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With the addition of a newly announced project set to be filmed in 3D, Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial oeuvre (as catalogued on IMDb) now stands at 100 entries spanning nearly 60 years: a mélange of shorts, features, essay films, contributions to omnibus projects, documentaries, television episodes, and works on video (including a multipart “miniseries” in the late ‘90s: Histoire(s) du Cinema) that collectively dissolve all kinds of boundaries, not the least of which is that between fiction and non-fiction. I have seen at best a quarter of these, mostly through home viewing, and many of them only a single sit-through, with the better-known feature films from the 1960s through the mid 1980s making up the bulk of my collective experience.

The last film of his I saw (chronologically speaking) was a screening of his 2001 feature In Praise of Love at that year’s New York Film Festival, which my Senior Seminar Film Studies professor was fortunate enough to secure tickets for the dozen or so of us. I didn’t enjoy it, for reasons related more specifically to the second half of the two-part film, which struck me as sophomoric and petty retaliations against – generally - “the United States of America” and blockbuster/commercial American filmmaking and more specifically Spielberg and the eliding of the historical record in Schindler’s List. Since this screening occurred mere weeks after the September 11th attacks, such criticisms rubbed me the wrong way and I think I have (unfairly) used that reaction and memory to push back against seeking out more of his unconventional, even more challenging works. (An example of such: reading the synopsis and statement of purpose for his most recent feature, 2010’s Film Socialisme, gives me a headache and I reflect that its methods appear to border on self-parody).

Such critiques are nothing new for Godard and barbs at America, among many other targets, have informed much of his output (although, it must be remembered, he launched his career with his desconstructions/homages to American genre filmmaking in films like Breathless). I genuinely admire the style and audacity and am simultaneously unnerved emotionally by any number of his films - Contempt, Weekend, Tout Va Bien, Made in USA, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou - but I let my personal opinions of the man override these and I must make allowances for and strive to overcome that.

Godard has always struck me as a grumpy old fart, even in the era of this week’s film, made in 1966-1967 when he was age 36 (he just turned 82 at the beginning of this month). He is hyper-intelligent, capable of packing his films with dense allusions and references to all the arts, and with a project like Histoire(s) du Cinema, able to assemble his film like a cinematic disc jockey, finding through lines/beats where it didn’t seem possible and squeezing in one last epic edit/jam before the lights come up. But this can also be intimidating. And seem like a lot of work.

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