Car, comme dit le vieil adage, s’il est trop tard pour attendre Godot, il est trop tôt pour atteindre Godard.


Jean-Bernard Pouy, Je hais le cinéma, 2004

Two years after having completed Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean- Luc Godard returned to that vertiginous labyrinth of visions and sounds and highlighted ten fragments, each one around ten minutes long, re-editing them following according to a different rhythm and with some changes. “Putting into perspective” his own work noticeably accentuates certain tonalities and themes – the grief, the Shoah’s history of non-return and the violent and inspired dispute against a stars and stripes type of cinema –. The “condensation” of the Moments choisis reduces the distances of the painful and funereal echoes between the diagnosis of cinema’s failure (to reveal the reality of the Nazi extermination) and the evocation of the defeated utopias of the Nouvelle Vague, between the religious magic of moving images and the tragically emblematic enigmas of the little stories contained in history. A shadow amongst shadows, even Godard’s cinema is subject to choices that, significantly favour his “damned” films (King Lear, Hélas pour moi).

Roberto Chiesi