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You don't top Weekend, you go "back to zero." Eden in a grossly saturated era is a darkened void, a vacant TV stage where Adam and Eve—Emile Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto)—gather nightly for semiotic seminars. (God is the raspy proselytizer heard on the airwaves, Jean-Luc Godard: "You, comrades. You, who I ignored behind the turbulences. Come. Talk to us.") Language, spoken and visual, is the enemy, recomposition is the goal. The weapon is an astoundingly sustained 92-minute fusillade-montage founded on Vertov (soundstage shenannigans intercut with cartoons, posters, porn magazines, political pamphlets and glimpses of Parisian streets) and Wittgenstein (anagrams, word-association games with a moppet and a half-deaf geezer, demolitions of meaning). "Links, relations, differences." Vermeer, The Beatles, "Mao sait tout," Che Guevara, Le Jour se Lève. A minute of silence for the Black Panthers, a minute of dissonance for the victims of "bourgeois philosophy." Mack Sennett and Stalin, "reac-Zionists," Ginsberg and Tom and Jerry, Daniel Defoe's "fascism" and John Ford's "imperialism." Grenades in theaters, "we're in a bit of an intellectual war now, no?" The juveniles munch on croissants and coo and squawk at each other in parodies of The Miracle Worker. Mozart, the bleeps of censorship, Bach, Cuba Libre songs, "Freud" and "Marx" scrawled on a nudie centerfold, poetic slurring before comic-book titans. Revolt against "absent images, censored images, prostituted images, machinated images, delinquent, buggered images..." Once the book is destroyed ("Turn the pages at random, I say"), what's left to do but invent your own dialectic? This is cinema in the barricades, Godard concludes with a rallying cry for Bertolucci, Skolimowski, Rocha, Straub, et al. "Let's look. Let's listen. Let's criticize." Cinematography by Georges Leclerc.
--- Fernando F. Croce |