Jean-Luc Godard

Right before his eightieth birthday Jean-Luc Godard premiered his latest film, Film Socialisme, in the Cannes Film Festival. At the same time, he was also placing it on the internet and releasing it in commercial theatres. In other words: he was showing it to film professionals, regular
audiences, and doing it free of charge. All at the same time.
That at the same time element is a curious thing, because Godard’s films were always marked by the paradox of going step by step, but also by that at the same time quality. Widely analyzed by critics, the idea that his work –huge, with multiple influences, sustained on different
areas, filmmakers, and trends all through the last fifty years of cinema– should be organized in periods also points toward that step by step thing: his periods of working with genres, faces, framings, cinema as history and rewriting. But his work was also constantly marked by an extraordinary condensation effect, an at the same time condition:
cinema and the world (in whatever order you prefer) would fit inside every film and video as if he could always get them to overlap, follow one another, alternate.