people have spoken
back when i was big into my godard days i sort of lacked a lot of the political and cinematic nuance that i think i have a slightly better grasp on now. ofc i will never be able to tell you the thesis statements of
Histoire(s) or anything but cursory briefings of most of his later pictures (those that beg for something like that, of course;
Hail Mary has never called for anything more than tears). with something like this, i think godard is shooting more for the primary territory. there are obvious parallels between the colonialism of the bougie culture that by and large decides the world culture, cinematic culture, the act of voyeurism, and the nature of how 21st century colonialism is shaping up. i like how, similarly to the way pwsa would reconcile the politics of his stuff, godard features pretty much nothing directly related to the "immigrant crisis" or anti-arab sentiments. he knows everyone is painfully aware of the zeitgeist, and this film very much avoids easy answers.
the juxtapositions are really cool, which is par for the course by this point. the great ones are the ones from wwii footage (i think?) to
Jaws, some of the
Vertigo ones, and the one from one of the latter
Histoire(s) episodes where he contrasts
Freaks with porn. and like, there are individual moments of beauty like there are always in godard flicks. i didn't know godard was a peter watkins fan but when he showed footage of
La commune it moved me pretty hard, such an important film in my life... idk there's just a way that godard uses montage here in particular (where it's almost entirely "found footage" of sorts). most of the sections are fully content from other films, streamed through godard's consciousness of adobe after effects, quotes from who knows who, and movies that i can identify with about 50% precision.
basically it's super opaque, deathly serious (to me, anyways), very different from whatever he went for in his last feature and feels like a lot of his shorter montage based works stretched to feature length. in the upper half of his filmo for me.