Godard, for a third time in as many months. Godard, which is like watching a brand new way of making cinema every time. No matter that the film is nearly 60 years old. It feels like it could have been made yesterday and still knock spots off the most avant-garde cineasta out there today. Maybe the avant garde has eaten itself. There’s no room left in the multiplex. And those with avant-garde predilections have no option but to shut the system down, adapt, meet the market criteria. Does anyone today use sound with the creative dexterity that Godard did? With the brash, assertive dislocation? Does the notion of playfulness even exist anymore? Watching Godard is like watching a lost innocence, the joy of film still vibrant, still singing. Coutard’s darting, swirling camera work has undoubtably been imitated a million times, but the overall tone of reckless esprit de jeu has been consigned to the cutting room floor. And to think that Godard became a byword for pretension? When his creative impulse stems from a childlike delight in the medium’s creative and iconographic possibilities. Perhaps children are secretly the most pretentious of them all.
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