Capsule Reviews: Macbeth (1971), The Book of Mary, They All Laughed

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)

Polanski's Macbeth, made in the wake of his wife and unborn child's brutal murder, manages to extrapolate its settings from the limits of the stage into something even more ascetic and and stripped-down. It takes place in hollow, filthy castles and frigid, craggy hills, and Polanski fills this howling void with blood. The director, grimly exorcising the demons of his own trauma, translates the violence of Shakespeare's drama in viciously straightforward terms. One of the first images is of a dead foe's shirt splotching with more and more blood as a soldier whacks his corpse with a flail, and the murder of Macduff's wife and son is so hellaciously rendered that no one could fail to see shades of Sharon Tate's death. Amending the source text only to make it, inexplicably, yet darker, Macbeth leaves one wondering why anyone would fight so savagely to rule such a realm. In a final stroke of nihilistic despair, Polanski frames the climax not as duel among nobles but little more than a street fight filled with cheap shots and the wild swings of insensible men, one driven mad by paranoia, the other by grief. Grade: B+

The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 1984)

A sort-of precursor to partner Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary, Anne-Marie Miéville's The Book of Mary shows what may be the childhood of Godard's protagonist. An intelligent, withdrawn child blotting out the sound of her parents' divorce, Marie gives lectures to imaginary pupils, using an apple half as a stand-in for an eye during a lecture on ocular surgery and later dictating from a pocketbook to her bedroom wall, even instructing the class to "be quiet" when her mother knocks at the door. Her parents encourage her to accept what has happened, but Marie finds denial and expression in art, hearing a conversation of voices in a concerto and later dancing with aggressive pain to Mahler's 9th. This dance, a naked response to the intellectualism of Mahler's composition, serves as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, a naive but beautiful interpretation of the music that seems to drain the last bits of her innocence before she can start to cope with her upheaval. The final shot, of her slicing off the top of an egg with a swipe, still confounds and teases me. Grade: A-

They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich, 1981)

I expect to do a full piece on this at some point in my life, but it is a film that uses all of its style toward such an overwhelming feeling of delight and retroactive regret that I only occasionally noted its almost tossed-off mastery. Check out this excellent piece by Sheila O'Malley that breaks down an early scene and how Bogdanovich's quick eyeline matches establish character relationships before anyone has been properly introduced. That scene confounded me when I watched it to the point that I kept dwelling on it as the film played out, until slowly all the pieces fell into place and revealed how that one sequence served as a map for the rest of the movie. There is a balletic choreography to that and other scenes that reminded me strongly of the work of Johnnie To, similarly able to impart an overwhelming deal of information visually with delicate shot patterns. Poised perfectly between the improvisational, naturalistic style of Cassavetes and shamelessly Old Hollywood depictions of the City That Never Sleeps. Grade: A+

First Name: Carmen (Jean-Luc Godard, 1983)

If Passion juxtaposed a largely aimless narrative with another artform, painting, as a means of offering clues to its solution, First Name: Carmen uses music as its driving artistic counterpoint. Yet Godard does not simply swap out media but inverts the contrast: here the film has a much more pointed, understandable story, but the cutaways to the other artform prove murky and not easily explained. This, of course, can be explained by the different natures of classical music (wordless, united only by evocative compositional themes) and painting (more literal and, obviously, illustrative). Indeed, Godard uses music as an emphasis of emotion and mood, not so much clarifying an abstract story as deepening a coherent one.

Sound is a key element in the film, with the audio track taking on the jump-cut properties normally associated with Godard’s images. This is nothing new; sudden fluctuations of noise and asynchronous play of sight and sound have been part of parcel of Godard’s cinema from the start. But there is something different about the director’s aural play here: where cut-up audio typically plays an intellectual, confrontational role in, say, the Dziga Vertov period, First Name: Carmen features an unorthodox use of fragmented sound to evoke the state of the characters and the overall tone of the action. One of the first lines spoken on the audio track, “It makes terrible waves in me and you,” is immediately followed with the sound of waves rolling onto a beach as seagulls screech. That gull cry is the most distracting noise of the movie, and like the sudden superimposition of the shrieking cockatoo in Citizen Kane, it may partly serve just to take the audience whenever it is used. But its restless, agitated squawk offers as crystalline and instant an insight into the spiky energy of this speaker as the beautiful yet thunderous sound of the ocean roiling underneath.

As the title suggests, First Name: Carmen adapts the Bizet opera. And as one should expect from Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, it does not simply replicate the narrative. They hone in on Carmen as the foremother of the modern femme fatale, building off Passion’s overt linking of cinema to its artistic forebears. In repurposing the opera as a tale of bank robbers and wooed cops, Godard and Miéville stress how little they had to do to make the basic story modern. Maruschka Detmers embodies the timelessly ahead-of-their-time qualities of Bizet’s anti-heroine, and she even channels a bit of Anna Karina’s wild siren in Pierrot le fou. But the changing times can be seen in the way that classic Godard film differs from this one: Pierrot sparks with sexual tension, and its explosions of violence in some ways seem the result of that sexuality having no outlet due to censorship concerns. This film, on the other hand, exhibits nudity freely and features less violence. This freedom to simply cut to the chase likewise marks the most basic yet most profound revision of the opera Carmen, tossing out all the window dressing one had to invent to get around what such stories are truly, always about.

And yet, because that job proved so easy, the filmmaking pair pile two additional narratives on top of the Carmen reworking. Godard himself plays Carmen’s uncle, a washed-up director looking for inspiration, which gives him a reason to intersect with her own story. So does Carmen’s motive, her thefts ostensibly being used to pay for a film. But Godard uses his own thread as an entirely separate issue, one that allows him to take direct aim at himself. Puttering around a hospital, a disheveled Godard makes proclamations one might call pretentious were they not coming from the mouth of a clearly insane person. Many of those thoughts are the sort of spoutings Godard used to make seriously, not farcically: in a later scene, he absent-mindedly compares Mao to a great chef who fed all of China, the asinine nonsense of that statement openly ridiculing his own support of the disastrous Chinese leader’s policies. Even Godard’s schizophrenic, typewritten fragments make for humor, a jumble of random letters and numbers that give way to vague, emptily ponderous words like “unseen” and “unsaid.” Godard also plays himself as a leering lecher, furthering his reevaluation of his early sexism.

The other recurring element involves frequent cutaways to musicians practicing Beethoven’s late quartets. Their frustrated rehearsals match perfectly to the mood of what is happening around them: they attack their strings passionately during, say, the bank robbery Carmen and her cohorts carry out or, more amusingly, when the security guard she seduces during the theft, Joseph (Jacques Bonnafée in the Don José role), tries to get hard for her after they shack up together. Godard further complicates, and lightens, the quartet’s influence upon the visceral direction of the movie by tangling their playing with the aforementioned sound of cawing gulls, occasionally even laying that grating noise over images of the musicians running their bows over strings. The soundtrack even features several “hiccups” of dropped sound, a reminder of Godard’s love of flawed takes

If these distinct stories interact in ways literal and figurative, their collective effect is one of unexpected harmony. The film is frequently distancing, even absurdist, but it represents a key refinement of this new stage in the director’s career, a poetic breakthrough that makes for one of his most expressive works. In an abstract but poignant scene, Joseph warps his arm around a television set broadcasting only blue static as Tom Waits’ “Ruby Arms” plays over the shots of his backlit hand moving sensually over the flickering device. Godard has routinely mixed formally striking shots with analytical commentary, but the beauty of this shot transcends whatever message might be conjured by this image of a man tenderly caressing a TV. Building off the budding humanist streak in his previous two features, Godard now fully trades didacticism for evocation, even when he continues to pose his actors like models and mouthpieces.

Nevertheless, the most moving aspect of First Name: Carmen is the director’s restored faith in youth, or at least his renewed interest in them as a subject matter. In the wake of May ’68 and its failure, Godard’s films slowly drifted away from the revolutionary zeal that led to that event to the disillusionment of its aftermath. Ostensibly writing off that entire generation, Godard returned to them only to share in their defeat or jumped back even further to prepubescent children to look for some measure of hope. But Carmen and her young adult colleagues bring back some of the fervor of developed but idealistic youth; Carmen’s satirical court scene recalls the equally scabrous kangaroo session running through Vladimir et Rosa’s loony tribute to the Chicago Eight. Incidentally, that marked the last time Godard focused intently on Western young adults still waging a struggle. It seems altogether fitting that, as Godard’s parodic self-portrait stumbles about trying to think up a new, intellectually sound film, Carmen’s wildness and sensual immediacy effortlessly lay out an arresting, evocative narrative. The key difference between this and the director’s ‘60s gangster inversions that it recalls is the gender of the protagonist, a significant alteration that suggests that even in repurposing his early work, Godard will not simply repeat himself. When Detmers bluntly announces, “I feel like showing people what a woman can do with a man,” she challenges the director’s own early work as much as the changed social reality of the 1980s.

