Godard, often one of the most pedantic authors in the historie(s) of cinema, unleashes a speech without special interest, using images and dialogues from hundreds of films, seasoned with photographs, titles and bombastic phrases, without it being very clear to us why or for what.
It begins with Godard typing the names of various classic films on his typewriter, with superimposed images of Chaplin, Ray, Lupino, and stupid signs with inane puns. After 5 minutes, we wait for the movie or documentary or whatever it is to start; but at 10 minutes we see there is no more than that.
Funny montages of classic films, interrupted by images of Godard with many books behind him, to show that he is an intellectual. Complicated textures of sometimes superimposed images, sometimes in slow motion, and with background music by Beethoven, Bach, Mahler, Schubert...; all mixed with some politics, with archive images of the Romanovs, the corpse of Lenin, Hitler, bombings, concentration camps...
The voiceover repeats phrases such as: "Cinema replaces reality"; "a world according to our desires"; "all the stories that there will be, that there would be, that there have been"; "you have to dream"; "darkness, oh my light!"; "the theater is something too well known, the cinema something too unknown... until now"; "only the hand that erases can write"...; or so-called brainy untranslatable puns like: "Is it that the u in produire prevents it from containing "dire"?"
What can we think of comments on the function of cinema in times of war such as: "1939, 1940, 1941, betrayal of the radio, but the cinema keeps its word. Because from The Death of Siegfried, and M, the Vampire of Dusseldorf, to the Great Dictator and Lubitsch, the movies had already been made, right? A simple 35mm rectangle saves the honor of everything real." This is the intellectual rigor of the discourse...
And at the same time, as it is supposed to talk about the many histories of cinema, telling us the obvious about Irvin Thalberg or Howard Hughes, the American film industry...
Some reputable critic alludes to Joyce and his Finnegans Wake, something only justifiable if you haven't read Joyce at all..., here we enter into an often insipid game of free associations: a shot by Jean Renoir, followed by Impressionist paintings by his father and with the music of Puccini: that is the inventive level at which we are.
Interesting for movie lovers, due to the potpourri of unforgettable images from so many wonderful films, used as a source of free associations following a speech without interest in itself.
