Lettre à Freddy Buache/Changer d'image

Commissioned to make a film about the Swiss town of Lausanne on the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the town's founding, Jean-Luc Godard responded in the form of a videotaped "letter" to his longtime friend and associate Freddy Buache, the founder and director of the Cinémathèque Suisse. Lettre à Freddy Buache is basically a film about Godard's refusal to make the film, or about the failure to make the film, or even more pointedly, about what Godard predicted would be the perception of his failure. Speaking in voiceover, Godard adopts an intimate, conversational tone appropriate to a letter to a close friend. His narration is almost conspiratorial, including by implication Buache, and the eventual viewer of the film, in his musings on how best to represent or not represent a particular place.

The film alternates between three basic types of footage: Godard in his editing room listening to records and playing with sliders and buttons on audiovisual equipment; scenic tracking shots of the Swiss countryside in which Godard's camera restlessly wanders about as if in search of the one right image; and images of people walking around the city, drastically slowed down with the choppy slow motion video manipulation Godard had developed in his late 70s video experiments and especially in his then-recent 1980 return to cinema, Sauve qui peut (la vie). The footage of Godard himself emphasizes that this is a personal response, not an impersonal documentary or generic tribute but the work of an artist who is thinking and shaping his material. As in much of Godard's post-1967 oeuvre, the film is very much rooted in technology, in the reality of the editing methods applied to the footage, and in the exigencies of shooting. At one point he inserts a sequence of himself arguing with a local police officer who hassled the crew for stopping by the side of a highway to film. The policeman tells them that they can only stop for emergencies, and Godard's reply — delivered in a tone of voice that suggests it's the only rational response — is that this is an emergency, that the light would soon be gone and, with it, the opportunity to capture this particular image. For Godard, this is undoubtedly a moral question; it is vitally important to find the right images, to capture a particular moment before it is lost forever, and the failure of the police officer to understand that urgency is, from Godard's perspective, the failure of much of society to understand the importance of cinema, the potential of cinema, and by extension the responsibility of the artist to think, to document, to express his or her ideas.

The other two categories of images here are thus embodiments of Godard's thought process, his uncertainty about whether a place can best be represented by its landscape — its light and its colors — or by its people. In his musings, which have the quality of thinking aloud, drawing connections to Picasso or Wittgenstein, Godard suggests that, in filming Lausanne, there exists tension between the greens and blues of nature — the sky above and the foliage below — with Lausanne itself in the middle, gray and rocky, made of stone and concrete, manmade buildings sandwiched between a bright blue sky and the lush greens of nature. It's a perverse and implicit rebuttal of the commission's purpose: asked to commemorate the founding of a town, Godard all but laments that it was ever built, his sweeping images of natural splendor jutting up against the boring grays of the city itself.

Instead, Godard suggests that the soul of the place, the thing worth commemorating and talking about, is the people who live there, and his slow motion images of people captured on the streets have a sensuous quality that's a parallel to his gorgeous tracking shots of cloudless skies and the shade under dense trees. These images have a dual purpose implied by the film's final text, an onscreen dedication that calls this short "en souvenir de Robert Flaherty et Ernst Lubitsch." In other words, Godard's images of people arise both from the ethnographic impulse to observe and study, and from the desire to tell stories, to create fictions and narratives from people's faces, their movements. It's this tension, Godard suggests, that is valuable and worth exploring, and that's why he couldn't make a film about Lausanne and made this instead, a film in which Lausanne is more or less a departure point for the filmmaker's ideas on form and the reality/fiction dialectic.


Changer d'image was another commissioned project for Jean-Luc Godard, a short film prompted by the one-year anniversary of the election of the leftist French president François Mitterrand. Godard, naturally, takes this subject as the implicit basis for his subsequent film, and never explicitly mentions anything about Mitterrand or French politics or the occasion being commemorated. Instead, the commission seems to have made him consider the subject of "change," broadly speaking, and he sets out to examine not only what it means to change, but how to represent and envision that change in the form of images, of art. In other words, like the roughly contemporaneous Lettre à Freddy Buache, Changer d'image is not, strictly speaking, the fulfillment of a commission but an essay about how to fulfill the commission, an essay on the question of whether it can even be fulfilled at all.

To tackle the problem, Godard turns by analogy to his experience in Mozambique during the early 1970s, where he was enlisted to advise that country's new Marxist government on their television plans, and to produce original content that would create a new, radical form of television. The project never went anywhere, and Godard's voiceover analyzes the ways in which political upheavals in that country conspired with the difficulty of the project itself to prevent his success. He quite literally beats himself for the failure, showing images of himself, shirtless and strapped to a chair, being beaten and tortured by someone who's questioning him about cinema and television. It suggests how Godard sees his position with respect to governments and the other institutions and organizations that ask him to create what amounts to art on demand: as a torture victim being asked questions he can't possibly answer. He's holding up his various failures and aborted projects, wondering why it's so difficult to change things, to create something new.

The film opens, in a poignant and stripped-down visualization of that difficulty, with Godard seated, his back to the camera, in front of a white screen. This image persists throughout virtually the entire 10-minute film, sometimes alone, sometimes superimposed with others. It is as though the director is facing a quite literal blank canvas as he wonders aloud how to fill it, while the voice of an unseen woman questions him about change. He seems uncertain, except that he knows what the image of change is not: it is not the televised news, the endless debates and discussions of politicians talking about reform, a word that suggests slow and incremental alterations whereas "change" is harsh and speedy. After a while, the question-and-answer format is replaced by a third-person voiceover that refers to Godard, the director, the artist, as "the idiot," a variation on the similar roles he'd play as the holy fool in later films such as King Lear or Keep Your Right Up. Godard sees the artist as a fool, an idiot, because he believes in change, in the possibility of creating images that foster or document change, even though it's a quixotic and near-impossible task. But the artist keeps striving, through self-flagellation and the burdens imposed from outside, to create change.

This romantic image of the artist-filmmaker is offset by the film's final lines, an anecdote Godard tells about his grandfather driving the young Godard and his siblings around. The grandfather always drove very slowly, and the children in the back always shouted at him to go faster, to change gears, the cries devolving eventually to "change, grandfather, change," with the grandfather simply responding with a petulant whine. The film abruptly cuts off in mid-whine, a high-pitched sad sound of a grumpy old man resisting change, and Godard's implicit question to himself is: has he become the grandfather, or is he still the child in the back seat shouting "change," even knowing that his words are fated to have no effect?

