Seite - 110 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/02

Revisiting the Relevance of Conceptualism of Godard’s Film | 109www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 83–113 realized that they have long disappeared into the dark of the night. If the key at- tempt of Godard’s filmmaking was to use cinema as a tool that obliterates that very same tool and shows us the beauty of life, the only faithful way to end this essay is to use the words piled up here as a tool to destroy that very same tool and, like Wittgenstein at the end of his debut treatise66, leave us speechless and in awe under the starry sky of life and its infinite beauties, lying beyond what any camera or pen could capture. The purpose of this whole array of words is, therefore, to make the reader look away from them, being the same goal that Godard strived to attain throughout his entire filmmaking career. For, what point other than this could Godard be making with the opening scene of La paresse, where the female protagonist reads a book and the page she reads shows an unpunctuated, grammatically broken excerpt from Beckett’s Com­ ment C’est: “Suddenly afar the step the voice nothing then suddenly something something then suddenly nothing suddenly afar the silence”?67 “Reality”, after all, “is too complex for oral communication”, as it is said in the opening scene of Alphaville, and all that language is, as Juliette from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle reminds us, is “the house man lives in”,68 suggesting the safety and comfort that abiding in it brings, but equally insinuating that the most exciting things, life as it were, happen strictly outside of it. 66 Wittgenstein 1922. 67 Beckett 1961, 11. 68 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1967), 00:10:55. Fig. 13: Histoire(s) du cinéma: La Monnaie de l’absolu (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/CH 1998). “… here is the question, it’s bigger than India, England or Russia, it’s the small child inside the mother’s womb”.