Forty-five years after Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle ( Breathless) ushered in modern cinema comes the director's latest, Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma ( Moments Chosen from the History/Histories of Cinema), which has its Canadian debut tonight at Cinematheque Ontario.
Condensed to 85 minutes from his four hour and 20 minute Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-1997), Moments choisis is challenging; in fact, the word "impenetrable" has been used. The film is a fragmentary archeological dig through Jean-Luc's brain, a great collage of quotations, sound, film, photographs, art, music, dialogue and voice-over.
Some of Godard's bleak pronouncements can be taken with a grain of salt, or even a smirk. He observes that the principles of projection were developed by Jean-Victor Poncelet, an engineer in Napoleon's army, while doing time in a Moscow jail. Thus a "Frenchman going in circles" in a Moscow prison cell set the stage for cinema. Later, he asserts that Alfred Hitchcock "succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler and Napoleon had all failed by taking control of the universe."
Most potent are Godard's juxtapositions of images and ideas: a shot from Hitchcock's The Birds with a formation of Second World War bombers strafing a target. There's the observation that American director George Stevens, while with an army photography corps, shot the first coloured footage of the Dachau death camp in 1945. Godard shows a single luminous black-and-white shot of Elizabeth Taylor in Stevens's 1951 movie, A Place in the Sun.
In the final moments, Godard rails against "global abstract tyranny," by which we assume he means American-originated consumer culture and television. Film, he claims, was originally thought to be a tool for thinking: Who remembers that?
Screenings of Moments choisis take place at Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. W., at 6:30 tonight and tomorrow. 416-968-FILM.
--
Liam Lacey