A Film Like Any Other

In the aftermath of the student demonstrations and worker strikes that swept across France in May 1968 and after, Jean-Luc Godard — who had already declared the end of cinema, at least for him, in Week-end — fully embraced the student radicalism and the peculiar French Maoism of the time. He was setting off on a journey away from the cinema, but continued making films (and eventually videos) nonetheless. For the last couple of years of the 60s and throughout the 70s, Godard all but abandoned the commercial cinema for various political and aesthetic experiments in which he would drastically reconfigure his approach to the cinema. A Film Like Any Other was one of the first statements of this new, experimental era in Godard's career, the beginning of his long exodus from the cinema, the first of what would be many attempts to work out, in film form, the political and cinematic questions that concerned him. In that respect, this film is a precursor to the films that Godard would make collaboratively with his Dziga Vertov Group experiments, as well as the later (and ultimately much more advanced) videos he'd create with Anne-Marie Miéville.

A Film Like Any Other establishes many of the concerns that would motivate the later films: the possibility of real change, the problems of how to better organize revolutionary actions, and implicitly the central idea that would drive the Dziga Vertov Group's work: Godard's attempts to reconstruct a cinematic form appropriate to ideological films. Whether intentionally or not, A Film Like Any Other also winds up demonstrating, better than any of the other films Godard made during his revolutionary period, just why the student idealism and radicalism of this period ultimately amounted to so little. The film is a direct response to (and document of) the events of May 1968. It is constructed primarily around footage of a group of workers and students having a discussion in a field with tall grass and flowers, interspersed with black-and-white documentary images shot during the May protests. The color footage of the discussion is shot from a low angle, with the speakers mostly either turned away from the camera or with their heads chopped off by the top of the frame, so that they remain anonymous representatives of student or proletariat interests rather than individuals.

On the soundtrack, Godard frequently layers the audio of this discussion with other voices, a man and a woman who are not part of the group and who sometimes talk over the discussion. Their interjections are excerpted from various texts or describe events happening in other countries, largely consisting of accounts of fascist repression or the co-option of socialist regimes by dictatorial impulses, as with Stalin. The soundtrack is often a riot of voices in which some are drowned out and others rise periodically above the chaos, but more than anything the film captures the spirit of the "revolution" as endless talk, endless debate about intricacies of policy and rhetoric, endless cycling through possibilities and if-then scenarios. Whether Godard means to or not, there's a pointed irony in his editing when he cuts from the frenzied action of the May riots to the students sitting in that pictorially beautiful field, calmly discussing revolution and resistance and never quite doing anything about it.

And yet all this discussion doesn't even imply the openness of a free exchange of ideas. One of the most telling moments (unintentionally funny, too) comes when the group is discussing the possibility of disrupting the "bourgeois knowledge" of the university, and one of the group's members asks if they mean discussing things with the professor, debating the professor's ideas. The rest of the group reacts with horror, shouting "no!" in unison, as though the idea was absurd. (The one who suggested the idea lamely protests, "it was just a question.") No, what they mean is impeding things through protests, riots, disruptions and provocations, like the one suggested earlier on the soundtrack of standing up in class and, more or less, calling the teacher an asshole and storming out. The very idea of dialogue with the bourgeois, with the oppressors, is anathema to them, not even worthy of consideration. For all their endless talk, their perpetual debate and discussion, they're only willing to give voice to certain ideas, to discuss things with those who already agree. It's a closed circle, a feedback loop in which they repeat slogans and bits of rhetoric, circling around and around the same ideas and the same concepts. They all agree so completely it's hard to see the point of talking so much other than as a form of reinforcement and encouragement.


For all that talk, one of the most powerful sequences here is a brief montage in the latter half of the film in which the voices on the soundtrack finally fall silent, as though in hushed respect for the images of the fiery, smoke-filled streets of Paris, where students and police are massed against each other across barricades, in streets filled with tear gas fumes and cars on fire. These images of the May riots, shot in the streets at the height of the chaos, are the film's most enduring legacy, and Godard assembles a wealth of footage that captures the violent, unpredictable mood of the protests, showing the competing signs for various socialist and students' groups as well as those held aloft by counter-protesters in favor of De Gaulle. The images from the protests are undoubtedly powerful, capturing all the activity in the streets, the sense of upheaval and instability, the sense that anything could happen. Simplistic slogans are angrily scrawled on the walls, there are huge assemblies where speakers give impassioned speeches (unheard on the soundtrack, doubtless because whatever video equipment recorded the May events by and large wasn't equipped for sound), cops beat the protesters and the students throw stones or light cars on fire. It's an atmosphere of chaos and violence, and it's these images that provide context to the theoretical discussions of the rest of the film. May 1968 suggested that change was in the air; A Film Like Any Other suggested the determination of these radicals and intellectuals to talk about that change, to wonder what they could do next, to nitpick one another's points while basically agreeing.

Some of Godard's later works in this vein would pose similar questions in formal and aesthetic terms, but in A Film Like Any Other he hadn't yet really begun the process of rebuilding atop the razed foundation of the cinema left over from Week-end. The other post-Week-end film he made around the same time, the much more successful and inventive Le gai savoir, was similarly built around ideological dialogue and dialectics, but despite its simplicity formal questions were very much at the heart of that film in a way they aren't here. Rather, A Film Like Any Other represents Godard's cinema truly stripped down to its barest essence. The result isn't really satisfying, as politics or as cinema, despite some interesting moments and memorable documentary images from May 1968.

Pravda

Pravda was the second film that Jean-Luc Godard made with his collective cinema experiment the Dziga Vertov Group, after British Sounds. Like its predecessor — and like the later Struggles In Italy — it is a kind of critical report on a particular country and the status of the socialist revolution in that country. Filmed in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of the country, with the assistance of DVG collaborator Jean-Henri Roger, Pravda is a savagely sarcastic indictment of the Soviets, the Czechs, and what Godard considered "psuedo-Communists" everywhere. The film's soundtrack is structured as another dialogue between Vladimir (as in Lenin) and Rosa (as in Luxemburg), the favored names that were repeated throughout Godard's revolutionary films. These two commentators, mimicking TV newcasters, dissect images of what Godard sees as the infiltration of Western imperialism and socialist "revisionism" into a Communist country: billboards advertising American companies; American-style rock n' roll music blaring on the soundtrack, cutting in and out unpredictably; the presence of Hertz and Avis renting Czech-made cars at the airports, thereby appropriating for profit the labor of the proletariat; the dominance of Hollywood-style exploitation pictures and spectacles at local movie theaters. Godard, at the height of his doctrinaire embrace of Maoism, finds evidence of socialist failure everywhere, and the resulting film is by turns savagely funny, utterly blinkered (the continued exultation of Maoist China as the ideal to aspire to is absurd and embarrassing), and intermittently boring.

