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.”
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS