“when I admire a film | they say to me | yes, it’s very pretty | but it’s 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 Godard’s “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 aren’t in the films in them, which is rather powerful for a recollection. These books aren’t 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 media—cinematic, literary, and otherwise.

Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) was a filmmaker and theorist. His groundbreaking body of work as a director and screenwriter included Breathless, Contempt, and Pierrot le Fou.