In other words, it's a typical example of Godard in his "lost" years, after declaring the end of cinema in Week-End and proceeding to rebuild from scratch the artform he'd once loved and had come to distrust. At the root of his distrust was a suspicion of the too-easy consonances between sounds and images, and much of his work with the Dziga Vertov Group constituted a self-questioning attempt to create new relationships between sounds and images. He often didn't succeed, and he knew it: towards the end of this film, Vladimir lambastes Rosa because, he says, she hasn't created new conjunctions of sounds and images, she's merely resorted to the language of posters and slogans, and in the process has taken a step back instead of forward. These kinds of disclaimers are peppered throughout the DVG films, signaling Godard's awareness of the limitations of his current modes of expression. That's part of the point: when Godard declared the end of cinema, he meant the end of commercial cinema, and the films he made subsequently in the late 60s and early 70s were self-conscious "blackboard" films in which the director, while delivering dogmatic ideas well-suited to sloganeering and polemics, was simultaneously querying the very foundations of cinema, the union of sound and image, trying (and usually, and admittedly, failing) to advance beyond mere slogans into the truly revolutionary cinema he envisioned.

If Pravda, like the other DVG films, falls well short of that goal, it's still a fascinating failure. The voiceover ironically calls attention, again and again, to the disjunctions between words and images — in other words, between theory and reality. This is a central theoretical construct, the idea that the image is reality, the documentation of something actually happening, while the sound is something else: on the one hand, the revisionist cover-up that uses words to disguise the reality, and on the other hand the ideal, the theory that has not yet been put into practice. Thus, the disjunction between sounds and images, between words and the reality they ostensibly describe. This is the reverse of the dynamic at work in British Sounds, in which images were presumed to lie while words and sounds provided the revolutionary truth. Godard hasn't exactly regained his faith in images, but Pravda already displays a more complex and dialectical understanding of the relationships of sounds and images to the truth. Thus, the voiceover says, "that's a picture of a girl in a bikini," but the image is missing, replaced by a black screen: the image had been sold, the narration corrects itself, to the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, and thus could not be shown. The voiceover says, "those are wire fences that the government puts around everything which is the private property of the people." The image shows a playground, fenced in, looking grim and forbidding, and the irony in the description — intimidating fences to demarcate land that supposedly belongs to everyone — emphasizes the discontinuity between words (the people are supposed to be "free") and images (the government continues to control and channel the people's activities from above).


This concept introduces one of the film's most effective sections, as the voiceover, posing as objective reportage, is actually engaging with the subject of ownership, the issue at the root of the debate between capitalism and socialism. Godard shows an image of a wheat field, while Vladimir says, "that doesn't belong to anyone, it's collectivized wheat." In another image, the film makes a distinction between a fruit tree that's genuinely placed by the side of the road and one that's separated from the road by a fence. The image of the tree, sitting just outside the fence's barrier, right by the side of the road and thus accessible and free to anyone, makes the point that the space between freedom and constriction is incredibly small. Through these clever juxtapositions of images and words, Godard is probing the thorny question of who owns what in capitalist versus socialist societies. The deadpan quasi-journalistic presentation adds a note of irony to these sequences: this is a tree, this is wheat, this is a "nationalized food store," and yet all of these things are more complicated in their status than they appear.

That's the essence of Godard's approach to the Dziga Vertov Group films. Pravda frequently gets bogged down in its polemics and contradictions, but one of those contradictions is that even when Godard is being didactic and extremely politicized, he's also grappling with his own assumptions and with the methods of representation he's chosen. That's what makes these films so interesting, despite the theoretical knots that Godard ties himself into over the course of each one. For all the seemingly humorless didacticism of Godard the polemicist, there's still a strain of bitter, ironic humor in this film's wordy narration, and also a lingering appreciation for beauty, as in the image of a solitary bright red flower, alternately blooming brilliantly or trampled in a mud puddle, a classically beautiful symbol for socialism's bold promises and its often disappointing betrayals. Godard is lamenting the need for tanks to "watch over" the peasants, and mocking the kind of men, brainwashed by Western advertising, who "would rather wash their cars than fuck their wives" on the weekends. This film, from Godard's transitional "blackboard" period, is hampered by all the flaws that are common to his DVG works — the ideological blinders, the inexplicable affection for Mao — but it's still a fascinating film that even pushes beyond its polemics in some unexpected ways.

Wind From the East

Wind From the East is a product of Jean-Luc Godard's involvement, during the late 60s and early 70s, with a collective filmmaking experiment known as the Dziga Vertov Group. The film is, typically of the films he made during this period, about ideas and simultaneously about how best to express those ideas through the medium of film. The film deals with the situation of a strike and, during its first half, methodically analyzes the different components of the strike: the workers, the radical students who encourage the strike while not quite being able to communicate in the same terms as the workers, the union delegates and other middlemen who preach moderation and compromise, the employers who demand the immediate resumption of work, the police state that suppresses the strike on behalf of capitalism.

All of these forces are allowed a voice on the film's dense, verbose soundtrack: a collage of voices constantly talking, expressing different points of view on the strike and on anti-capitalism in general. Some voices, in sympathy with socialist ideas, advocate for small measures, for small steps and incremental advances, while other voices, representing the bourgeois and the capitalist classes, say that things are already good enough, or getting better, that the strike is accomplishing nothing, that it should end already. Both of these views are contrasted against the voice of the agitator, the radical, the militant, who denounces both those who say that the work is already done and those who say that the work should proceed more slowly. Godard doesn't speak himself, but it is obvious that this last voice is representative of his own.

The film's soundtrack essentially tells its story, subverting the conventional narrative expectations of the cinema. Its images, related only tangentially to this tale of strike and conflict, instead depict a pastoral rural setting through which various characters wander, dressed up to symbolically embody the various voices of the soundtrack. There is a bourgeois woman in a frilly dress, carrying an umbrella to shield herself from the bright sun. There is a union representative, a compromiser, dressed in a bold suit that makes him look like a reject from the Sgt. Pepper's photo shoot. There is a policeman or army officer, dressed like an American cavalryman in a John Ford Western, with his musket and his saber and his horse, a real Hollywood icon of law and order. And there are the young radicals, the students and workers in their shabby clothes and long hair, opposing these forces of suppression and status quo. The whole thing has an aura of playfulness that belies the dead-serious ideas being expressed in the film. When the militants fight with the cavalryman, it's staged as a play cowboys-and-Indians battle, like kids waging pretend war, the bullets never hitting anyone, the sword never slicing anyone up. When someone does bleed, it's the bright red paint that Godard favored — along with an equally bold blue — in title cards and mise en scène alike in many of his films from the second half of the 60s on.


