. 36-39)
86 THE JOY OF BEING SWISS BY FRDRIC BONNAUD
Godard blends mediumsthe paintings of Aim Pache, the music of Beethoven, and film clips of the Vaud countrysidein his new video essay Liberty and Homeland (from September/October 2003, pgs. 14-15)
88 VIVE LA RSISTANCE! BY J. HOBERMAN
Colin MacCabes biography offers a unique portrait (from January/February 2004, pg. 76)
90 CHAPTER AND VERSE BY RI CHARD COMBS & RAYMOND DUR GNAT
How to pick apart Godards approach and reconfigure it through an analytical lens (from January/February
2005, 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)
105 WIPING THE SLATE CLEAN BY AMY TAUBIN
Sonatas and socialism: Godard takes high command of digital media in Film Socialisme, a film in three movements shot entirely in HD video (from September/October 2010, pgs. 44-46)

filmcomment A Digital Anthology 2014

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Head Trip

PHOTO BY GAVIN SMITH

A recent Godard installation expands an

already massive oeuvre into innite
dimensions BY A M Y TAU B I N
I wrote most of what follows sitting
on Jean-Luc Godards bed in Voyage(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 personal essay on image/sound, history/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, technical, and financial difficulties.The
words technical and financial are
crossed out, suggesting that arguments 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 strategies involved in the work proper.
The other key object here is a collage of four female heads in closeup, cropped from photographic
reproductions of master paintingsamong them a Godard
favorite, Girl with a Pearl Earringall

vision
of them illustrations in Andr Malrauxs 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 speakers 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, including half a dozen made specifically for
this installation; and by some
loathed directors as well.There are
wires attached everywhere, big ladders, small ladders, a bag of potting
soil thats part of a video garden
(shades of Nam June Paik), generic
home furnishing including the aforementioned bed, and books nailed to
tables, fences, and floor.Toy electric
freight trains run on tracks that tunnel 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 superimposed onto the exterior space.
The play of projections and reflections summons The Large Glass of
Marcel Duchamp.Theres no way to
enter the museum without raising
his ghost.
Godard is so successful at setting a tone of anger and frustration
at the front door that its not until
youve immersed yourself in the
piece that you sense the improvisational energy and formal discovery
involved in exchanging cinemas linearity for simultaneity and threedimensional 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.

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Breathless will always be more than a movie

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF RIALTO PICTURES/STUDIOCANAL, EXCEPT OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION

AN IDEAL FOR LIVING For Geoffrey OBrien,

FC_28-33_Breathless.qxd:028FC 4/21/10 4:02 PM Page 29

FC_28-33_Breathless.qxd:028FC 4/21/10 4:02 PM Page 30

that Breathless should have reached its

50th anniversary is a bit hard to accept, in part
because it serves to remind just how much time has
passed since I first saw it, within a year of its New
York opening. It is also more than a little unsettling
to think that, had I looked back half a century in
1960, when at age 12 I was just getting immersed
in movies, I would have been contemplating an
inconceivably remote film world whose pathbreaking work was being done by the likes of D. W.
Griffith and Louis Feuillade (who had not yet
even hit their stride). How could so much have
changed in that earlier 50-year span, and so relatively little since? Breathless still seems very much
a live influence; it has remained continuously available, most recently in a pristine Criterion restoration, and will be re-released theatrically this month.
That the iconic images of Jean-Paul Belmondo in
hat and shades and Jean Seberg in New York Herald Tribune T-shirt have never gone away make it
easy to pretend it was all the day before yesterday.

