So this is Godard’s five-hour history of cinema. Except that it’s not really any sensible kind of a history, it’s more of an impressionistic montage of images and sounds and words from various movies overlaid on each other, with Godard narrating pretentiously, all arranged in a scattershot quasi-thematic fashion. In a lot of ways, it’s like Man with a Movie Camera if that movie had been made solely of clips from other movies — just all fast cuts and double-exposures and whatever else, with little narrative or logical sense to it.

And so, okay, that doesn’t sound awesome, and five hours is waaaaay too long a length for it to go, but in principle going on a deeply personal, thoroughly pretentious walk though cinematic history with one of cinema’s great directors isn’t unappealing. The thing that bugged me is Godard’s view of everything, which could be summed up as:

  1. It sucks. All of it.
  2. Except for Italian neo-realism, which is utterly amazing. Oh, and the French New Wave, but too bad our revolution failed.

In those bits when he was talking about the Italians and his own contemporaries, you could sense some of his real passion for cinema and that’s cool… but for most of the rest of the time, it was just an angry old man shouting about how awful everything is, whether it be France as a country, Hollywood, British cinema, politics, television, or the depraved state of modern cinema.

Which is a pity. Because when you’re a young bomb-throwing artistic revolutionary who meets with huge success, there are two ways you can go with it: You can be proud that your critique was enfolded into the cinematic culture and that you’ve shaped the state of things, and maybe even look back a bit and laugh at how seriously you took everything; or you can continue to be that bomb-throwing angry man, even though the world has passed your anger by. Harlan Ellison is probably a good example of that latter mold, and so is Godard.

Anyway, this is on the list because this sort of thing — little fragments of important films, remixed and recontextualized by a great director — is basically catnip for the kind of critics who put this list together. You will find it interesting to the precise degree that twentieth-century European cinema is one of your interests. But I’d make a pretty strong argument that this should be the last of Godard’s films that you watch, because if you haven’t already seen all of them, probably you’re not going to be in the demographic that fully appreciates this documentary; lord knows I’m not.