Jean-Luc Godard's wry exercise on the quicksands of communication, the title a trick question -- "How are ya," "How's it going," "How does one go (from Renault to Palestine)?" The setting is a radical Communist newspaper, a film is being shot about how the press operation works; burly, middle-aged editor Michel Marot thinks himself a political emissary, until the typist (Anne-Marie Miéville) shows him up as a hapless receptacle of corrupt media signifiers. Text has long been deconstructed, now it's time to dismantle the machines through which text springs: Marot dictates while Miéville mimics punching an imaginary keyboard, a notepad is scribbled with notes in close-up before being fed through a typewriter, the soundtrack is a symphony of electronic pings and clangs ("the noise of a press machine, and the noise of Vietnam"). Technology that could serve against oppression is shown as already seriously degraded by complacent reading, and the camera takes the editor's befuddled view as he pours through portfolios of commodified images (newspaper photos, magazine ads, war atrocities stills). At the center rests an analysis of such an image, a photo of protesters from Portugal placed under the microscope of Godard's multi-layered montage until, like Fonda's face melting onto the culprit's in The Wrong Man, it becomes a "miracle." Conscience piqued by revolt is the protagonist, "what is unseen is what directs" -- the scrutiny of hands and eyes, with Miéville supplying the voice, her backlit obscured face providing a template for the poster of De Palma's The Fury (which Godard dug). The auteur insists on a hectoring game, yet his delight with new technology is unmistakable and infectious, down to his reconfiguration of the august central shot of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, the cursor blinking on a computer screen as if stranded in a dark cosmos. "Information, deformation" -- it's up to us to extract meaning from the image, on the page and on the screen.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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