Godard after Weekend has always been very iffy, usually bordering into resentful left wing proclamations and the obscure and the pretentious. But this film, less than an hour long and made as a series of films by the British Film Institute on the occasion of the centenary of the first film (by the Lumiere brothers) is a good effort.
Be warned that there are no clips of classic films here - for that you can look at Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, made at about the same time. We have instead Michel Piccoli, a washed up director (a clear stand in for Godard) in a hotel room questioning the maid about the history of French cinema. Obviously she knows very little about French cinema: when he asks her about Jacques Becker (director of the classic Casque d'Or) among others, she replies that the only Becker she knows is the tennis star Boris Becker. One can guess than in the twenty years since, the ignorance about classic French cinema by the French youth has only gotten worse.
Intercalated with the dialogue between Piccoli and the maid, we see intertitles with quotations by famous French critics (Bazin, Langlois, Rohmer, etc). I'm giving a little away the ending if I say that the quote that ends the film is by Truffaut, who had a famous quarrel with Godard in his later years before his untimely death. It's a very moving ending.
Be warned that there are no clips of classic films here - for that you can look at Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, made at about the same time. We have instead Michel Piccoli, a washed up director (a clear stand in for Godard) in a hotel room questioning the maid about the history of French cinema. Obviously she knows very little about French cinema: when he asks her about Jacques Becker (director of the classic Casque d'Or) among others, she replies that the only Becker she knows is the tennis star Boris Becker. One can guess than in the twenty years since, the ignorance about classic French cinema by the French youth has only gotten worse.
Intercalated with the dialogue between Piccoli and the maid, we see intertitles with quotations by famous French critics (Bazin, Langlois, Rohmer, etc). I'm giving a little away the ending if I say that the quote that ends the film is by Truffaut, who had a famous quarrel with Godard in his later years before his untimely death. It's a very moving ending.