Godard uses filmic means of expression as symbols and depending on what he wants to achieve, he uses totals and close ups, long scenes precipitating cuts, inserted titles and the techniques of cinema verite.

In his autobiographical meditation JLG/JLG: autoportrait de décembre, from 1994, there are juxtapositions of shots of his house in Rolle, in Switzerland, with film clips of Godard surrounded by books and film tapes. He looks like a lonely wanderer through the world of quotes in which everything points to, evokes or reminds us of something else. Even though the quotes are not just from films - equally represented are the dialogues from Nicholas Ray’s film, Beethoven’s melodies and a sentence from Dostoyevsky’s work - it is evident that for Godard film is the only way to comprehend things, thoughts and concepts. He believes that editing or rather juxtaposition of different elements is the basic characteristic of films. Since elements placed in front of a camera belong to some other whole, whether cultural or any other, they unavoidably become quotes: "Everything is a quote. When I shoot the Triumphal arch, it is a quote." In Godard’s films, what is represented depends so much on representational codes that Rivette described them as intertextual terrorism. In fact, Godard directs our attention to the constitutive parts of every kind of film representation. Godard weaves the multitude of different audiovisual elements into unexpected but harmonious wholes and uses filmic means of expression as symbols. Depending on what he wants to achieve, he uses totals and close ups, long scenes precipitating cuts, inserted titles and the techniques of cinema verite. At the same time, he takes full advantage of his actors’ talent (for example Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Michel Piccoli) or the iconic personalities of Fritz Lang or Samuel Fuller. He activates the intertextual connections to the film tradition in different ways - from a direct juxtaposition of scenes of Renée Falconetti from Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d'Arc to close ups of Anna Karina. Or for example, Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution and Belmondo’s impersonation of Bogart, more subtle scenes such as paraphrases of Hawks’s films in his Bande a part, or his film Le mépris that Godard described as "Antonioni’s film that was made by Hawks", all the way to complex elaboration of some directors’ poetics, such as Rosselini’s. Godard’s films from his earliest and most famous phase (1959-1965) that we will see in this program highlight the fact that it is extremely important to view every film as a part of the whole history of film, and as a work influenced by many different stylistic, cultural and ideological standpoints. In that context, Truffaut’s famous saying that “there is film before and after Godard” makes sense.
(Tomislav Brlek)