PostED ON OCTOBER19 2022

Completed after the recent death of the filmmaker, this valuable documentary retraces the progression of Jean-Luc Godard’s path.

Has Godard ever lost you? Then this documentary is for you. It is a complete, accurate, never trite journey through ‘Godardia’. Its director, Cyril Leuthy, has divided the master's work into several chapters - like a painter has his periods - and has endeavoured to find an aesthetic style corresponding to each one: interviews in cafés to evoke the pop culture of the 1960s, bright red to bring up Maoist illusions, etcetera. This great visual variety, in the service of a highly documented chronological approach, constantly sustains the viewer's interest.

The archives are striking, like an extract from a short film by Jacques Rivette, found recently, where we see Jean-Luc Godard as a young man. The testimonies are fascinating; commentators on Godard's work (Thierry Jousse, Alain Bergala, Antoine de Baecque...) and from those who worked with him, from Marina Vlady (who describes Godard as "the husband of the human race"!) to Nathalie Baye, very touching, or Romain Goupil (who is seen as a teenager trashing the movie ‘La Chinoise’).

© Anne Wiazemsky

Another good idea was to ask actress Céleste Brunnquell to read the texts of Anne Wiazemski, who candidly described Godard's contradictions at the end of the 1960s and was highly critical of the influence of Jean-Pierre Gorin during the Dziga Vertov Group era. Was this the first time this period had been clearly branded a failure, a dead end? Or like like Daniel Cohn-Bendit's colourful and vivid memories…

As the story progresses in the life of Jean-Luc Godard, the intimate portrait of a solitary man emerges (despite the eruption in his life created by Anne-Marie Miéville, whom we are happy to see in some of the footage), an experimenter in constant turmoil, always on the lookout for new techniques  - the documentary includes a particularly beautiful passage on his Sonimage period in Grenoble - and someone who deplores his complicated relationship with the world. A beautiful archival clip shows that cinema is the only way for him to question the Other. One finally understands the title of this documentary: ‘Godard, the cinema alone’.  Alone with the cinema, and in spite of it.

A.F.

Screening:

Godard seul le cinéma by Cyril Leuthy (2022, 1h30, VFSTA)

Pathé Bellecour Wed. 19 2:45pm