Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Wild Palms’ premiere
John Wyver writes: ‘What’s language, mummy?’ a small boy asks actor Marina Vlady (above,. top) playing a waking Juliette Jeanson in Jean-Luc Godard’s Wild Palms, the world premiere of which was held at London’s ICA last night.
More accurately, the occasion was the first realisation of the late filmmaker’s ‘proposition’ for an adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which was first published in 1939 as The Wild Palms. As Wikipedia says, ‘The book consists of two different stories, told in non-linear fashion in alternating chapters, which contain both parallels and contrasts.’
In his foundational 1967 study Richard Roud reported that Godard envisaged an interlaced showing of his films Made in USA (1966) and Two or Three Things That I Know About Her (1967), ‘first a reel of Made in USA, then a reel of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, then a reel of Made in USA, etc., just as Faulkner mixed two stories in The Wild Palms. That would be his adaptation of the novel.’
And thanks to the ICA cinema team, juggling complex projection and live subtitling, and to Michael Witt, season curator and author of Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, newly published by Bloomsbury, the proposition was experienced for the first time, from fine 35mm prints, by a lucky few who filled ICA Cinema 1 for three revelatory hours.
(Michael Witt’s ICA season Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned continues on 9 December with Literary Adaptation 1: Guy de Maupassant, and then into the first months of 2026.)
Others will write detailed exegeses about last night, but I want simply to witness that the showing was a totally absorbing and thrilling experience. For much of the time, and bonkers as this perhaps sounds, I felt I was watching a single film, to the extent that I often forgot which of the pair of features was on the screen.
That it seemed seamless is perhaps not entirely surprising, given that the films were made back-to-back in the summer of 1966, that each is powerfully focussed by a central female performance (Anna Karina in the first, Vlady in the second), and that they share numerous concerns, including sex, neon signs, the city, Hollywood, magazines, legacies of colonialism, and inevitably the war in Vietnam.
Both were shot in colour and widescreen by Godard’s regular cinematographer in the 1960s, Raoul Coutard, and this master’s formal framings, lateral tracking shots and high contrast primary blues and reds (especially in Made in USA) contribute very significantly to the sense of unity. So does an obsession with looking intensely at the faces of women, who frequently stare back and speak back at the viewer. Karina’s luminous features especially are dominant.
Cars recur, and travel posters, and doors being closed and opened, whether in a cheap hotel or a brothel that comes with its own creche. Quotations are scattered liberally, as fragments of music and as words, from literature and history and philosophy. Sometimes the words relate to the fractured narratives, and sometimes they seem plucked at random by latter-day manifestations of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Péchuchet, who pop up pleasingly in Two or Three Things…
And of course both films pose questions, asked over and over, urgently, lightly, dismissively, fervently, casually, passionately, as only Godard can. What’s language, mummy? What’s desire? What’s love? What’s a person? What’s death? What do women want?
What’s a subject? What’s an object? What the relationship between them? What’s a relationship? What’s meaning? What are dreams? What’s dialectic? What are the limits of language?
What’s space? What’s time? What’s eternity? What’s fiction? What’s art? What’s an idea? What’s truth? What’s reality? What is the world and all that is in it?
What’s politics? What’s war? What’s capitalism? What’s communism? What’s labour? What’s consumerism? What’s communication? What’s knowledge? What’s memory? What’s freedom? What is to be done?
What’s a word? What’s a sound? What’s an image? And always and forever…
Qu’est que ce le cinéma?
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