On No Thing
A shot of the azure sky, luminous and expansive, is how Godard opens his “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), which was released two decades after the start of the nouvelle vague and serves as the effective zero point of so-called “late Godard,” a period that now spans close to four decades. Although seen as Godard’s return to narrative filmmaking after his post-1968 Dziga Vertov period, the film might better be considered the first in a generative period of experimentation that would culminate with Toutes les histoires (1988), the first chapter of the director’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma. Opaque, highly elliptical, obscure on the level of story and stubbornly resistant to categorization—qualities that would only intensify in later years—Godard’s variegated ’80s output can nonetheless be succinctly described, via a phrase from Détective (1985), as the work of “a poet who stopped writing.”
“The Godard of today exists entirely in this tension between still making—films: circumscribed, identified objects that serve as reference points—and completely being—a state of gaze, of video-thinking, the all-being of images, which opens onto the infinite, and where the risk, obvious but avoided, is to be sucked in, absorbed, dissolved into an ocean.”
—Philippe Dubois, “Video Thinks What Cinema Creates” (1992), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974–1991
“I have once again
