The forest for the trees: political contexts for Godard’s nature imagery in Film socialisme and Adieu au langage

Abstract Jean-Luc Godard’s most recent feature films, Film socialisme (2010) and Adieu au langage (2014), are striking for their prominent imagery of nature: recurring images include water and forests, and one of the principal ‘characters’ of Adieu au langage is a dog. In many ways, this can be seen to prolong a long-term project of aesthetic research begun in Godard’s films of the early 1980s, complete with the sometimes dubious gender politics of that period. The recent films also include an historico-political tirade against technocracy. Yet nature in these films is prevented from becoming a transcendent opposing pole to technics through the extreme fragmentation of Godard’s imagery that reaches an unprecedented level of distillation at this late stage of his career. As such, this article suggests that the difficult, unstable form of these films marks a serious attempt to capture something of a new political reality.