Can we all get over the "challenging" provocations that this Film attempts to offer. Forgive a potential Agism, but in the spirit of class conscious critique: This is a sign of late Godard, complicit in his Bourgeois canonization, making ineffectual meditations on a a medium already robust, ubiquitous and politically affective. I'm speaking of course about Video. A previous reviewer mentioned Ryan Tracartin - This film is at least 20 years behind Ryan Trecartin's most trivial undergrad work. Godard mobilizing the distancing, alienating politics of a pseudo-left closeted Eurocentrist in order to promulgate a consistent dominance over "Art House" cinema. Honestly what the blood is this film? a further denigration of the kinds of education received in low income areas of the United States, Northern Africa, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe? Who is this this film standing up for? and if it stands up for no one then why is this nihilism necessary? The fractured subtitles are absolutely insulting - There is no transformative translation ala Benjamin, no generative deconstruction, no Stein, no Saurraute , no performative language at all - we are left with nothing but masturbatory sloganism (and not a kind of sloganism which implodes on itself in order to critique a contemporary state of language, rather a sloganism which, with full self awareness, alienates all those accept for the most privileged, most geographically/economically/culturally entitled). This film is no "challenge" to its audience as the audience for late Godard is ALREADY educated, already leftist (or at least conventionally Liberal) already enlightened as to the ornate delicacies of high cinema and already aware of and experienced with cultural forms outside of the myopic mainstream. Therefore, this film seems unnecessarily difficult, a poorly informed cloying attempt at relevance in a digital age. The Film says nothing about its medium other than a tired Brechtian breaking of verisimilitude at the beginning (a fruitless technique, as video implicitly points to its own making(s) given its unmistakable and highly recognizable fidelity) and is years behind even the most the primitive works of contemporary video art. It seems Godard did not realize the impact that Histoire(s) du cinema had on the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world has taken something he helped to pioneer and ran far far away from beyond it. I can't help but feel that Harun Farocki already made this film in the 80s and it was far more innovative, "challenging", inclusive and all around less insulting than this ultimately apolitical irreverency. There is nothing about identity in this film and an absolute disregard for the filmmaker's own place of power in the discursive grid (ie, heterosexual, white, wealthy, Western, mutilingual, gendered male).
to the reviewer who in response to the fractured subtitles said "you should learn French!" - maybe in another lifetime free of inhibitory systemic inhibitors, financial constraint and economic-racial-historical determinism we could all take up this task of Eurocentric cultural Enlightenment, but for now I'll settle for at least a concession of legibility.