or me, as doubtless for many who caught it

the first time around, it still feels that way. On a
fresh viewing, after a few moments of initial
detachmentbut then that opening car theft in
Marseille was always disorientingthe deeply
ingrained associations begin to kick in. I dont so
much recollect my first reactions to Breathless as find myself
involuntarily possessed by them, or rather inextricably embedded
in them. I cannot report on Breathless as it looks now because it
will never lose for me its original mesmeric fascination. To have
come upon Seberg and Belmondo exactly as they were may not be
quite like getting youth back, but its the best that movies can do.
At the time it seemed to promise an era of wonders to come
unimaginable movies, inventions, pleasureswith Jean-Luc
Godard a new name for astonishment. There was perhaps more
magic in the anticipation than in all that followedthere generally is. Its impossible to watch it now without thinking, for
instance, of the later history of Jean Seberg; but likewise impossible not to be once again taken over by her just as she takes over
her 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 not
already seen it had to be dragged. It became part of the furniture
of life; promenades and parties and love scenes (real or attempted)
were for a long time all more or less remakes of Breathless. Every
second of its running timeevery stray reference and physical
gesture and cinematic devicewould be shared and parsed and

rehashed. Every peripheral glimpse or overheard fragment of conversation was somehow indispensable. The first time I saw
Breathless on videoon a tape that looked as if it had been struck
from the very print that had made the rounds of Manhattan
revival houses in the SixtiesI was amazed to recognize each flaw
and scratch. The tiniest peculiarities of film grain were like old
friends. (The restored DVD makes the film clearer but at the cost
of some of those cherished associations.)
Breathless was the first film I had watched that way, attentive not only to plot or dialogue or deliberately grand composition but to everything that came, however briefly or marginally,
into the audiovisual field. Everything seemed potentially important, from a glimpse of wall poster or comic strip to the expression on the face of a passerby on the fringe of the frame. In the
same way that every photograph in Robert Franks The Americans (another overwhelming product of that moment) was both
offhand and monumental, Breathless turned any courtyard or
caf 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 if
the 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 to
Bosley Crowthers New York Times review is to re-enter a lost
world: [S]ordid is really a mild word for its pile-up of gross indecencies . . . It is emphatically, unrestrainedly vicious, completely
devoid of moral tone, concerned mainly with eroticism and the
restless drives of a cruel young punk to get along. (He might
have been describing, more or less accurately, a drive-in movie of
the same period like The Beat Generation or Platinum High
School.) Pauline Kael perceived something not altogether dissimilar, although in subtler and more suggestive terms, finding Belmondo and Seberg as shallow and empty as the shining young
faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in
newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And youre left
with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos.

f it was a new race, then my contemporaries must

belong to it. To those of us entering adolescence, Breathless
was like the trailer for what we hoped our lives would be:
hilarious, exhilarating, bracing, and filled with allusions
you could happily spend a lifetime tracking down. Reading
Dashiell Hammetts The Glass Key one might come upon
the same line about not wearing silk socks with tweeds, and, years
later, watching Otto Premingers Whirlpool, finally realize it had
been the voice of Gene Tierney crying out in that Parisian movie
theater: You dont want to know the truthyou wont let me tell
ityou think Im lying! These bits of Godardian citation were
talismanic street signs, pointing toward hidden alternate worlds: if,
as Godard said in a 1961 interview, Breathless was more like Alice
in Wonderland than like Scarface, it was a wonderland constructed
from pieces of what was then just beginning to be described as
pop culture. The phrase had not yet worn out its welcome.
We took Breathless as a manual of how to move through the

> > i n f o c u s : The 50th anniversary restoration tour of Breathless kicks off at New Yorks Film Forum on May 28.

