Cinema comes thick and fast at the end of the year. Nothing more appropriate than late Godard as a way of trying to review and summarise not merely a year of cinema and its interaction with the news, but the whole history of cinema and its relationship to just about everything. There’s no way to process late Godard except on a transparently subjective level. The multiple possible interpretations of the bricolage he assembles seems to demand subjectivity. As cultural experiences go, the closest comparison might be reading Derrida. Why is this edit next to that edit? Why has he chopped the world up in this way? Why is there sound here and silence there? You could spend a month deciphering and debating the filmmaker’s choices and be none the wiser, and much the wiser at the same time.
As if to emphasis this, there’s a curious moment in the screening. About half way through the film, someone shouts out, in the style of the old Cinemateca, that there must be a problem with the sound, which cuts in and out. Someone else calls back, out of the darkness, that this is Godard and he’s doing it on purpose. Someone leaves the auditorium to check. At the end, this little community of Sunday evening filmgoers talk among themselves - is the sound part of Godard’s game, or is it the cinema’s new speakers? People check on-line, ask the attendants, but no-one seems any the wiser. It’s tempting to think of Godard chuckling at this wonderful ambiguity, where even the process of watching the film is put in question. We can’t even trust our five senses, which the film has taken note of in the opening reel.
This confusion is part of the game. A glass bead game, perhaps. However, there’s a stitching going on, a mind at work, a constant juxtaposition. It’s like studying the inside of the engine, what’s under the bonnet. Godard is the mechanic who is also the magician, operating in a dimension whose workings we can barely follow.
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