Random Notes, Quotations__

Shinya Tsukamoto (冢本晋也)

01. Seven Samurai
02. Ruined Youth
03. Blade Runner
04. Metropolis
05. Taxi Driver
06. Intentions of Murder (Imamura)
07. The Terminator
08. My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki)
09. Nikita
10. Les Amants du Pont Neuf

Director: Kurosawa
Actor: Robert De Niro
Actress: Jodie Foster

Terry Gilliam *

01. Citizen Kane
02. 8½
03. Pinocchio
04. The Seventh Seal
05. Seven Samurai
06. Napoleon
07. Birth of a Nation
08. Sherlock Jr.
09. The Exterminating Angel
10. Lawrence of Arabia

转自moviegoers
——————————————————————————
瞧瞧戈达尔的口味

By Jean-Luc Godard

美国电影十佳（～1963）

01. Scarface (Howard Hawks)
02. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
03. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. The Searchers (John Ford)
05. Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
06. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
07. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
08. Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
09. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
10. Dishonoured (Josef von Sternberg)

战后法国电影六佳（～1964）

01. Le Plaisir (Ophuls)
02. La Pyramide humaine (Rouch)
03. Le Testament d’Orphee (Cocteau)
04. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (Renoir)
05. Pickpocket (Bresson)
06. Les Godelureaux (Chabrol)

世界电影年度十佳

1956
01. Mr Arkadin (Orson Welles)
02. Elena et les hommes (Jean Renoir)
03. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. Bus Stop (Joshua Logan)
05. Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan)
06. The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg)
07. Un Condamne a mort s’est echappe (Robert Bresson)
08. Fear (Roberto Rossellini)
09. Bhowani Junction (George Cukor)
10. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine)

1957
01. Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray)
02. The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock)
03. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin)
04. Hollywood or Bust (Frank Tashlin)
05. Les Trois font la paire (Sacha Guitry)
06. A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin)
07. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang)
08. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Bunuel)
09. Sawdust and Tinsel (Ingmar Bergman)
10. Saint Joan (Otto Preminger)

1958
01. The Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
02. Journey into Autumn (Ingmar Bergman)
03. Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger)
04. Montparnasse 19 (Jacques Becker)
05. Une Vie (Alexandre Astruc)
06. Man of the West (Anthony Mann)
07. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
08. L’Eau vive (Francois Villiers)
09. White Nights (Luchino Visconti)
10. Le Temps des oeufs durs (Norbert Carbonnaux)

1959
01. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
02. Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville)
03. Les Rendez-vous du diable (Haroun Tazieff)
04. Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch)
05. La Tete contre les murs (Georges Franju)
06. Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Jean Renoir)
07. Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais)
08. Les Quatres cent coups (Francois Truffaut)
09. Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol)
10. Du cote de la Cote (Agnes Varda)

1960
01. Les Bonnes Femmes (Claude Chabrol)
02. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray)
03. Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen)
04. Sansho Dayu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
05. Moonfleet (Fritz Lang)
06. Nazarin (Luis Bunuel)
07. Poem of the Sea (Alexander Dovzhenko)
08. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
09. Le Testament d’Orphee (Jean Cocteau)
10. Tirez sur le pianiste (Francois Truffaut)

1961
01. Two Rode Together (John Ford)
02. La Pyramide humaine (Jean Rouch)
03. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (Jean Renoir)
04. Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol)
05. Paris Nous Appartient (Jacques Rivette)
06. Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti)
07. Exodus (Otto Preminger)
08. Lola (Jacques Demy)
09. Era Notte a Roma (Roberto Rossellini)
10. The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang)

1962
01. Hatari! (Howard Hawks)
02. Vanina Vanini (Roberto Rossellini)
03. Through a Glass, Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
04. Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut)
05. Le Signe du Lion (Eric Rohmer)
06. Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard)
07. The Flaming Years (Alexander Dovzhenko)
08. Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks)
09. Une Grosse Tete (Claude de Givray)
10. Ride the High Country [G.B. Guns in the Afternoon] (Sam Peckinpah)