FC_28-33_Breathless.qxd:028FC 4/21/10 4:02 PM Page 31

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

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

FC_28-33_Breathless.qxd:028FC 4/21/10 4:02 PM Page 32

world in cool balletic fashion, pausing for brief indelible poses, and
dropping the occasional gnomic observation after the fashion of JeanPierre Melville as the aphoristic novelist Parvulesco. Parvulescos
credoTo become immortal and then to dierepresented a perfect fusion of Walter Paters injunction to burn always with this
hard, gemlike flame and the teen punk epigram of Knock on Any
Door: Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. If
you didnt want to be Belmondos Michel Poiccardthat is, if the
romance of self-destruction was not altogether temptingyou
could 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 an
elegantly evanescent haze). Learn French (if only to find out what
dgueulasse really meant). Go to Paris. Go to the movies, especially the ones with Humphrey Bogart. Behave, when moving
among the spaces of the city, as if your movements were continually underscored by the endlessly repeated phrases of Martial
Solals score. Wear hats indoors. Make faces in the mirror. Play a
favorite piece of music with the understated reverence of Belmondo for the Mozart clarinet concerto. Live in discrete, carefully measured takes, leapfrogging from jump cut to jump cut.
And aspire to the company of someone just like Jean Seberg, with
the hope that she would not finally betray you to the policeor,
more plausibly, betray you with a rival like the mysteriously
creepy 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, this
deployment of hats and posters and quotations from Faulkner
in the service of some ineffable higher communication between
lovers, was what life was to be about. How many times would
we emulate the staring contest in which Seberg gazes at Belmondo to know whats behind your face? The answer to her
question might well be nothing, perhaps. We were duly jolted
when Michel, in response to Faulkners Between grief and
nothing I will take grief, opted decisively for nothing: Le chagrin cest idiot. Je choisis le nant. (Grief is idiotic. Id choose
nothingness.) But if this was nihilism, it was a nihilism that
looked very much like fun.

iven the advanced level of game-playing

going on, all that other business of murder and
betrayal and final brutal rejection seemed likewise a game. Each role could be tried on and
reversed and changed for another. Back then I
dont think I believed for a moment that the
Michel who gunned down the cop and mugged the unfortunate
fellow in the mens room was the same Michel who clowned so
charmingly and was moved by Mozartno more than I believed
that the Patricia who slept her way to journalistic success and
ratted on her boyfriend was the same Patricia whose Americanaccented French was so indescribably charming. Each character
consisted 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 every
move looked like supreme freedom, the freedom not to be a
character in what Bosley Crowther might have called a threedimensional, psychologically nuanced film. They were free to
make themselves up as they went along, and this promised to be
no game but the most serious thing in the world.
Movies had always provided materials for improvisational
role-playing; that was in fact their chief function. As kids we had

played Lost Patrol or King Kong in the back yard, replaying fantasies brought to us courtesy of Million Dollar Moviescripts
for the imagination, all the more powerful because in pre-video
days they had to be reconstructed from memory. If we had learned
to stare attentively at movies, it was only in order to retain as
much as possible for subsequent use. What seemed to be happening in Breathless amounted to a revolution: the people watching
the movies had asserted control over them. If Godard became an
immediate hero, it was because he had reversed the power relationship between mesmerized viewer and entrancing spectacle.
The wall separating movie from audience had been smashed,
right from the moment when Belmondo launched into monologue
mode while driving along in his stolen car. It wasnt that he
addressed the audience directly (Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and
others had done that for comic effect) but that he didnt: he treated
the screen as a space in which a private freedom might be indulged.
In Godard, the moviegoer had taken over the movie; and where he
had gone any of us might follow. The moment-to-moment
exchanges of Breathless were not exotic or extraordinary in themselves, they became so because they had been filmedor rather,
they existed in the first place in order to be filmed. This was not
film as a record of ordinary life but as cinematic utopia: a continuous process of inventing the world by turning it into a movie.
Geoffrey OBrien is editor-in-chief for The Library of America. His books include Hardboiled America, Dream Time, Sonata
for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears, and Red Sky Caf.

scriptapalooza
12th Annual

screenplay competition
regular deadline March 5

FINAL deadline April 15

$10,000
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Over 90 production companies reading all the entered scripts