Godard's playful references to the Western are made most explicit during a segment in which he declaims and analyzes the filmmaking theory behind his radical films of the late 60s and early 70s, opposing this filmmaking practice to Hollywood's "realism." In contrast to radical filmmaking, the voiceover declares, Hollywood works on the assumption that an image of a horse is not only the same thing as the horse, but is in fact better. Godard, drawing on Magritte's infamous painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe, says the opposite: this is not a horse, this is not reality, this is not a real Union soldier, this is not an Indian. His joking deconstructions of Hollywood plots and characters in earlier films had already hinted at this point, and here, by toying with genre and narrative in only the roughest and most casual of ways, he is definitively rejecting the idea that what we see on a cinema screen should be taken at face value.

In another scene, Godard parodies the conventional understanding of cinema as a source of spectacle and entertainment. A man breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the camera in Italian, his words translated into French by the female narrator, describing the dark space of the theater and the people in it. The man ends his monologue by coming on to a pretty girl in the back of the theater, asking her to join him in his splendid rural surroundings. This is, as Godard sees it, the essential nature of the cinema, an act of seduction, asking audiences to believe in the space of the screen so completely that they wish to enter it.


Godard is suspicious of this cinema of seduction, but in some ways he can't help recreate it as well. His images are at times calculated to produce boredom, to focus attention on the words pouring by on the soundtrack: static images of youths lying in the grass, their faces obscured by protruding shubbery, or endless takes of people trudging slowly through open fields. Godard is critiquing the pictorial sensibility, the presentation of images as beautiful, but his own images are often beautiful as well — one suspects that Godard's aesthetic sensibilities frequently sabotage his theoretical embrace of ugly or functional images. At times he deviates from his subjects to film the leaves on trees nearby, a move dating back to 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he wondered aloud why it was necessary to photograph a woman if the tree swaying in the breeze behind her was equally interesting.

Later, he stages a scene in a field of pink flowers that might have come from a Monet painting: a bourgeois woman sitting with umbrella over her head, chatting amiably with a man standing nearby. The two figures, particularly the woman, are obscured by long green stalks topped with pale pink buds, the kind of pointillist field of flowers beloved by Monet. On the soundtrack, the female narrator applies various historical and fictionalized names to the two figures, positioning them as representatives of bourgeois oppression: a white woman who falsely accuses a black man of rape and gets him lynched; a scientist who develops napalm to destroy Third World lands and people; a German Communist who urges moderation in responding to the encroaching Nazi threat before the Second World War. One of the names given to the woman in the image is the wife of Monet (although with the wrong name), along with a (presumably fabricated) description of her opposition to worker activism. Coupled with the pastoral beauty of this very Monet-like image, the message is obvious: beauty is to be distrusted, and the bourgeois people framed within such lovely images are often actors in racist violence, in fascism, in the suppression of the working class.


Interestingly, though the film is all about getting beyond the abstract and the theoretical into practical action, Godard really only runs into trouble when he tries to advocate for specific action, which for him at this point means revolutionary violence. Gone are the back-and-forth debates over violence that marked his La Chinoise, from a few years earlier. The advocacy of violence here is direct and troubling, complete with practical advice for militants — avoid leaving fingerprints — and images of homemade explosive devices constructed from various consumer goods. Godard does nod to Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers — which earlier in the film he'd criticized as an unforgivably Western take on Third World struggle — in his direct images of bourgeois businesspeople and children shopping or traveling, but the disconcerting advocacy of random violence is never resolved by counterarguments as it often was in Godard's other films. Allowed to stand alone as it here, it's the clearest example of Godard's theoretical ideas existing in a vacuum where priorities and relativities are obviously skewed.

Elsewhere, though, the film is simply fascinating and complex, deeply engaged in dealing with the question of how to represent class struggle, how to deal with questions that aren't fully resolved even for the people taking part in the struggle themselves. As with most of the Dziga Vertov Group films, Wind From the East is in part about its own process of production. At one point, in a convoluted meta maneuver that's hilarious in its boldness, the narrator talks about how the next scene is a document of a conference that was called for the purposes of deciding how to film the next scene, with the subject being how to film an assembly of socialists and the ideas they present. Then the scene plays out exactly as described, with overlapping voices only occasionally resolving into an identifiable phrase, in French or Italian, while the camera spins around, revealing the sound crew, filming the trees, showing images of Stalin and Mao, panning among the students sprawled out in the grass at the gathering. The scene consists of filming the discussion that is intended to decide how to film the scene, a kind of filmmaking paradox that Godard obviously finds delightful, and invites us to find delightful as well. As the narrator says, the voices are confused and the ideas are not necessarily fully developed, but they're trying to move forward, trying to express complicated ideas and incite change.


That describes the films of the Dziga Vertov Group in general. Although in practice the "group" generally consisted of Godard and his collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin, the theory of the DVG was intended to create a whole new practice and ideology of making films. Wind From the East is thus constantly calling into question the methods of Godard and Gorin as well as the methods of Hollywood cinema. The narrator often speaks in the second person, as though talking about the filmmakers: always "you," encompassing everyone in the failures and limitations of the film. When the narrator describes images of apartment blocks and suffering working class people as enforcing the bourgeois order, she might be describing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with all its similar images of towering urban buildings representing the alienation of its characters. Godard, who broke from his own past and his own oeuvre after 1968, is consistently looking forward in films like this, trying to start over from scratch. If he doesn't always succeed, as the film itself frequently and explicitly acknowledges, the results are rarely less than fascinating anyway. Wind From the East is a rich, complex work, a work of bold ideas and slapdash, often goofy aesthetics, approaching the cinema not with a reverent aesthetic sensibility, but with an anything-goes mentality that promotes experimentation and risk-taking on every level.