France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

In The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bowie's alien offers a sadly poignant insight into the limitations of television, the manner in which he and his family learned of Earth. They saw the look and stylized behavior on TV, but as "Thomas Jerome Newton" gets caught up in emotions and interactions he does not understand, he laments to one person that TV leaves so much uncaptured, so much unexplained. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville's France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants, a 12-part miniseries made for French television, attempts to rectify this shortcoming. They use typical TV techniques and formats—shooting interviews like any other TV news crew, returning to the studio for commentary—but they do so in such a way as to critique those conventions and dissect the false social image TV itself helps to create and perpetuate.

Godard and Miéville divide the 12 episodes, or "movements," into dialectical pairings. Therefore, the first episode, subtitled "Dark/Chemistry," matches up with the second, "Light/Physics." Later, "Violence/Grammar" contrasts with "Disorder/Calculation." The format for each episode is the same: it opens on some aspect of French social life that corresponds (however loosely) with the subject of each , whether it's a commute to work or the labor itself, with a narration caught somewhere between Marxist rhetoric and a bedtime story. Then, there's a section titled "Verité," in which an off-screen Godard poses questions to one of two child subjects, Camille and Arnaud, in an unbroken take lasting the majority of the 25-minute runtime. Finally, a "Télevision" segment goes back to a TV studio as actors standing in for Godard (Albert Dray) and Miéville (Betty Berr) debate what was said in the interview before throwing to a "Histoire" (both story and history) only tangentially related to what has preceded it. Compared to the radical video experimentations that preceded it, this is pleasantly relaxed, downright accessible by Godard's post-Week End standards. Even the montages are easily followable!

None of this is to say that the miniseries isn't as rigorously formal and intellectually challenging as the rest of Godard's video period. Instead, France/Tour/Détour serves more as a culmination of this time in the filmmaker's career, its refined techniques an advancement over the primordial soup of images and noise even as its focus on children nearing the cusp of social integration marks Godard's most literal "return to zero." The episodes all operate under this overarching dialectic, a contrast of Godard's serious, mature questions to the children and the overall playfulness of his rapport with the children and the steady deconstruction of the series as it continues.

By this time Godard had alienated practically everyone. The "hip" critics who championed one of their own had given him up as a pretentious, aimless bore (a consensus that continues to this day), and on the rare occasion anyone even reviewed his new work, it was to lament that he'd lost the spark from his early work. It is therefore not only fascinating but deeply funny that these two prepubescent children, still in the early stages of education and wholly unprepared for Godard's social and philosophical probings, respond more earnestly and thoughtfully to the director's advanced notions than all the grown-ups.

Godard asks such questions as whether night is space or time, what the revolution means to the girl, and what parts of the body are matter and what, like memory, isn't. Camille and Arnaud frequently look puzzled, and sometimes they either sit in silence trying to parse out the question or deflect with a "yes, no, I don't know" answer. The director clearly prods the children toward the answer he wants, his Socratic dialogue compounding each initial question so that the children contradict themselves or at least acknowledge that simple either/or questions are more complex. (This is as much autocritique as critique of the kids' answers, Godard proving that he knows dialectic has its limits and that it must be used in opposition to itself for the full image.) But the kids sometimes offer surprises: Godard asks Arnaud some space/time questions, and the boy offers an almost profound idea when he says of himself, "I'm more of a moving point in space."

These moments of stirring insight and inadvertent philosophy stand in sharp contrast to the socialization Godard and Miéville show at work on the children. Occasionally, Godard accompanies the children to school, where we can see Arnaud sitting silently, attentive but removed as his teacher idly instructs through recitation, his stiffness a sharp contrast to the fidgety cleverness he displays in the interviews. Similarly, a late episode devotes its Verité segment not to an interview of Camille but an unbroken shot of her in medium-close-up as she sits at the dinner table, her parents having a conversation with each other as she quietly eats. In both cases, the institutions that shape a child into a member of society—school, family—do not encourage growth but restrain it, mold it, limit it. In the interviews, the children seem so alive, curious, and unbounded. But in society, they are caged, and even a schoolyard at recess, drowned in echoing noise of happy screams and conversations, seems like a prison.