and the top 30 winners get software from Write Brothers

323.654.5809 office

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info@scriptapalooza.com

FC_44-47_FilmSocialisme.qxd:044FC 8/18/10 8:44 PM Page 44

Wiping the Slate Clean With Film Socialisme,

Jean-Luc Godard embarks on an unsentimental
journeyand asks Quo Vadis? by Amy Taubin
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
t. s . e l i o t, The Waste Land
think i ve used this quotation beforeperhaps in
relation to Histoire(s) du cinmabut it has never seemed as
appropriate as it does now, applied specifically to the movie
rumored to be the last by Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme. But if
indeed this is an ending, it is not a summation. The phrase des choses
comme a (things like that) is repeated throughout. This is the
work of art as provisional, approximate, relativenot ideal. And so,
here are some thingspitifully fewabout des choses comme a as
chosen by Godard in what might or might not be his last film.
(A note about viewing circumstance: absent from Cannes this
year, I missed the opportunity to see Film Socialisme projected
on the big screen, Godards preference, according to one of several interviews he gave prior to the premiere. What follows is
based on DVD viewinguseful for analysis, less than satisfactory as cinematic experience.)
Film Socialisme is a movie in three movements, their relationship, particularly in terms of tempo and the statement and recapitulation of themes, corresponding more or less to classical sonata
form: a fast-paced first movement, a slow second, and a third that
is faster and shorter than the first. The opening movement takes

place on a huge ocean liner cruising the Mediterranean, with brief

side trips in various ports of call. The second movement is confined to a small house and an adjacent gas station somewhere in
the south of France. The third recapitulates the Mediterranean
journey of the first, depicting places where what Godard terms
our humanities were bornEgypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas
(i.e. Greece, hlas), Naples, Barcelonalargely by scavenging
through banked images of 20th-century horror.
his is the first feature-length movie that godard
has made entirely on video. While he has often fashioned a
dialectic with film and video, here the kinetic montage of the cruise
ship 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, and
they seem to have wielded every variety of video camera from cell
phone to state-of-the-art HD. The chaotically pulsing pixels and
overly saturated, smeared colors of the low-tech images result in
busy, garish near-abstractions, and when they collide with the hightech imageshyperreal, flattened fields of fauve blues and yellows,
bisected and trisected like lessons in geometry or, in the case of the
overhead shots of the sea, filling the entire screen with eddies and
waves 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.

FC_44-47_FilmSocialisme.qxd:044FC 8/19/10 3:02 PM Page 45

is representation, but not all representation is equal. It is the breathtaking HD images that prove Godard as much a master colorist in
digital media as he has been in celluloid.
Generous as the movie is with visual beauty, it is equally withholding of linguistic meaning. The cruise ship is a floating Las
Vegas. Godard cites Fernand Braudels great history of the Mediterranean as a source, but one might also think of Venturi, Brown, and
Izenours pivotal 1972 text on postmodernism, Learning from Las
Vegas. The several thousand actual passengers on the cruise liner
commandeered by Godard function, unwittingly, as extras. They
are making a putative tour of the roots of Western civilization as a
way of escaping the pressures of capitalism in its final throes. They
eat, drink, gamble, exercise, pray, and watch movies together, and
they 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, the
philosopher Alain Badiou is shown lecturing on geometry and philosophy to an empty auditorium. (Godard explained in an interview that he placed an announcement of the lecture in the ships
daily activities calendar, but no one came.) One interpretation of the
movies title, which remains obscure (to use one of Godards
favorite words) to the very end, is that the artificial community
formed aboard the boat, solely for the purpose of R&R, is incapable of entertaining the possibility of socialism because they can
neither communicate with one another nor reflect on themselves or
the reflections of themselves they mindlessly produce.
The fragmented textwhich largely consists of non sequiturs,
gnomic pronouncements, chains of associations broken off before
theyve barely begunis spoken by about a dozen actors, posed in
various parts of the ship, their voices often masked by the sounds
of wind whistling across unshielded microphones, the cacophony of
the passengers, and bursts of music. The actors present themselves

