Highlight of this entry: Godard cutting between images of Chaplin and Hitler. "Cinema, like Christianity...Cinema, like Christianity..."

A loosely-connected smattering of barely related clips and really bad video effects, with Godard occasionally muttering something meaningless. This kind of free-association essay format can be interesting, and occasionally Godard nails an intriguing transition, but most of the time you're just wondering where he's going with all this. Answer: eh, nowhere in particular. The best thing is that it reminds you of better movies that you'd like to see again, without all the surrounding nonsense.

Godard stitches together an abstract chronology of 20th century cinema in montage, exploring at any particular moment everything from the mythology of cinema to its revolutionary potential, its unique essence, and its tendency to present reality in illusion. It's among his most personal experiments, with his cerebral musings drawn for once from a tapestry of meaningful emotional connections to the material, which has clearly haunted his entire life, resulting in a truly singular work of art.

The gist of those series is I think a Hegelian philosophy of subjectivity of cinema. G. constantly films himself and his means to film himself too, giving a full account of the possibilities and consciousness he has to express via the medium. Apart from all that pseudo-philosophical mambo jumbo that is important, perhaps the only important gift he gave to cinema: the camera recording its own consiousness like Vertov's Kino-Glaz.

(Cont'd) ...new that he hadn't already said better in earlier films (in particular his underrated masterpiece King Lear, a number of clips which appear here, more than from any of his other work in fact), and considering the main reason i watch Godard is for his ideas, this dearth of new ones (which he nevertheless repeats ad nauseam) makes the undertaking a rather fruitless slog a lot of the time, give or take a few inspired bits.

Not much fun to watch; it's hard to shake the feeling that this is just an extended exercise in arbitrary visual rhyming & juxtaposition. The theme of cinema's relation to humanity is perhaps so fundamental as to be impenetrable, so maybe I expect too much, but Godard's narration is only occasionally interesting to me. I watched the whole series in a marathon so I'm giving them a uniform review (however, I'd actually recommend watching them separately & spacing them out over a longer period).

Score applies to the series taken as a whole.

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