But Godard and Miéville don't stop there. Tracing their political obsessions to social roots and beyond, the pair extrapolate the intimate focus of the show ever outwards. A shot of Camille being punished at school by being forced to copy lines grows into an indictment of an education system that forbids plagiarism but teaches only through copying, not originality. But language itself is a binding, repetitive structure. A playful episode opening of two lovers describing each others and themselves with adjectives reveals both the sumptuously descriptive possibilities of language and its frustrating limitations. And of all languages, French is one of the most rigidly hidebound, with its grammatical rules held in check by its own institution, the Academie Française. So even communication, then, can be a form of indoctrination, learning all the verb tenses of grammar as much a means of controlling and shaping the children as making them line up in formation like a military squad or teaching them basic work functions.

These are lofty ideas, and even loftier ones come out in the Histoire segments. Here, the challenging polemics and philosophies of Godard and Miéville get to run riot. These sections feature asides such as a radical leftist cell madly deciding to make up for the failure of their hostage taking to produce change by planning higher-profile hostage taking. Elsewhere, a nude pregnant woman, a recurring figure in superimpositions as the symbol for humanity's hope and the possibility of engendering change, can be seen as a secretary, nonchalantly taking dictation and fetching things as men boss her around. The metaphor is clear, visualizing the one force capable of reshaping the world and how it is thus treated worst of all by that system. Montage also pops up from time to time, but Godard slows down the battery of images seen in various Dziga Vertov productions, instead focusing specifically on one idea. For example, the duo branch out of the discussion of light and dark to meditate on how some images, such as brightly lit photographs of Nixon and Mao, actually obscure the truth of their subjects where darkness would do them justice.

France/Tour/Détour/Deux/Enfants routinely recalls the great Numéro Deux in its social inspection, but also in its giving spirit. Miéville's admonishment in that film that Godard stop reducing everything to either/or dialectics carries over to the questions he asks the children, all of them binary but posed in such a way as to disrupt binary systems. Furthermore, the Godard and Miéville stand-ins often critique themselves and the entire show, not only for deeper questions not asked but what they want out of the series. "Instead of keeping watch, the camera will transmit," comes an early, idealistic hope for the show's potential. By the end, however, "Miéville" is despondent that their questions give the impression that they want the last word in the discussion, when what they really want is the first. The two even end the series avoiding any kind of summary, the humorous anticlimax keeping with the delicate touch of the entire series. Taken with Numéro Deux, the miniseries returns Godard to the aesthetic and intellectual openness of his 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Godard's Dziga Vertov and video years married radical content with radical form, but it seems, at last, that the director finally realized that the best way to attain a socialist cinema was, as he concluded in 2 or 3 Things, to give it to everyone, even two schoolchildren.

[This post marks the shamefully belated return to my ongoing attempt to see as much of Jean-Luc Godard's filmography as I can (not the easiest of tasks for nearly anything made after 1967). I am skipping over Six Fois Deux, the first TV miniseries Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made for French television, only because I am having a hard time finding a copy to download. The only place I can find it is on a private torrenting site where it would likely get me expelled for ruining my seed:leech ratio (for some reason my Internet connection almost completely blocks uploading). If I can get my hands on that series, I'll double back later and cover it. For now, though, I'm pressing ahead with this retrospective and Godard's subsequent "return to cinema."]

Comment Ça Va (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

Despite the blatant reflexivity of the film's premise, Comment ça va might have been a remarkably straightforward film about a newspaperman making an instructional video about the paper business with his partner. But as much as Godard has always been fascinated with process, the single question out of the journalistic "Five Ws" that is truly addressed here is "Why?" The complexity that will eventually push the film into some of the director's most challenging work to this point (no mean feat) is prompted by an almost childlike simplicity on behalf of the radical woman, Odette (Miéville), who oversees this project with the Communist newspaper editor (Michel Marot). Though her questions are complex, political, philosophical and aesthetic, they ultimately boil down to that simplest yet most agonizing of queries.

The editor considers himself a radical but, as Odette points out, he pays little heed to the process of his video editing beyond utilitarian and populist concerns; what's more, he also routinely comes into conflict with the more commercialized and tepid mainstream media, which always finds a way to soften and bury his more radical stories. He shows her a workprint, and immediately Odette asks why the film cut over information, demanding to see all of the footage first. Naturally, this results in a flood of imagery and explanatory text, but even that is soon challenged by the silhouetted Odette as she criticizes the imagery of Portuguese and French worker uprisings shown within the educational film Marot put together. After all, can text really break down an image, or can it only propose one interpretation, usually prompted by a narrow focus on but one aspect of the image?

Godard and Miéville, through Odette and a slowly contemplating Marot, delve into that theme with exacting analysis of the primary film stills of the workers. For the editor, he believes that showing such scenes while cutting out the fluff hones his statement into its clearest form. Odette, however, uses the still images to point out how one's interpretation is often formed by preconceived notions, and that to edit together only these striking images only serves to make the meaning more ambiguous. For example, Odette asks, is the gesture of raised fists a show of solidarity or a precursor to violence? For already-converted radicals and leftists, a glance at such an image would provoke the former interpretation. But what of the conservatives? Would they not view the fearsome collection of angered workers as a mob? But even then, Godard moves beyond dialectics to show even more observations that arise from the image: Odette points out that, without any context, the one worker with his mouth agape looks almost like a pop singer in gesture and body language.

And once text gets placed over the image, the meaning only further obscures. Marot, by now wise to what Odette is arguing, types "To go on strike, that is joy" onto the screen, the word "joie" making him view that same worker's open mouth as a smile or laugh. Then, he muses about removing the letters r-e-v-e from "grève" (strike). In French, "rêve" is dream, suggesting that Marot just robbed his interpretation of its optimism. This being 1976, the primitive computer equipment that allows for Godard and Miéville's image manipulation throws up text via a giant pixel of a cursor, a block that darts over the screen as it types out the letters and simply moves according to the whims of the computer operator. Perhaps this signifies the movement of the eye over the image and how importance of the mise-en-scène is subconsciously imparted to the viewer, that same ordering of importance defining meaning for the viewer before he or she truly has time to think about it. Godard had pursued a democratized film image since at least 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and here we see a refinement of the philosophy and motivation behind that push, a desire to parcel out how we perceive images, and indeed whether auterial intent, however intellectually reasoned and intricate, matters at all the second someone else views the product.

Complementing this obsession with perspective and interpretation is Godard's pointed critique of the gap between ideological beliefs and commitments to those beliefs. Marot and his estranged son believe themselves to be radicals, but we see the son primarily getting his news through half-heard newscasts in the morning when he eats breakfast in his comfortable apartment with his lover. Meanwhile, Marot's aforementioned ignorance of the full power of his editing and film construction blinds him to the potential impact of his sloth. For him, he wants to edit the shortest distance between two idea-affirming images, but Odette demonstrates the folly of his approach.

She (and by extension the filmmakers) also subtly critiques the repression of women among these so-called radicals, showing how they assign stereotypical roles to women: the son's lover appears almost solely as a homemaker, while Odette herself gets roped into stenographer work typing out print copy, something that annoys her almost visibly (amusing, since we never see her unobscured by shadow) to the point that she slowly types and even later replays the scene in an attempt to get the man to see the error of his ways. But by then Marot's already dropped a line about women being "copying machines," effectively spitting out genetic duplicates of, erm, let's call it input data.

It is important to note that the profession Godard uses to prompt this film is journalism, a profession nominally dedicated to publicizing the truth. But religion was quick to teach the concept of lying by omission, and Godard wishes to show how casual editing for the sake of legibility and flow can undermine the power of journalism even as it makes the profession more esoteric and unappealing to the common reader. He does let on an understanding for the complicated, self-defeating position in which that places everyone, and he wryly notes "Language is the place where the executioner transforms the victim into another executioner." But if Godard finally works out that success in his quest to democratize the film image will obliterate meaning in the flood of interpretation, he suggests a path back to full directorial control by having Odette say, "What is unseen is what directs." However slowly, Godard is working his way back to narrative cinema even as he consolidates his more radical experimentation of the decade.

The first text of the film, projected on a black screen, dubs Comment ça va "A film between active and passive," and Godard shows how easy it is to lean back into passivity. Even Odette notes how she can switch her brain off while typing up copies of polemics, arguing that even a blind man can do this job. Godard shows how life itself gets in the way of full dedication to one's beliefs: can a mother be a full-time radical if she must worry about the health and progress of her children? Can someone in even the most liberal profession not devote a portion of his time to ensuring some form of paycheck to survive? It is, however, unclear whether Godard has fully accepted the truth he has uncovered, for he still suggests irritation with passive commitment. Still, the fury and autocritique of the DVG years is cooling into more a measured response to his frustrations, and if Comment ça va is not as stunning a work as Numéro deux, it is at least a refined insight into Godard's thought process as he navigates ever headier waters.

Numéro Deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)

Numéro deux represents Godard's first fully successful attempt to include the elements of his previous films into a cohesive whole. Ironically, it may also be his most abstract and jumbled film yet. Shown entirely on video monitors (even the two establishing shots showing Godard in his studio contain running images on screens), Numéro deux takes his Brechtian distance to a new extreme, creating such an aesthetic distance that the cold abstraction of his characters can be attributed as much to the blatant falsity of it all as it can to Godard's philosophical and political musings.

