GOING TO THE MOVIES
313
versal can bring oversimplification, which must be combated by the
concreteness and ambiguity of words.
Godard has always been fascinated by the opaqueness and coercive–
ness of language, and a recurrent feature of the film narratives is some
sort of deformation of speech. Complementing these mutilations of speech
and language are the many explicit discussions of language as a problem
in Godard's films. The puzzle about how it's possible to make moral or
intellectual sense by speaking, owing to the betrayal of consciousness by
language, is debated in
My Life to Live
and
A Married Woman;
the am–
biguities of language, in the mystery of "translating" from one language to
another, is a theme in
ContemjJt
and
Band of Outsiders;
the language of
the future is a subject of speculation by GuiIlaume and Veronique (it is to
be altogether different; each word or phrase will be separate) in
La Chinoise;
the nonsensical underside of language is demonstrated in
the exchange in the cafe between Marianne, the laborer and the bar–
tender in
1v[ade in U.S.A.;
and the effort to purify language of philo–
sophical and cultural dissociation is the explicit, main theme of
Alpha–
ville
and
Anticipation,
the success of an individual's efforts to do this
providing the dramatic resolution of both films.
At this moment in Godard's work, the problem of language appears
to have become his leading motif. Behind their obtrusive verbosity,
Godard's films are haunted by the duplicity and banality of language.
Insofar as there is a "voice" speaking in alI his films, it is one that
questions alI voices. Language is the widest context in which Godard's
recurrent theme of prostitution must be located. Beyond its direct socio–
logical interest for Godard, prostitution is his extended metaphor for
the fate of language, that is, of consciousness itself. The coalescing of
the two themes is clearest in the science-fiction nightmare of
Anticipa–
tion:
in an airport hotel some time in the future (that is, now ), travelers
have the choice of two kinds of temporary sexual companions, someone
who makes bodily love without speaking or someone who can recite the
words of love but can't take part in any physical embrace. This
schizophrenia of the flesh and the soul is the menace that inspires
Godard's preoccupation with language, and confers on him the painful,
self-interrogatory terms of his restless art. As Natasha declares at the end
of
Alphaville:
"There are words I don't know." But it's that painful
knowledge, according to Godard's controlling narrative myth, that marks
the beginning of her redemption and - by an extension of the same
project - the redemption of art itself.
Susan Sontag