1963
01. Proces de Jeanne d’Arc (Robert Bresson)
02. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)
03. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. The Chapman Report (George Cukor)
05. Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier)
06. Donovan’s Reef (John Ford)
07. Muriel (Alain Resnais)
08. The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
09. Irma la Douce (Billy Wilder)
10. Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli)

1964
01. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi)
02. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer)
03. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. Man’s Favourite Sport? (Howard Hawks)
05. The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)
06. A Distant Trumpet (Raoul Walsh)
07. Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan)
08. Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford)
09. La Ragazza di Bube (Luigi Comencini)
10. L’Amour a la chaine (Claude de Givray)

1965
01. The Enchanted Desna (Alexander Dovzhenko)
02. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)
03. Journal d’une femme en blanc (Claude Autant-Lara)
04. Young Cassidy (Ford-Cardiff)
05. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller)
06. Gun Hawk (Edward Ludwig)
07. Vidas Secas (Nelson Pereira dos Santos)
08. Yoyo (Pierre Etaix)
09. Lilith (Robert Rossen)
10. The Unworthy Old Peter and Pavla (Forman-Allio)

黑色電影為一九四○年代美國逐漸發展出的電影風格，由於形象與主題的黑暗，而被法國影評家如此命名。

柯柏(Sharon Y. Cobb)在〈寫作新黑色電影〉(“Writing the New Noir Film”)一文中，條列了這類(genre)影片的十三項要素：

1.
情節圍繞著背叛；

2.
內容與犯罪有關，「象徵了我們潛意識的恐懼、最黑暗的想法和最惡劣的夢魘」；

3.
片中的善惡混淆，呈現出「道德上的模稜兩可」(moral am-bivalence)；

4.
主角是身陷絕境的反英雄 (antihero)，於內、外在的混沌世界中奮力求生；

5.
當主角為罪犯時，故事由他的敘事觀點說出，引發觀者的認同，「彷彿他們代表我們自己可怕、黑暗的一面」；

6.
黑色主角在最終很少自我救贖；

7.
黑色主角感受到生理與心理的孤絕；

8.
片中經常有一類似致命女子(femme fatale)的角色；

9.
主角沉溺於與致命女子的關係；

10.
致命女子會欺矇、背叛主角，結果產生暴力；

11.
片中甚少小孩 (因小孩代表樂觀、希望) ；

12.
這些故事的張力除了來自預期的暴力之外，便是來自情節的扭折與逆轉；

13. 此類寫作風格應結合「黑色形象意象」(noirish images)，展現「黑色質素」(a Noir texture)，而重要的方法便是善選場所，以塑造氛圍。

《浮云》

【原 片 名】Floating Clouds
【中 文 名】浮云
【出品年代】1955
【首映日期】1955年1月15日
【IMDB链接】http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048757/
【IMDB评分】7.9/10 (74 votes)
【国　　家】日本
【类　　别】剧情/爱情
【导　　演】成濑已喜男 (Mikio Naruse)
【主　　演】高峰秀子 (Hideko Takamine)……. Yukiko Koda
森雅之 (Masayuki Mori (I))…… Kengo Tomioka
冈田茉莉子 (Mariko Okada)…… Sei Mukai
山形勋 (Isao Yamagata)…… Sugio Iba
中北千枝子 (Chieko Nakakita)…… Kuniko Tomioka

【文件格式】XviD + MP3
【文件大小】1CD 49*15MB
【视频尺寸】448x336
【影片长度】123 Mins
【对白语言】日语
【字幕语言】外挂中文

【内容简介】

成濑已喜男执导的《浮云》，根据日本著名女性小说家林芙美子的同名小说改编。编剧水木洋子是战后女性题材电影的著名编剧，演员阵容强大，高峰秀子、森雅
之、冈田茉莉子都是日本电影史上享有盛誉的明星。特别应该指出的是成濑已喜男与小津安二郎是同时代的电影人，作为描写女性命运的作家，在欧美影坛成濑比小
津享有更高的声誉，甚至可以说成濑的作品是日本女性教材电影的圣典。在这部作品中痛斥了男人的无常与女人对“情”的真挚与悲哀。影片描写的男女情感的冲撞
与牵连十分动人，观众常在电影结束后仍对片中情感回味无穷。故事描写二战期间农技师富冈被派往邻国管理森林资源，遇到在家遭表兄强暴后逃到此地工作的打字
员雪子，一见钟情。但富冈已有妻室家山，他向雪子保证回东京后一定立即离婚。可是雪子发现他并未离婚，只好另租间破房住下。但俩人仍然藕断丝连，雪子怀了
孕。富冈去温泉开辟事业，又和旅馆老板的妻子发生了关系，事情败露，走投无路的富冈又来找雪子，雪子再次原谅了他。这时，富冈的妻子去世，当富冈被派往尾
久岛工作时，终于名正言顺地携雪子同行，但为时已晚，途中雪子病故，富冈抚尸痛哭。影片精彩之处在于导演对女性的日常生活惟妙惟肖的描写真实而细腻。。
———————————————————————————————
Extract frm

Krause, Linda(Author). Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age.
New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, 2003. p 91.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/auckland/Doc?id=10075363&ppg=101

The cinema of Japanese director Naruse Mikio offers a rich example of
vernacular modernism in the context of a rapidly modernizing postwar
Tokyo. Sometimes referred to as Japan’s “Number Four” director, following
Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Mizoguchi Kenji, Naruse’s work has nevertheless
been largely neglected by both Japanese and non-Japanese critics
alike. This may be because his films blur the distinction between art cinema
and popular cinema and also, perhaps, because his films can almost all be
described as women’s films. Most of his eighty-nine films are set in the small,
simple homes of the urban middle and working classes. Domestic architecture
and the life of the street are the settings for his stories of young women,
housewives, single mothers, and aging geishas struggling to survive in a
world of economic and social hardships.
Naruse, Women, and Japanese Modernity
Naruse Mikio’s style changed greatly over the thirty-seven years of his career,
but I would describe his films generally as melodramas, taken in the largest
sense of that term. Only occasionally do they rise to the levels of hysterical
excess that we tend to associate with the Hollywood melodrama. But in
Naruse’s films the strong currents of emotional intensity are expressed in
the silences between people, in quick exchanges of looks, and in the framing
of bodies in space. In the 1950s his films were often shown as the B-pictures
on double bills, following Kurosawa’s headline features. 3 Whereas Kurosawa
developed the heroic persona of the postwar male subject, in Naruse we find
the inscription of a fairly well-defined female subjectivity in Japanese
modernity.
Certainly, the director, his scriptwriters, actors, and audiences would
have been familiar with the Hollywood women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s.
During the Occupation Japanese screens were flooded with Hollywood films in the interests of promoting American democracy. Naruse may have been
neglected by film critics because of his chosen subject matter— women’s
dramas— but also because his invisible editing eschews the formal aesthetics
so vital to the critical discourse on Japanese cinema. The confusing affinity
of Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics has tended to
efface the discourse of Japanese modernity as the emergence of an urban
image-culture.
A similar story is told in the historical appropriation of traditional Japanese
architecture by Western architects, who have largely overlooked the role
that Western architecture has played in the construction of modern Japanese
urban space. 4 The term Japanese modernity refers to the emergence of an
industrial consumer culture in Japan that might have been accelerated by
the opening to the West in the middle of the nineteenth century but that
cannot be reduced to a process of “Westernization.” Masao Miyoshi has
pointed out that modernity is a disynchronous process, occurring in different
cultures and social formations at different times. 5 Enrique Dussel has
argued, “Modernity is not a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system,
but of Europe as centre.” 6 The influence of Japanese arts on Western
modernism is a good example of how modernity is coincident with the
establishment of Europe as the center of a world system. The limits of
modernity are therefore coincident with the decentralization of the world
system in a (potentially) globalizing cultural economy that is more selfconscious
about its exteriorizing and othering effect on the non-European
center.
Film studies scholarship has tended to miss the important point that in
the Japanese context “modernity” involved the emergence of the bourgeois
individual and the coextensive adoption of realist modes of representation.
In literature this meant the development of the I-novel, or shishosetsu, in the
early twentieth century. Whereas debates and discussions of this literary
genre were intense throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were few parallel
intellectual debates, as far as I can tell, concerning the cinema. Questions of
gender and women’s literature, which began to proliferate in the 1920s,
tended to be ghettoized and cut off from the main arena of debate over the
constitution of the Japanese subject, a situation that persists in Japanese
studies. My interest in Naruse’s films is precisely in the way that they enable
us to trace the articulation of female subjectivity over a period of turbulent
cultural transformation.

For the purposes of this essay I will concentrate on the 1950s, when
Naruse made his most popular films and worked at refining a mature style
that has admitted him into the international canons of art cinema. Although
neither the industry nor the critical establishment used the term “women’s
film,” almost all of Naruse’s eighty-nine films feature female protagonists
played by some of the most popular actresses in Japan. Starting in 1951 he
adapted six films from the writing of Hayashi Fumiko, a popular woman
writer who published serialized stories in women’s magazines. In the films,
as in Hayashi’s stories, female characters find new roles for themselves in a
changing society, demonstrating a stubborn perseverance; but there are just
as many women who find ways of resigning themselves to their poorly drawn
lot in life.
Naruse’s work of this period is full of war widows trying to reconstruct
their lives. With the democratic reforms of the postwar period came recognition
of women’s rights and a nascent women’s movement, along with economic
development that created more room for women in the workforce. But
as Sandra Buckley points out, “a discourse of motherhood and the family was
quick to surface through the 1950s in opposition to the emerging women’s
labour movement.” 7
Given the deep ideological conflicts of postwar Japan, the “home drama”
became an important site for directors such as Kinoshita to reestablish the
values of domestic harmony and national identity around the stable figure of
the sacrificing mother. The home drama is a subspecies of the shoshimineiga
and encompasses Ozu’s increasing interest in the upper middle class in
the 1950s. Tadao Sato defines the home drama as centering on a family. 8
Japanese film genres tend to be named for their semantic content, so there
is a great deal of overlap among such genres as wife films, mother films,
husband-and-wife films, salaryman films, home dramas, and shoshimineiga.
In light of the lack of clear distinctions among genres, and the shared
roles of family and domestic architecture in all of them, they can all be
heuristically grouped together under the umbrella of the home drama, which
specifies the important conjunction between architecture and family in this
cinema.
Moreover, this larger category of the home drama has specific effects of
gender. The term okasan, which refers to both mother and wife, derives from
Chinese characters referring to the inner chambers of the home. 9 The maternal
role is a cornerstone of the Emperor System in its implicit link to the ily System, 10 a structure heavily reinforced in the imperialist home-front
propaganda of the fifteen-year war. As Masao Miyoshi has pointed out, many
Japanese perceived democratic reforms such as women’s rights as punishment
for losing the war, and the ideology of male supremacy remained for
many a cornerstone of the mythological “Japanese race”. 1 1 Yet in Naruse’s
cinema we can see how the generic form of the home drama begins to show
cracks and fissures in the postwar period, as he introduces strong and stubborn
female characters into the form.

Trackback from pkblog.org
————————————————————-

a recent interview of godard about his present life and thoughts and his latest film “notre musique”, which was shown at the hk international film festival.

—————–

‘Cinema is over’

Jean-Luc Godard hardly ever talks to the press, and when he does it’s as likely to be about football as film. In a rare interview, Geoffrey Macnab discovers that the original enfant terrible of the French new wave has lost none of his fire

Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian

It is a balmy afternoon and Jean-Luc Godard is sitting by a French swimming pool, smoking a cigar and talking football. His new film, Notre Musique, has just received its world premiere. Midway through it, there is a reference to the famous match at Wembley in November 1953 when Hungary (the “Magnificent Magyars”) defeated Billy Wright’s England 6-3. Reflecting on the match, Godard, a devoted football fan as a youngster, begins to tick off the names of the Hungarian players one by one. “Apart from the goalkeeper, I remember them all,” he says. There was Puskas (”the galloping major”), the right-half Bozsik (”the deputy”), Sandor (”the mad winger”), Kocsis (”the golden head”). Stanley Matthews, he adds, is the only English player who sticks in his mind.

Godard describes first watching the Hungarian team, which revolutionised world football, as being “a discovery, like modern painting.” Most of the Hungarian players, he points out, were from Honved, the “club of the army”. The country was under Soviet occupation. None the less, Puskas (an army officer) and his colleagues approached the game in a freewheeling, marvellously uninhibited style that contrasted with the regimentation of day-to-day life behind the Iron Curtain. The only team that has come close to Puskas’s Hungary, Godard adds, was Ajax of Amsterdam during the Cruyff era. “Everybody played in attack and defence - it was like free jazz.”

Godard turned 74 in December. In the twilight of his career, he remains as playful, provocative and perverse as ever. Somehow, it’s no surprise that he is as eager to discuss Puskas and Stanley Matthews as to reflect on his new film. He is nothing if not contrary, and has an unerring ability to wrongfoot critics and audiences alike. At a press conference for Notre Musique, Godard fazed journalists by inviting a spokesperson for the French actors and technicians’ union to take to the platform. He then sat silently as the union’s gripes against the French government were detailed at length.

Humorous, lyrical and baffling by turns, Notre Musique is typical late Godard: part essay, part poetic meditation. The film, divided into three parts, begins with a rapid-fire montage sequence of stock shots from documentaries and Hollywood war movies. Lasting for around seven minutes, this section is called Hell. Godard uses a quote from the 18th-century philosopher Baron de Montesquieu to contextualise the images: “After the great flood, men came out of the earth and started exterminating each other.” Alongside the battle scenes, there are shots of penguins and monkeys. “I found some pictures of American GIs in the river and I thought they made a nice follow-up to the monkeys,” he explains cheerfully.

Next comes Purgatory, in which Godard returns to Sarajevo, a city also featured in an earlier film, Forever Mozart (1996). He wanders through the city, encountering journalists and academics, and discussing politics and history. We hear asides about how history is written by the victors. There are actors playing fictional characters and real people (Godard among them) playing themselves. There are near-identical images of Palestinians and Israelis on the same sea shore, but the context of these pictures is utterly different. One is of victory, the other of defeat. We hear a quote from Malraux: “Humane people don’t start revolutions, they open libraries”. We also see the bridge at Mostar, whose destruction in 1993 marked a low point of the Bosnian war. The bridge has now been reconstructed, amid much talk of hope triumphing over barbarism.

“I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory,” says Godard. The final part portrays heaven, albeit in heavily ironic fashion. Paradise is a leafy place in the woods, guarded by US marines.

Godard may be a famous name, but he seems resigned to the fact that his films are not now widely seen and rarely make much impact at the box-office. His reputation is such that his regular producers, Ruth Waldburger and Alain Sarde, can raise money for his new projects easily enough, but his recent career isn’t exactly a commercial beanfeast. To illustrate the point, he tells a story of how he recently flew from Montr?al to New York. When he arrived, the customs officer asked him: “Mr Godard: what are you coming here for? Business or pleasure?” Godard indicated the former. The officer asked what business he was in. “Unsuccessful movies,” Godard replied.

There is something paradoxical about his attitude toward cinema. He now seems despairing of the medium’s ability to reinvent itself or to have any kind of social impact. “It’s over,” he sighs. “There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.”

Yet he continues to study film and experiment as energetically as ever. He is brutally dismissive of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and of the spate of other recent films attacking globalisation, warmongering and US cultural imperialism. “They say they are attacking Bush, but they are not doing it in movie terms, but in words.” He calls Moore (in his idiosyncratic English) “just a Hollywood reporter man”, and compares him unfavourably with the great cin?ma v?rit? documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman. He even suggests that Moore’s work may actually have helped Bush. “It’s not enough to be against Adolf Hitler. If you make a disastrous movie, you’re not against Adolf Hitler.” (Whether he has actually seen Fahrenheit 9/11 is not in any way apparent.)

Nor is Godard especially flattering about the legions of admirers who make reference to him in their own movies or even name their companies after him. Quentin Tarantino, for example, calls his production company A Band Apart, in deference to Godard’s 1964 classic, Bande ? Part. “He says he admires me, but that’s not true,” Godard muses, then makes a cryptic remark about the torture and humiliation of prisoners by US guards in Iraq. “What is never said about Tarantino is that those prisons we are shown pictures of, where the torture is taking place, are called “reservoir dogs”. I think the name is very appropriate.”

Back in the 1950s, when he was writing for Cahiers du Cin?ma magazine, Godard was among the most provocative critics of his day. “The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray,” he wrote. Another of his gems: “You can describe Hiroshima Mon Amour as Faulkner plus Stravinsky.” Every film student knows quotes such as “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” and “The cinema is truth 24 times a second.”

He remains adept at coining polished one-liners, but now they tend to have a melancholic undertone. Ask him whether he still takes pleasure in Nicholas Ray’s films and he admits he doesn’t watch them any more. “It’s not possible to see the films. You can only see them on DVD, which I don’t like very much, because the screen is too small.”

He sounds equally disenchanted with film festivals. “In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it’s just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”

Living in Switzerland, he rarely sees movies, unless he is preparing a documentary like Histoire du Cin?ma. He claims he spends his spare time watching sport and reading old Jack London novels. He doesn’t keep in touch with many of the old colleagues with whom he worked in the Nouvelle Vague era. “It’s like with any family. You see your relatives and then you don’t. All of a sudden, they disappear and you don’t know what has become of them. Ten years ago, I felt nostalgic about that period, but not any more.”

No, he hasn’t seen Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-creates the heady days in Paris in 1968 and features its own homage to his film, Band ? Part. Isn’t he curious about a film so close to his own experiences? “It’s a past life,” is all he says. He likewise parries questions about future projects, joking that all he now has in mind is “to try to play some tennis and see my analyst”.

Despite Godard’s reputation as an aloof, Prospero-like figure, he is a surprisingly gracious interviewee. Not that Godard relishes journalists or authors poring over his private life. Even Colin McCabe’s enthusiastic biography, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70, meets with his disapproval. “I was not glad he did it. I asked him not to, but I can’t prevent someone from writing,” Godard says. “He knows nothing about me. Maybe he knows some of my movies … I was grateful to him for a time because he helped me do a few things, but that’s all. It’s not because you are friends at the time that you have the moral authorisation of entering the private life of another person.”

Godard’s treatment of his own collaborators hasn’t always been chivalrous. One thinks of Truffaut’s famous letter in which he suggested that if Godard ever made an autobiographical film, the appropriate title might be Once a Shit, Always a Shit. Then, there was Letter to Jane, the 1972 documentary he and Jean-Pierre Gorin made about Jane Fonda. A 52-minute deconstruction of a photo of Fonda in Hanoi, this was a cruel and mocking piece of agit-prop. “It was not a very good movie,” Godard acknowledges, but adds that it was “an attempt to analyse the political work of Jane Fonda”, not an attack on Fonda personally.

The director describes his new film as an optimistic one, with an underlying message that “reconciliation is possible” - but there is no disguising the his dismay about the state of his chosen profession. In one of the most poignant scenes in Notre Musique, we hear a voice asking him if small digital cameras can save cinema. There is a close-up of Godard’s face: he scowls and says nothing at all. The inference is clear: the battle is already lost. As our meeting ends, I put the question to him again. There is still no answer.