in, respectively, 1983 and 1984? If you were inclined to side with the earlier
Godard's politics, so with his apparent enlisting of art in the service of politics,
then you are apt to sense a falling off, or backing off, in the later work, and
become disappointed or disaffected with its apparent avoidance or evasion of
politics. If, contrariwise, you were inclined against Godard's earlier politics,
and perhaps sensed his hatred of hateful, exploitative society as a cover for his
spiritual coldness and isolation, then you are more apt to feel, and welcome,
a redemptive move in the later work, a search for perspective on the individual-
ities of his work that signals an affecting effort to take responsibility for it,
for its irresponsibilities that are as necessitated artistically as they ever were
politically. But in that case Hail Mary will have traveled the familiar route
from a totalizing politics to a totalizing religion, and from an apparent quest
for a transcendence of the self (if just from one circle or stance to the next)
to a self-indulgent transcendentalizing (or philosophizing) of nature or rethe-
ologizing of science.

Suppose, though, that Hail Mary is not an evasion of politics but a
critique of it, of what Godard had at some time named politics. (Can we bear
to hear those words of Marx again?: "The critique of religion is the beginning
of all critique." But shouldn't the ending, in principle, have been the critique
of critique itself, of the claim to have found a position from which to measure
the cost of accounting for the costs of other people's ideas, of all but your
own? This ending is so easy to postpone.) And suppose that Godard's criticism
of his irresponsibilities is a continuation of a mode of criticism there in his
work from the beginning--since the later films are recognizably continuous
with the earlier, bearing no different signature. Then from what perspective
is such an effort at truth to be assessed? Does philosophy provide one?--call
it thinking. (We were duly warned in First Name: Carmen that something
basic, banal, is amiss with our registration of our experience into, for example,
a division of politics and poetry. In that film, the line "Beauty is but the
beginning of terror," remembered from the Duino Elegies, is dangerously
tossed into a context invoking terrorism.)

If Godard is thinking, and his thinking is to provoke thought, then he
must be thinking about film and about films; about, let's say, the conditions
of their possibility. Wasn't he always? But in Hail Mary his thinking is not
expressed by more or less routine showings of his hand, self-reflections on the
fact of a film's making, of the sheer fact that what he has produced is a film.
Because the question he is raising at that time is precisely whether this that
appears is, or what it means to say that it is, a film--it is unlike other things
so called. The question raises others--whether it is comprehensible that those

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