Godard Work Will Be Featured in 4-Day Video Event at AFI

Between Friday and Sunday the National Video Festival will present at the American Film Institute a whopping 120 hours of programming, including 22 hours shot for television by Jean-Luc Godard, the one major film maker who has plunged headlong into the new medium.

A sampling of those hours reveals some of his most complex and challenging work.

Despairing of the commercial cinema by 1968, Godard turned to highly political collective film making and finally to video, not reentering mainstream films until the ‘80s and now continuing to work in both media.

Even if you’re unable to see this entire offering, it’s rewarding to see it in part.

It is important, however, to see the work chronologically because, on one level, it becomes a portrait of an artist coming to terms with himself and the world in which he lives.

In collaboration with Anne-Marie Mieville, Godard devoted most of 1976-78 to two series, “Six Times Two/On and Below Communication” and “France/Detour/Two/Children,” which the British Film Institute’s Colin MacCabe has declared as “probably the most profound and beautiful material ever produced for television.”

The first begins with an unseen Godard interviewing applicants for work at a French film and television company. His sometimes outrageous, sometimes hilarious questions go way beyond the usual, beyond even evoking what working people’s lives are like (a la Studs Turkel) to probe the role of television in shaping our image of reality.

From a Marxist-Leninist stance, Godard sees television as reinforcing the existing social structure in all its political and social inequities, as an instrument that divides and oppresses rather than unifies. (He asks a cleaning woman whether she thinks Russian and Chinese women would be interested in a documentary on her and her problems--and whether it would be a profitable venture for the company to produce, the kind of film that would help pay her salary.)

In “France/Detour/Two/Children,” he goes even further, to probe the very nature of existence and the role of the media in shaping our understanding. His points of departure are interviews with two appealing children, a girl of perhaps 10 or 12 and a boy somewhat younger (and both typically French in their solemn sense of self-possession), at home, in school and at play. In full force are Godard’s trademark chapter headings (and subheadings)--i.e., Truth, Darkness, Light, Physics, History, etc.

Again, this series is permeated with the artist’s need to bring unity to experience. Godard’s concern for the everyday and for the workplace continues in his “Scenario for the Film ‘Passion,’ ” an explication for his 1981 film about people making a movie and their impact upon an activist factory worker (Isabelle Huppert, who significantly complains that the movies “never show people at work”). Gradually, it evolves into an almost religious celebration of the cinema itself; at one point he says, “Turn a camera movement into a prayer.” Also to be on view, but unfortunately unsubtitled, is “Special Cinema: ‘Every Man for Himself,’ ” in which Godard discusses his “comeback” film with Huppert and her role in it.

The Godard works conclude appropriately with his brand-new “A Soft Conversation on Hard Subjects,” in which we discover, with unexpected charm, Godard and the attractive Mieville--she could pass for Brigitte Fossey’s sister--sharing their lives (in handsome, functional living quarters) as well as their work (shades of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). There’s the now slightly potbellied and balding Godard goofing off while Mieville irons; a trip to the country where he recites a beautiful poem of the “despair” of art and the desire of the artist to create that which is imperishable. Then the couple settle down to a long dialogue on what cinema means to each of them.

Godard also can be seen interviewing Fritz Lang in the delightful “Dinosaur and the Baby” for French television, made at the time Lang played himself--more or less--in Godard’s “Contempt” (1964). Godard--the “baby”--asks Lang, the self-described “dinosaur,” to define what a director is. “A man who works hard and likes his profession,” says Lang, resisting some flattery on Godard’s part. “A great surgeon--that’s a great artist.” As the two directors discuss censorship and compare working methods, we watch clips from Lang’s masterpiece, “M.” Lang’s replies are laced with a gruff affection for Godard, which endured until his death in 1976. Florence Dauman will provide simultaneous translation.For full information: (213) 856-7787.