Phrases

when I admire a film | they say to me | yes, its very pretty | but its not | cinema | so | I asked myself | what it was Phrases presents the spoken language from six films by Jean-Luc Godard: Germany Nine Zero, The Kids Play Russian, JLG / JLG, 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema, For Ever Mozart, and In Praise of Love. Completed between 1991 and 2001, during what has been called Godards years of memory, these films and videos were made alongside and in the shadow of his major work from that time, the monumental Histoire(s) du cinema, complementing and extending its themes. Like Histoire(s), they offer meditations on, among other things, the tides of history, the fate of nations, the work of memory, the power of cinema, and the nature of love. Gathered here, in written form, they are words without images: not exactly screenplays, not exactly poetry, but something else entirely. Godard himself described them enigmatically: Not books. Rather recollections of films, without the photos or the uninteresting details Only the spoken phrases. They offer a little prolongation. One even discovers things that arent in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books arent literature or cinema. Traces of a film. In our era of ubiquitous video streaming, e-books, and social media, these traces of cinema raise compelling questions about the future of mediacinematic, literary, and otherwise.