And yet, the film represents the best-yet examination of Godard's obsession with the line between discussing politics and embodying them. Despite its formal minimalism -- employing nothing but static shots of video monitors themselves displaying solely static shots -- Numéro deux at last emerges as the true heir to the poetic 2 or Things I Know About Her, a film that partially informed every Godard film that came after it, as well as a further exploration of not only the ideas behind the Dziga Vertov Group but of the reasons that collective failed. It represents a better meditation and autocritique than Here and Elsewhere, and somewhere in its brutal asceticism is a poetry I'd begun to think Godard lost.

After a brief play with images on two video monitors, the film cuts to Godard in his editing suite giving a monologue about his move from Paris to a smaller home outside the city, which then leads into a discussion of money and the difficulty of financing movies. Purportedly, Godard made this film when the producer of his landmark debut, Georges de Beauregard, proposed that the director remake that film. Godard agreed but naturally had no interest in returning to Breathless. Instead, he used the money to get the equipment needed finish Here and Elsewhere, then made this movie, which examines a French family suffering a bourgeois implosion. Not exactly a jazzy genre exercise.

With voyeuristic still shots of the family in their social housing complex, Godard takes the contradictions and metaphors of his monologue and examines them in action. In his speech, he referred to his editing studio as a factory, where he is both boss and worker, a semi-equal but nevertheless distinct dichotomy that speaks to socialism as it turned out, not in its fully egalitarian utopian model. For the film's subjects, their bodies are themselves machines in a factory; I don't know of a film with a less romantic vision of sex.

The young couple between the other pairs of the film -- two children, two grandparents -- use sex as an empty means of power and brief pleasure. The father caught the mother with another man, but only one part of him reacts with anger. Another part is turned on, and his internal struggle occasionally explodes in physical and sexual violence against his wife. Yet he still idealizes the act: in bed, Pierre and Sandrine compare men and women. Pierre romantically speaks of woman as a river crashing into the shore that is man. Known for washing away the shore, the river does not receive much consideration for the effects of the shore upon it, limiting its graceful flow and span. Sandrine's views of Pierre are far less rosy: she notes that she sees his ass every morning when he goes to work and leaves her to do chores and his dick when he comes home expecting some action.

These harsh, clashing dualities comprise the film's philosophical conflicts, as well as its aesthetic framing. Using two monitors, Godard juxtaposes sight and sound against each other, creating jarring miniature compositions. Before the film turns to the family, Godard experiments with the two screens, juxtaposing news broadcasts concerning revolutionary activity and Establishment crackdowns of same with light TV programming, suggesting television's capacity for indoctrination and how it's used to retard mental growth and independence with endless fluff. Anne-Marie Miéville, who co-wrote the film but did not share a direction credit, speaks in a voiceover as these two screens keep going, discussing how all images, including those in a film, are manufactured just as TV images and ads are. At one point, she drifts into a tangent where she speaks of Numéro deux as if it were a coming attraction, thus exposing how film can be its own advertisement. She also amusingly wonders whether the film is political or pornographic, placing the two as flip sides of the same coin.

Tempering these comparisons and dualities is a written-in admonishment to this dialectical approach. "Why do you always ask 'either/or?'" ponders Miéville. "Maybe it's both at once." Though the characters of the movie often talk politics, the true focus is on the mundanity of their lives, hence the presentation through the smaller scope of television. From their quotidian routines come questions on many of the same topics Godard explored with the DVG, delivered without the collective's polemics.

Despite the stark framing, Godard clearly put care into his compositions, and they betray some of the higher ambitions of this essay film. He shows the grandmother doing chores, her head either cut out of the frame or so far away we cannot read it. He then lays a monologue on top of these images of her reflecting not only on mortality but feminism. She speaks bitterly about gender struggle as the video shows her ironing and cleaning, and one gets the feeling that she's voicing a suppressed cry she never got to vent to another person. The grandfather, far more steeped in self-pity, summarizes his life (one that coincides with various radical movements and their failures) as he sits nude from the waist down, his own chilling conflation of the death of rebellion with his own mortality sending shivers down the spine.

Perhaps this is still too polemical despite Godard's efforts to present politics through human interaction and emotion, however abstract. Indeed, some parts challenge the audience's patience, if not its sense of propriety. The two children pose a number of those simple-but-deep questions children always ask -- a precursor to Godard's TV series France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants? -- and, since sex takes up so much room in the film, their questions naturally gravitate in that direction. Eventually, the parents invite the kids into the bedroom to explain sex by pointing to their exposed genitals. Even a liberal viewer might question the necessity of this, particularly when Godard had already effectively used dissolves to layer the kids' faces over shots of the couple screwing.


However, there's a perverse beauty in the moment. The parents refer to their genitals as mouths and portray sex as a form of kissing and silent communication. It's a poetic view of sex, and one the parents certainly don't believe, but they at least try to put intercourse on the pedestal for the next generation. Even then, Godard can undercut the moment: part of the reason the sex in this film is so unerotic is that it has been abstracted to the point of objectivity and obscurity. Like Howells' anti-romantic point about the ideal grasshopper, Godard demonstrates how losing track of the actual object or action robs it of its true meaning, a lesson he might need to re-learn after the radical analysis of the DVG.

Rather than focus on the dichotomies between each pair of characters, Godard and Miéville show how each group, however emotionally isolated from each other through their self-absorbed worldviews and the aesthetic oppression of Godard's editing, links with each other. The grandparents resemble less the previous generation than futuristic visions of the young couple currently mired in acrimony, aged and bitter endpoints for these post-radicals burned out on politics after the failure of May '68. In turn, the kids' inquisitiveness about sex reflects the moments of innocence in Pierre and Sandrine's sexual play, and perhaps they will internalize their parents' more beautiful talk of sex instead of the brutal reality of their acts.

Godard's attempts to tie these people together are but one facet of his desire to link threads: he might have burned his old producer by making this film, but he drops a vague reference to Breathless in the form of a gangster story the two children tell each other, bits of which recall the plot of Godard's first feature. Likewise, Godard's wordplay reveals a respect for puns as a means of experimenting with, and expressing a love for, language. As Miéville says, "Numéro Deux isn't a rightist or leftist film but a before and behind film." It sees what lies before it, but it takes care to incorporate the past as well.

In Godard's rambling monologue, he briefly touches upon the idea that "there's too much DNA not enough RNA." I interpreted that to mean he sees too many completed thoughts that cannot be manipulated. He wants to get a hold of the half-strands, the ones that leave space for learning and exploration. Numéro deux looks to the past (its Breathless reference, its abstract reflections on May '68) and the future (paving the way for both Godard's miniseries and Histoire(s) du Cinéma), but the most striking revelations it contains deal with the present. Godard has not quite returned aesthetically to cinema, but he certainly believes in it once more: in one shot of the typed text intertitles frequently placed in-between scenes, "cinema" changes into "possible," as if to say film can make anything happen. That reinvigorated look at film fits nicely with my favorite summary of the film courtesy of this capsule review: "If we look at the 1960's as Godard's childlike enjoyment of pop culture, genre cinema, and primary colors, and if we look at the Dziga Vertov Group as Godard's rebel without a cause years, then Numéro deux is when Godard finally becomes an adult."

Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975)

Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of the group's material but because Godard uses the opportunity to investigate why the group failed. Predictably, he cannot go into such details without making a movie as messy as one of the DVG films.

Though five years removed from his time in Palestine, Godard clearly has not forgotten his outrage, and as Miéville translates the revolutionaries' anti-Zionist rhetoric, it becomes clear Godard agrees with them even before he starts visually comparing Hitler to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. As ever, Godard thinks in terms of the Marxist class struggle, and when he cuts to a petit bourgeois family in France watching these images on their TV the connection -- Palestinians and Westerners held down by the same capitalist powers -- is obvious. Too obvious, in fact; Godard does not account for religious tension, and his equation of Hitler with Meir is but one example of his single-mindedness getting the better of him.

And yet, Here and Elsewhere also serves as a response to that dogmatic commitment Godard displayed even at his most open and considerate during the DVG years. Godard and Miéville discuss collecting all the footage and feeling confident in relating the story and its currents of theory and practice, only to return to France and see how all the careful ordering was inherently false, no matter how pure Godard's intentions were. Adding further sobriety to this autocritique is the reason Godard and co. left Palestine before completing their original film in the first place: so many of the natives involved had been killed. Shots of children training in a camp to fight in the insurgency may once have convinced Godard of the commitment of the Palestinians to their cause, but as he looks back he clearly wonders how many of them are dead now, and the images seem tragic and mournful. By filming these people at all, Godard ensured he would present their struggle against Western domination through Western means and interpretations of art. All filmmaking is interpretive, meaning that, for all the elements the director stripped from his style during his Dziga Vertov years, he always retained the most bourgeois one.