Film Socialisme (take 2)

Take 2, because take 1 was not enough. Because this latest film of Jean-Luc Godard defies interpretation at every step. Because Godard released Film Socialism with "Navajo English" subtitles in the English-speaking world, defying Americans to glean some meaning from the minimal, fragmented translations that reduce this film's at times complex texts to disconnected strings of verbs and nouns, at times run together into compound words. Not that seeing the film with more complete translations in the subtitles completes the picture: there are still gaps, still confusions, still whole sections where that signature Godard logic is fully comprehensible perhaps only to the filmmaker himself. The film, grandiosely titled as the document of (or monument to) an entire political philosophy, is a summation of Godard's relationship to commerce, quotation, politics and nationalism. As such, it can only be as gnomic and digressive as Godard's whole career has been. The document of a journey now lasting over 50 years, the journey of a filmmaker who's always been interested in questions of art, commerce, political action and inaction, history with its repetitions and echoes, and of course his own role as an artist in dealing with these subjects, and our role as the audience in watching him deal with them, trying to follow him. That's what the film is, a game of "follow me," with the implied dare being "if you can."

This intellectual gamesmanship is bracing and enthralling, even when the film remains baffling and unapproachable despite multiple viewings and multiple attempts to get closer to it. At one point, one of the characters, a young woman trying to trace the various losses of socialism like a detective of history, suggests that not everything is comparable (and thus comprehensible?), that sometimes "the incomparable can only be compared to the incomparable," a paradox that Godard applies to the machinations of history, the march from Hitler and Stalin to the current global capitalist status quo, where such flashy dictators have been replaced by the dominance of gold and money. That's why, perhaps, this woman is trying to discover the truth behind the various robberies that define the past: money stolen from Spain, from Palestine, by the West and by the supposed representatives of Communism alike. The gold funneled out of national banks by businessmen and capitalists: this, it is implied, is the foundation for the modern order, for the opulence of the cruise ship and the culture that revels in such luxuries.


Photographs are important in this film, as Godard examines the relationship between reality and the document of reality. A discourse about the imperialist history of the West's involvement in Palestine ends on the revelation of "the first photo of the Bay of Haifa," which segues into an image of the cruise ship photographer snapping pictures of partying tourists, then an image of an Arab woman looking at a photo, presumably the already mentioned imperialists' document of the West's arrival in the Middle East. The implication is that a photo is not just a document, not just a representation of what is seen. There is a story behind each photo. Just as a photo of a cruise ship passenger tells a story about luxury and privilege, a photo of a Middle Eastern location, from the vantage point of arriving imperialists, tells a story about a history of conquest and exploitation. That's why so many shots in this film show people using cameras, taking photos, documenting their surroundings and documenting, in the process and perhaps unconsciously, their relationship to those surroundings. The importance of the camera is asserted again in the film's second half with the presence of the TV journalists, whose cameras are never present during the intimate, private interior moments where the family discusses their ideas and their emotions. The TV cameras are only present outside the house, and mostly glimpse people rushing back and forth, trying to avoid the camera's gaze. Only Godard's camera, which exists outside the diegesis, can capture the more private moments that really count.

The second segment is Godard's return to the territory of his 1975 film Numéro deux, an examination of the political foundations of the family, dealing with the question of how ideas are passed from one generation to the next. The parents try to make a connection, to forge a mutual understanding, but they frequently falter, struggling to pass on their understanding of a world they don't really understand themselves. This is a near-constant undercurrent in Film Socialisme, this struggle to make sense of history and the present, which is the current endpoint of history, the situation that everything before had led towards and created. Politics and family life interweave, as the outside world unavoidably intrudes upon the domestic status quo, influencing the relationships that form between parents and their children, influencing business and daily life alike.


In the first scenes of this segment, first the family's father and then the mother are questioned from offscreen by their children, an interview technique that references Godard's frequent use of such dialogues dating back to Masculin féminin. In these unbalanced conversations, the children want to understand, while the parents just want to be loved and appreciated. Godard spaces out these dialogues amidst the quiet stasis of daily living. The pacing of these pastoral scenes of home life is exquisitely slow and meditative. Godard holds shots for a long time, watching as these people brush their teeth, or as the daughter rests her head on her father's shoulder in the dark, or the mother washes the dishes. There's a casual domesticity to such moments, and Godard purposefully infuses political dialogue and considerations of history and the image into this context. He's suggesting that such concerns are not — or should not be — separate from daily life or daily concerns. There is no disconnect between the home life and the political life, as the journalists hang around the family's home trying to create a political documentary, filming these domestic moments while shouting out questions that never get answered.


The film is, like many of Godard's films, about culture, though not in the obvious way of Passion, where he posed his characters like figures from classic paintings, nor of King Lear, where the search for Shakespeare provided the foundation for all manner of ruminations on culture and art and meaning. The young blonde son of the film's second segment is an avatar of culture, recreating the paintings of Renoir, moving with the rhythms of classical music and dreaming jazz. Godard's relationship to art has always been complex; he both loves beauty and is suspicious of it. He seems to be suggesting that art, rather than providing a commentary on reality and a way of expressing ideas about the world, has become an escape, a refuge from reality. A voiceover says, "We have only books to put into books. But what if we have to put reality into books?" Art feeds into art, creating a cultural conversation that is abstracted from the real world, from the experience of life as it is lived. That is why Godard subtly shifts the emphasis onto domestic routine, onto the peripheral tasks of the cruise ship's maids and waitresses as they do their work, onto brief scenes of Arab women talking and doing daily work.

In the final section of the film, culture becomes both a document and a warning, as Godard tries to develop an alternate understanding of art as essential, as intimately connected to life as it is lived. As Godard visits several European and Middle Eastern locales in turn, he finds the lessons of history in culture, and particularly the cycle of war and violence that has defined both world history and the depictions of it in art. The constant warring of Greek mythology and Greek tragedy, the emphasis on mortality in Egyptian art, the endurance of the Odessa Steps as a site of dramatized bloodshed: all of these markers are for Godard signs of the continuity between current situations and the grand tragedies of the past.

Film Socialisme (take 1)

Take 1, because Film Socialisme is not a film that offers up its ideas easily, because Jean-Luc Godard, in his latest film and first feature since 2004's Notre musique, is typically opaque and elusive. Take 1, also, because Godard, trickster that he is, released this latest opus to the English-speaking world in a way deliberately designed to make it even more difficult for those who don't speak the film's many languages. The film's dialogue and monologues are in French, Russian, German, Arabic, and other languages, but only an occasional isolated phrase of English. And Godard's chosen subtitles are in what the director has playfully dubbed "Navajo English," minimalist strings of disconnected words, not so much translating the dialogue as providing snippets of meaning, hints at the full meaning of what's being said. The subtitles are less translations than messages to the audience, enigmatic epitaphs that translate not speech but the deeper subtexts of Godard's cinema. The subtitles are a kind of passive-aggressive joke on American audiences, because America and its influence is the film's subtext — for the most part, Godard avoids explicitly mentioning America so assiduously that it becomes the unspoken ghost within the film, the driving force for everything that happens, the hidden target of so many of the film's satirical jabs.

And what is this but a satire? A satire of America, of capitalism, and also of the whole idea of cinematic storytelling. The film is divided into three segments. The first is set on a cruise ship, visiting various locales that have resonance to Godard — Barcelona, Naples, Odessa, Hellas ("Hell As," and also hélas, as in "alas," as in Godard's Hélas pour moi), Egypt, Palestine ("Access Denied," the onscreen text simply reads at this last port of call) — and never venturing beyond the superficial surfaces of anything. The images are glossy and pristine, bright and beautiful, parodies of cinematic splendor that are both jaw-droppingly sublime and yet somehow empty, suggesting how little beauty counts for amidst all this silly opulence. The film is obsessed with gold, with money. The cruise passengers play slots, their mechanically pumping arms highlighted against a gorgeous seascape. A Christian mass is held in a dining room with a bar nearby and a crystal ball rotating overhead, projecting fragmented mirror images of the ceremony. Snatches of conversation, partially translated or not, are concerned with business deals, with history (Hitler, Stalin, Communism, wars civil or otherwise), with seeming plots and spy maneuvers.

This baffling, elliptical verbal chatter is juxtaposed against the images of the cruise ship's conspicuous consumption: dance clubs where the music is distorted into a noisy clamor, passengers watching workout videos and cinematic images of Arabs interchangeably, people lounging around, eating, staring out at the sea. What better place than a cruise ship for Godard to document the victory of capitalism and the death of socialism: it is a place where capitalism's virtue is assumed, where every image, every setting demonstrates the capitalist's ascendancy. To the extent that there are distinguishable characters in this section of the film, they are symbols and metaphors rather than actual individuals. So Godard pays special attention to the glowing glamor of this setting, but does so in ways that call attention to power relations and the subtexts of the capitalist system as it's incarnated here. One shot from early in the film shows a couple of passengers posing for a photo on a typically glitzy staircase, surrounded by bright lights. But the image is out-of-focus; only the photographer in the foreground, presumably a cruise ship employee, is in focus, while the rest of the image is deliberately blurred and indistinct, an abstract image of privilege and success rather than a concrete portrait of two particular people. The composition calls attention to the worker taking the picture rather than the photo's ostensible subjects.


The film's second section shifts to a rural setting and focuses more concretely on a single family. The fragmentary pacing and flashy aesthetics of the cruise ship segment give way to a slower, more patient pace and an emphasis on domesticity and routine. This family, the Martins, owns a gas station and is apparently involved in an important election. They are dogged by a pair of journalists with a movie camera, who hover around the gas station accosting anyone who walks by, trying to get interviews and images. The fragmentary dialogue of the film's first part is replaced by lengthier dialogues, which makes the incomplete "Navajo" translation more of an issue: during the cruise ship passage, the Navajo subtitles mirrored the jumpy editing and the collaging of hi-definition digital images with grainy video footage. Here, the subtitles really do feel like out-of-context fragments ripped out of a larger whole, and it becomes even more apparent that Godard intends for language-deficient Americans to understand only incompletely, to be denied the full meaning of the dialogues.

But this confrontational pose is balanced by moments of humor and playfulness, particularly in the form of the Martins' young blonde son, a sprite who incarnates Godard's still-youthful sense of humor. This boy, dressed in a red CCCP shirt decorated with the Soviet hammer and sickle, conducts the classical music of the soundtrack, wildly swinging a lead pipe through the air in response to the music. Later, in his sleep, the movements of his mouth and the twitch of his fingers respond to — or perhaps produce — the plucking bass of a jazz tune. This boy chases off the TV reporters with his pipe, swinging it like a sword, playing pirate. He feigns blindness and runs his hands along his mother's body, creating an image of her in his mind with his fingers. He paints a Renoir masterpiece, and Godard's camera looks over his shoulder, distorting the image with digital color manipulation, as the boy looks at the young black camerawoman in her bikini top but paints a Renoir scene of pastoral beauty. The manipulated, blown-out colors make the whole image look like a painting, artificial and distancing.


Godard seems to be suggesting that art distorts, art lies, art dodges reality: the disconnect between what the boy is looking at and what he's painting suggests that the art of the past, like Renoir's landscapes, is a way of avoiding engagement with the present, with what's directly in front of us. What we need is an art of the present, an art that engages with reality as it really is. Earlier, on the cruise ship, one of the wealthy passengers wound through a gallery crowded with paintings, all of them for sale, all of them representing a classical style from the past, and images from the past. The glorification of the past, the obsession with masterpieces and masters, is interwoven with commerce, with the value of art in terms of money. Godard's more interested in the present, in images that are aware of history but point towards people and things that are happening now. Thus the second section, with its emphasis on the slow rhythms of daily life — brushing one's teeth, reading a book, children playing, halting conversations between members of the family — locates Godard's ideas within the context of the family, the context of prosaic reality rather than the stylized confines of art.

In the film's final section, Godard adopts an essayistic style to return to the locales of the cruise ship's journey: Egypt, Palestine, Hellas, Naples, Barcelona. For the cruise ship, these were simply destinations, brief stopovers, their rich histories obscured by the tourist's gloss. Godard returns to them here by pulling images from newsreels and films, images of art and photographs of history mashed up alongside cinematic excerpts. He's examining the disjunctions between past and present, nowhere so obviously as when he cuts between the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein and the modern-day Odessa Steps, a tourist attraction where groups of schoolchildren gather on the steps that were once the site of both a real massacre and its cinematic representation. It's during this section, especially, that Godard's insistence on denying meaning and translation render any understanding of the film conditional and ephemeral.


But, one suspects, that is the nature of the film in general, even for those rare individuals who "understand" all its many languages perfectly, who don't require any translation. Film Socialisme is dense and challenging, beautiful and provocative, allusive and elusive, bursting with so many ideas and suggestions that it defies the possibility of the kind of complete reading that one generally expects from a movie. In its very structure, the film is making a statement, more even than any Godard film before it, that the idea of complete understanding is an absurd joke.

Take 2, of perhaps many more, follows here. Understanding will come, if at all, much later.