less as characters than as familiar Godardian mouthpieces and

archetypes: the war-criminal hunter, the Jewish banker, the young
woman accompanying the powerful and much older man, the serious young African who says she doesnt want to die until she sees
Europe happy, and another serious young woman who says the
same about Russia. Good luck to those last two. In response,
Godard throws the Latin title Abii Ne Viderem (I departed lest
I 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 screening, Godard added subtitles in what he termed Navajo English at
the bottom of the frame, which were as unhelpful as they were
meant to be. If you are fluent in French, you may think you have an
advantage, but you dont because this is a film about the failure of
language and meaning. Indeed, the pair of parrots in the opening,
pre-credit imagetheir iridescent feathers a hint of visual splendors
to comeand the pair of cats, meowing in unison in a YouTube
video that we see slightly later, communicate far better with each
other and with us than do the humans. And yet, in a movie that went
into production four years ago, Godard, ever the Cassandra, makes
glancing references to the global financial meltdown, the economic
crisis in Greece, the destruction of the waterways by deep-sea
drilling, and more. Nothing in Film Socialisme, however, has the
clarity and wit of Godards argument that if you believe in intellectual
property rights, then logiGenerous as the
cally the entire Western
world owes a thousand bilmovie is with visual
lion dollars to Greecefor
beauty, it is equally
Pericles, Sophocles, and Ariswithholding of lintotlerather than Greece
guistic meaning.
owing Europe anything at
all. Which is to say that

despite the visual pyrotechnics of the first section, the mood is ominous and despairing. How could it be otherwise?
he title quo vadis europe is the segue from the
first to the second section, in which we find ourselves in the
modest home of the Martin familyfather, mother, 10-year-old
boy, and teenage girl. The Martins keep a llama on a painfully
short leash, tethered in front of their gas station, along with the
llamas donkey sidekick. Otherwise they seem like nice people.
The wifes decision to run for local office brings a two-person
TV crew to their door. There are echoes of Wind from the East
(70) and, in the insistence on putting children first, the television
series France/tour/dtour/deux/enfants (77). After the razzledazzle of the opening movement, the extended fixed-camera
positions of this adagio section seem a bit too grounded, until a
shot in which the boy is holding onto his mother as she washes
the dishes. Their bare arms seem illuminated as in a de la Tour
painting, the flesh made lightan HD miracle indeed. The boy
then sits on a couch alone, scratching his arm as if to confirm its
corporeality. Part of the slow movement of a Beethoven piano
sonata plays on the radio, then a bit of Chet Baker, then a political debate. Gradually you might realize that these scenes of rare
tenderness and exquisite beauty are fragments of a portrait of
the filmmaker as a young boy, an idea confirmed somewhat later
during a scene in which the boy sits on an outdoor staircase,
painting an early Renoir from memory. (Braudel wrote the first
volume of his history of the Mediterranean from memory during the years he spent in a German prison camp.) The TV
reporter, a stunning African woman, asks the boy what hes
thinking about and he answers, Your ass. Does that really
interest 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 movement, which reiterates the Mediterranean journey of the first in
the form of a montage of footage of the horrors of the 20th century. That weve seen this film before is precisely the point. It is
the unsparing proof of Freuds theory of the death instinct and
repetition compulsion. Godard revisits footage of wars and
atrocities, including his own reedit of Eisensteins Odessa Steps
sequence. When he slams the door on Film Socialisme with two
words, first spoken as a joke by a cheeky boy (English, it turns
out, is good for something), it comes as a relief.
No comment is a shifter, referring back not only to this
enigmatic, painful, off-putting, ravishing Film Socialismebut to
all the Godard films that preceded it. Yet one cant help but feel
that it also refers to what is to come, especially since the few seconds of black that follow the title give way to an empty field of
white. Black signifies nothing; white makes one think about
what nothing means. Is this a last film? Godard claims he has
given up his production studio and is in the process of dismantling his library of videos and books, making it likely that this
film brings to a close at last his extended raids on the image
bank. But he has also
hinted at starting again
If you are fluent
from zero with a pencil
in French, you may
camera and three photos.
think you have an
Interviewing himself for the
advantage, but you
press book that accompanied the Cannes screening,
dont because this
he queries, A last film?
is a film about the
The reply: Only the title,
failure of language
Farewell to Language.
and meaning.
But is that not the movie
Ive just described?

ALL PHOTOS WILD BUNCH

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