Chapter 8 - Sink or Swim: Immersing Ourselves in Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage

Summary

This book has been dealing with questions of orientation and disorientation in film, with the ways that films can cause us to lose – or to have difficulty getting – our bearings, and with the consequences of the various critical strategies we might employ in response. As I have had occasion to observe more than once, the language of orientation relies on a metaphor of territory; it envisages a film as some kind of place through which we pass, which may at times be more or less familiar, and may either supply or deny the signs necessary for us to be able to assess our ‘location’ in relation to the landscape that is the film. In Colossal Youth we encountered some situations where such signs seem to be insufficient or even lacking entirely. In common with much of his work, Jean-Luc Godard's 2014 film Adieu au langage presents almost the opposite situation: it contains such a surfeit of images, sounds, fragments of music and citations (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) that it can seem almost impossible to distinguish figure from ground, to separate elements that might serve as signs from those which are merely features of the landscape. This means that the film is often extremely confusing (in the ordinary sense). This confusion is generated both by the lack of obvious connections – those parts of the film that most exhibit what Brenez, as I mentioned in Chapter 5, calls ‘figurality by overload’ – and, as in Holy Motors, by the presence of connections that it is difficult to know what to do with. (This is particularly the case in those moments in that film that both offer a narrative and frustrate its comprehension.) As I also argued in my chapter on Holy Motors, however, I want to claim that the difficulty of perceiving a consistent diegesis in Adieu au langage should not lead us too quickly to assume that pursuing questions of diegesis could only result in a misdirected and fruitless quest. But, of course, it will not be possible to simply take the orientational strategies that worked elsewhere and apply them here; we need to look for new ones, guided by this film in particular. That we can – and should – look to confusing films themselves for guidance as to how we might go about orientating ourselves is, as I hope is becoming clear, one of the central claims of this book.