Image Gallery: Five Sensual Shots

Joel Bocko over at The Dancing Image has tagged me for a fun new meme: a themed image gallery assembled from cinematic screen captures. The idea originated with Stephen of Checking On My Sausages, who a while back put out a call for single images displaying the glory of cinema.

This small gallery is my response, assembled rather loosely around the theme of sensuality and sexuality: images that entice, provoke, and suggest. The images are very different in their context and their content, suggesting the sheer variety with which the cinema has approached this most human of subjects. An image from Godard comes from a scene in which the French master, always fascinated by the eternal battle between man and woman, satirically mocks the fetishization and commercialization of sexuality, a theme he'd explore even more savagely in his 1980 Sauve qui peut (la vie). It is a theme that of course also resonates with Buñuel, who approaches it in an entirely different way while explicitly framing such sexual excesses in response to clerical puritanism, as an audience of priests observe, with horror, a sadomasochistic encounter. Claire Denis and Maurice Pialat, meanwhile, are concerned with the violent aspects of sex, the former delving into bloody horror as sex becomes synonymous with death, the latter dealing with the psychological wounds lovers inflict on one another. (Which doesn't stop Pialat from pausing for a delightful, charming moment of sexual joy.) Finally, Apitchapong Weerasethakul captures a moment of casual intimacy amidst a low-key argument.

It should be noted, too, that I didn't intend for this to be the theme. I simply grabbed five films I like off my shelves, more or less at random, and discovered that the commonality between them was these kinds of images.

The films, in order, with links to my full reviews where applicable, are:

Police (Maurice Pialat)
The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis)
Syndromes and a Century (Apitchapong Weerasethakul)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Jean-Luc Godard)

I'm supposed to tag people for this, but I'd rather just leave it open. If you're reading this, go ahead and make your own image gallery. Just make sure to link back to Joel and Stephen's original posts.

William Lubtchansky, 1937-2010

The great cinematographer William Lubtchansky has passed away at the age of 72. He has had a long and fertile career working with Godard, Rivette, Straub/Huillet, Garrel, Varda, Otar Iosseliani, and countless others. In particular, Lubtchansky worked on multiple films for Godard and Rivette, including some of the former's most radical, adventurous work. Lubtchansky was the cinematographer for many of Godard's late 70s forays into video, and for the elegant 1990 masterpiece Nouvelle vague. He collaborated with Rivette over the course of several decades, shooting many of the great director's most enduring works, including almost all the films Rivette has made in recent years.

Below is a small tribute to some of the images left behind by this remarkable cinematographer, all from his work with Godard and Rivette, the two directors most closely associated (in my mind, anyway) with this genius behind the camera. Admire, especially, the muted but somehow eerily beautiful quality of light in these images, which are never flashy or glossy but always striking in more subtle ways.

Numéro deux (Godard, 1975)

Duelle (Rivette, 1976)

Noroît (Rivette, 1976)

Ici et ailleurs (Godard, 1976)

Comment ça va? (Godard, 1978)

Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Godard, 1980)

Le Pont du Nord (Rivette, 1981)

Merry-Go-Round (Rivette, 1981)

Love on the Ground (Rivette, 1984)

Nouvelle vague (Godard, 1990)

La belle noiseuse (Rivette, 1991)

Joan the Maid I: The Battles (Rivette, 1994)

Secret défense (Rivette, 1998)

The History of Marie and Julien (Rivette, 2003)

Don't Touch the Axe (Rivette, 2007)

King Lear

To be or not to be? No. No thing. Nothing. That is not the question. The question is: to see or to hear? To show or to tell? Reality or image? Sound or silence? Or both? For Jean-Luc Godard, if Hamlet is the theater, King Lear is the cinema, so he abandons that "to be or not to be" stuff and focuses instead on the story of an old man and his daughter. The old man is sound, hearing. Lear, ear. The daughter is the image, what is seen. The father insists on words: he has specific things he wants to hear. But the daughter will say only "nothing." She can give, will give, only herself, her presence, her body: image, reality, but not sound. Leave it to Godard to find in this old play the elements of the cinema, to reconstitute the story of King Lear and Cordelia as the eternal conflict between sound and image, those interlocked but opposing forces that have tangled and wrestled their way through Godard's entire oeuvre, from the 60s onward.

Godard's version of Lear is a dense and allusive (not to say elusive) reworking of Shakespeare's play — a patchwork assembly reflected in the struggles of the historical researcher William Shaksper Junior the Fifth (theater director Peter Sellars) to reconstitute the lost works of his famous ancestor after a nuclear disaster destroys all of the world's culture. Godard, obsessed as always with resetting things to zero, imagines a post-apocalyptic world in which people and places are pretty much the same but culture and art have vanished. It's up to intrepid researchers like Shaksper — and Godard's own alter-ego Professor Pluggy — to set things right, to rediscover the combinations of elements by which stories can be told. Professor Pluggy might be an absurd concoction — a cinematic prophet with hair made of audio-visual cables, a cigar perpetually in his mouth, and a mumbled, slurred diction that makes him sound like he's narrating the film while eating breakfast — but he's the one who introduces Shakespeare's descendant to the idea of the image. It's Pluggy who allows the recreation of King Lear to progress beyond the stage of the word, beyond just writing.

Indeed, Godard's distrust of the written word is apparent from the opening section, his savage mockery of Norman Mailer, who wrote the original script for this film, re-envisioning Lear as a gangster picture, with Mailer to play Don Learo and his real daughter Kate to play Cordelia. Godard sarcastically calls Mailer "the Great Writer" and, while he replays the several repetitive takes the writer actually completed before storming off the film, Godard/Pluggy's voiceover deconstructs Mailer's contribution and the writer's failure to engage with the cinematic process, continuing to think in terms of words even after filming begins. But of course Godard saves his best takedown of Mailer for his sendoff, saying that the Great Writer leaves by airplane, Mailer and Kate flying first class, Kate's boyfriend flying economy.

With Mailer and his daughter gone, Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald play Lear and Cordelia for the remainder of the film, which amounts to film actors replacing people who were basically playing themselves: image replacing reality. This is one of the film's dominant themes, the interactions between the various layers and elements that go into creating a work of art. In one scene, Shaksper finds the wanderer Edgar (Leos Carax) in the woods, while his voiceover says that he finds Edgar and his girlfriend Virginia, but that the girl isn't there. And indeed, she isn't; only Edgar is onscreen, and Virginia (Julie Delpy) won't appear until later. This scene seems to be a throwaway, one of the many humorous non sequiturs scattered throughout the film, but it's also tied in with Godard's interest in dealing with words and images as opposing forces. The image shows, unequivocally, Shaksper meeting Edgar, but the voiceover suggests something stranger, something surreal and impossible to visualize: Shaksper meeting Edgar and a girl who isn't there. It's a simple scene, a joke even, but it's also a rumination on the differences between images and words. Words can lie, can be abstract or complex or have ambiguous meanings, but an image tells the truth, an image represents a thing in a straightforward way. Which is still not quite the same as documentary reality, as Godard proves by running the film backwards at one point, creating a strikingly beautiful image of a hand carefully placing petals back onto a stripped-bare flower.

This is one of Godard's many films in which he attempts to reconfigure the cinema from a razed ground zero. To that end, banks of video monitors toy with images, reminders of Godard's late 70s experiment Numéro deux, already over a decade old by the time he made his Lear. The soundtrack is even more unstable, constantly being disrupted, looped, turned back on itself: the sound slows down into a distorted warble, or breaks down, becomes repetitive. It frequently sounds as though a tape is being treated so badly that it's tearing apart, being warped and crinkled. The manipulations of sound are extreme. Indeed, everything is extreme here, from the bizarre cast — Woody Allen even makes a cameo at the end as an editor who stitches film together with a needle and thread — to the fragmentary quotations of the Shakespeare play to the near-slapstick gags scattered throughout the film. This masterful but underseen film is Godard's dense, typically playful attempt to break cinema down into its constituent elements, to treat this hybrid medium like a warring family, and to attempt to reconcile father and daughter, fiction and reality, image and sound.

Anticipation

[This review of a largely unknown and unavailable Jean-Luc Godard short is presented here as a plea that The Criterion Collection should include this film as an extra on one of their forthcoming Godard DVDs. It would be a very timely and appropriate inclusion for any of the Godard films that Criterion currently plans to release. If you're interested in seeing this film, write to them and tell them about it.]

Anticipation was Jean-Luc Godard's contribution to the multi-director anthology film The Oldest Profession, a collection of shorts on the theme of prostitution, with contributions by Claude Autant-Lara, Philippe de Broca and other minor French filmmakers of the time. Needless to say, Godard's segment stands out. He filmed his contribution in late 1966, not long after finishing 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, with which it shares some commonalities in theme and style. But the film Anticipation resembles more than anything else is Alphaville, Godard's futuristic take on a society that has forgotten about love. In this short, the space traveler John Demetrius (Jacques Charrier) takes a break from his interstellar journey on Earth, where the solicitous planetary government — a Soviet-American alliance, confirming that this is the distant future — provides prostitutes for all travelers who request them.

The film thus opens with a wry sequence in which Demetrius sits in an airport lounge thumbing through a catalogue of pornographic pictures, in order to choose his companion for the night. Across from him sits a young female traveler, looking through a catalogue of her own for a male prostitute. The two travelers keep casting sly sidelong glances at one another, as though appraising the other in relation to the images in the magazine. It's a sharp commentary on the increasing distance between people in a culture dominated by images, in which actual flesh-and-blood human relationships are forced to compete with glossy simulacra and media fantasies. This becomes even more apparent in the rest of the film, in which Demetrius interacts with a pair of prostitutes, neither of whom can quite satisfy him. The first girl (Marilù Tolo) is pliant and willing, stripping for him in a businesslike way and preparing for bed. But he discovers that she is unable, or unwilling, to talk, to murmur even a word to him, instead lying there inert, another incarnation of the robotic women from Alphaville.

Enter Anna Karina, Godard's ex-wife in her last role with the director (even though the feature Made in USA is usually given that credit, evidence of how sadly forgotten this great short is). Here she's playing the prostitute Natasha, who's provided to Demetrius after his complaints about the first girl. Unlike her predecessor, Natasha can talk, but it soon emerges, to Demetrius' consternation, that that's all she's able to do. It seems that the division of labor has been applied to prostitutes, who are now super-specialized so that some of them are skilled in the physical acts of love, and some of them are skilled in expressing love verbally. No one in this futuristic society brings the two acts together as a unified whole, since love itself has been thoroughly suppressed, presumably along with the other emotions. This is a witty premise, and Godard builds a very flippant conceptual sci-fi piece around it. One of the best moments is the bizarre and hilarious sequence in which Natasha and Demetrius spray one another's mouths with water from an aerosol can, a fetishized sexual display in a culture where such mechanized rituals based around consumer products provide the only possible connections between people.


In fact, the alienation of people from each other is the film's key theme, as is the increasing compartmentalization of lives: love and sex are separated, conversation and meaning amputated from one another. Natasha speaks, but she does not mean what she says. Without deeper feelings behind them, her words are empty signifiers, suggesting a love that simply isn't there. For Godard, about to plunge at the end of the 60s into an in-depth consideration of semiotics and language in films like Le gai savoir and his work with the Dziga Vertov Group, this is a hint of things to come, the fascination with the relationships between language and meaning, between gestures and ideas.

It was also meant to be a glorious formal experiment, although Godard's intentions have often not been preserved in presentations of this film. The original American release version was a dubbed and censored travesty coated with an orange filter, while the only current way of seeing the film (sourced from an unsubtitled Japanese DVD) provides an uncensored and unaltered monochrome print that nevertheless does not preserve the radical formal interventions that Godard intended. The film as he originally conceived it was to have been printed with an alternating set of colored filters layered over the image, much as he had used during the infamous Brigitte Bardot nude scene that opened Contempt (this would certainly explain the female narrator who periodically intones colors as though signaling a filter change). Furthermore, Godard apparently planned to manipulate the images so that the characters would often appear as blurred, indistinct shapes, further accentuating the alienation and disconnections of the narrative.

Even in the monochrome version of the film, Godard's formal interest in this material is preserved in the final moments, in which Natasha and Demetrius tentatively rediscover the lost art of the kiss, which is both communication and lovemaking and thus sidesteps Natasha's limitations against performing physical acts of love. It's a wonderful conceit, on a par with the rediscovery of the words "I love you" as the key to Alphaville's finale. Godard sees hope and possibility in communication and genuine interpersonal connections, and he celebrates this connection by briefly strobing to full-color shots of the couple kissing and then a closeup of Karina smiling shyly at the camera as the film ends. On the soundtrack, the tranquil, robotic female narrator finally loses her cool, desperately repeating, "negative! negative!" In one of Godard's chilliest works, this kiss is another profound romantic gesture, maybe his last until rediscovering sensuality in the 80s: love conquers totalitarian control, and a kiss proves a more powerful form of communication than any government propaganda.