If I am remembering clearly — and my head is filled with so many densely layered words and images, it is hard to unpack them — the first image in Film Socialism, the new movie by Jean-Luc Godard, is of two red-headed parrots, side by side on a tree limb. The parrots are among a handful of animals that appear in the movie, which had its press premiere on Monday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, including a pair of hilariously talkative cats (whose meows are, in turn, parroted by a young woman watching them on a laptop), as well as a llama and a donkey. Surrounding these animals is a menagerie of talking, quoting, babbling human beings, speaking in French, German, Russian, English and Arabic, among other tongues.
Wittily, perversely, contrastingly, the final words in the movie are “no comment,” which appear in large English letters like a declaration, bringing this 1 hour and 41 minutes of sights and sounds to an abrupt close. Godard, 79, was scheduled to appear at a press conference after the screening, but made good on these last words by not showing up. Though the rumor that he would be a no-show had circulated before the screening, several dozen journalists trooped to the press room to see if a representative might appear with an explanation. Nothing. Not even a note. No comment.
According to the French newspaper La Liberation, Godard sent a fax to the festival’s director, Thierry Fremaux, saying that “problems of the Greek type” (“des problemes de type grec,” perhaps referring to Greece’s financial crisis) had prevented him from attending and that he would go to his death for the festival, but not one step more: “Suite a des problemes de type grec, je ne pourrai etre votre oblige a Cannes. Avec le festival, j’irai jusqu’a la mort, mais je ne ferai pas un pas de plus. Amicalement. Jean-Luc Godard.”
Any new Godard movie is a noteworthy occasion, and this initial screening was packed with an audience primed for difficulties of some kind. On Friday, British newspaper The Independent reported that the movie’s English-language subtitles would be in what was characterized as “Navajo English,” to replicate the fractured words spoken by Hollywood-style American Indians in Westerns (and in the sitcom F Troop): “If a character is saying, ‘Give me your watch,’ the subtitle will read, ‘You, me, watch.’” In the 1950s, Godard worked in the Paris publicity office for 20th Century Fox and knows how to stir things up.
My thoughts on the movie — which looks as if it were shot in both low-grade video and high-definition digital — are tentative and, for now, brief. Structurally, it can be divided into three sections, the first set on Mediterranean cruise ship on which the mostly white passengers eat, mingle and gamble. Among the travelers are several men and women, as well as a teenage girl and younger boy, who speak to one another and themselves in largely untranslated languages. As promised, the English-language subtitles are sparse, with words sometimes joined together or widely spaced: “nocrimes noblood”; “German Jews black”; “impossible story”; “Kamikaze divine wind”; “right of return.” Every so often, Patti Smith appears, singing in a cabin and strolling on deck or below with an acoustic guitar.
The second section is set in and around a small gas station and adjoining house, where two women, a white journalist, perhaps, and a black camera operator, are lurking around the garage owners, a French family of four. (An exterior wall is emblazoned with the name J.J. Martin.) Here, the discussion turns to the liberte, egalite, fraternite, and with these ideals the French revolution is invoked.
The third section turns to different places: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hell As (more on that in a moment), Naples and Barcelona. “Hell As” refers to Hellas, the Greek word for Greece, but might also be a punning reference to the French word for alas — helas — and an earlier Godard film, Helas Pour Moi, which retells the myth of Amphitryon and Alcmene. Along the way, Jews, Hollywood and the Holocaust are referred to.
Obviously, it will take many more viewings of Film Socialism, an improvement in my French and many more fully translated subtitles before I can begin to get a tentative grasp on it. Such are the complicated pleasures of Godard’s work: However private, even hermetic, his film language can be, these are works that by virtue of that language’s density, as well as the films’ visual beauty and intellectual riddles, invite you in (or turn you off). I imagine it will be awhile before the movie travels to the US, but if you want to prepare, I suggest you look at an interview with Godard from Telerama.fr that includes this quotation from the movie: “Les Americains ont libere l’Europe en la rendant dependante,” which translates as “the Americans liberated Europe by making it dependent.”
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