Still, he presses on in search of a universal form, and the film largely serves as his attempt to sift through his failure and learn from the mistakes. The text on the monitor at the start reads "Mon/Ton/Son Image," communicating that everyone can lay claim to the image, not merely the filmmakers who believe they are getting the full story. As frustratingly didactic as the film can be, Here and Elsewhere is yet another fascinating peek into Godard's insecurity and self-doubt in his lofty goals. He considers images in both time and space and seeks a way to put images in the same space at the same time instead of having one follow the other as it must in film. Multiple monitors and new editing equipment allow Godard the freedom to juxtapose more images than ever, and he uses these toys, these capitalistic innovations, to try to get a more accurate representation of his Marxist aesthetic.


More than any of his preceding late-'60s/early-'70s work, Here and Elsewhere captures and further develops the ideas and desires that motivated 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, in which he first surrendered autonomy of the image to seek all around him. By finding methods of not only cutting up images to fit them all in the frame -- which he does here using video technology that allows him to blur, overlap and melt images -- he instead places all these monitors on the screen, so that we are in effect watching others watch the movie, sitting in the editing suite with the filmmakers as they judge which images to use. Thus, Here and Elsewhere transcends Godard's efforts to find a Marxist image by not only showing more freedom in the selection of images beyond those that serve Godard's narrative means to making the viewer a semi-equal participant in viewing the complete footage. Of course, Godard still has the power to interpret it, but now he starts to leave

Here and Elsewhere expands the scope of Godard's attempts to capture the world on film, delineating all around one's vicinity from the images we ultimately receive on TV or in film, all of which were shot "elsewhere." Because of this, the images and sound lack their full power. The family in France look no different watching Godard's imposed images of horror and war than they do watching an ad with a catchy jingle play in-between the Palestinian footage. By, however unwisely, tossing out religious considerations, Godard can frame the Palestinian cause as class struggle and draw comparisons from the families elsewhere who grew fed up with their station and began organizing to the Western drones who can start their own revolution on a similarly small scale before expanding. But since he does leave out all that vital information when compiling his thoughts, Godard's conclusions can be messy and taxing, like the worst of Dziga Vertov output.

I admit I got a bit lost with this film and felt I were missing something in between what Godard was aiming for and the final product, so I looked to Ed Howard (one of the people chiefly responsible for me deciding to go through Godard's canon in the first place and a fantastic resource for where to find so many of the director's forgotten films) to see if he made anything out of it. I think we largely agree, but one of the passages of his review of the film caught my eye:

"It is not so much a political film as it is about political films, about the ways in which images, sounds, and their combinations can contribute to or impede understanding. It is also a study in contrasts, with the title's dual concepts the central dichotomy at work: "here" for the familiar, the domestic; "elsewhere" for the unfamiliar, the foreign.

That's a spot-on observation, though I find it amusing that Godard would divide locations into "here" and "elsewhere" given the time he devotes to criticizing his obsession with Marxist dialectic. "It is too easy and too simple," Miéville repeats, "to simply divide the world into two." In fairness, his dichotomy here is flexible and relative as opposed to the more hardline "good/bad" splits of earlier rhetoric. However, the key component of the film's title (and the filmmakers' focus) is neither on "here" or "elsewhere" but on the "and." Godard stresses the "and" in comparisons as if stuttering, and a giant "Et" fills the screen when he does so. He wants to bury into the "and," the conjunction taken for granted, to find the mysteries it contains. Godard notes that even the most quotidian, insignificant image becomes part of "a vague and complicated system," and Godard desperately wants to map that system.

Despite these humanistic aims, Here and Elsewhere still contains the frustrating limitations it criticizes, including its moments of rigid condescension. "There are no more simple images, only simple people, who will be forced to stay quiet, like an image," the filmmakers say. And yet, Godard and Miéville do internalize some of their inclusive aesthetic lessons, lumping themselves in with the crowd when Miéville posits "It seems we do not know how to see or listen." The solution, it seems, is to "learn to see here in order to understand elsewhere." I can't say I'm not glad to finally emerge from Godard's political period (barring the chance to catch up with a few of the DVG films I couldn't track down). But as many issues I have with Here and Elsewhere's pacing and contradictions, its mature evaluation of those politics and the human motivations and limitations behind them make the film a surprisingly moving elegy for an ambitious but misguided period for the world's most ambitious filmmaker.