Day 337
Saturday 2 June 2018 7am
‘Godard’s Story of Cinema, Parts 5-8’ 2018
Top 100 Films Ever Made –
It is equal #48 with The Battle of Algiers (1966) in the 2012 BFI Critics Poll
It doesn’t rank in the Directors Poll.
Pulled an all-nighter to watch the last four hours of Godard’s Historie(s) du cinema. What an extraordinary – yes, that word again – series of comments by Godard on cinema that catches his fancy or that he has an opinion on. He’s got an enquiring mind and this series shows so many different things on so many different levels. It’s somewhere between seven and eight hours long in all, and one viewing can’t do it justice because Godard is showing images, using an experimental filmmaking style and making dozens of interesting comments every few minutes. It’s probably a lifetime of thoughts, reduced to seven hours, a commentary on many aspects of filmmaking and political ideas that go hand in hand with how he sees cinema.
For me to explain something comprehensible that gives any idea what this very long movie is actually about, is something that I can’t do on one viewing. It’s mind-blowing. Yes, it is very important and needed to be seen and I would never had made time for it without the impetus that this project has given me.