Conditions of Visuality and Materialist Film at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

By analyzing and comparing films Godard made between 2006 and 2014, I articulate the coherence between the filmmakers’ earlier and more recent explorations on representability, irrepresentability and representation, which became the filmmaker’s version of materialist filmmaking for the twenty-first century. For instance, Voyage(s) en utopie is an experiment in three dimensions in which Godard plays with various supports of the image to (re)visit the utopian aspects of his work in dialogue with contemporary art and mass media creating a kind of archive of rescued utopias. I conclude that like Film: Socialisme, Adieu au langage is a call to arms; if the former foresaw the massive 2011–12 worldly mobilizations, Adieu is the novelty announced by the scream of the new born and the bark of Roxy the dog, which we hear at the end of the movie. In both films what is to come—a political project, the figures that will lead history on, and new forms of mediation and enunciation—is yet to be invented.