I mean, I don't know if there's necessarily a direct one-to-one correlation between this film and the site and sound pole, but it is interesting because this movie was commissioned as part of a series of films by the British Film Institute, coincidentally, the institution that does the site and sound pole.

In 1995, they commissioned a series called Century of Cinema, where they invited famous filmmakers from around the world to write and direct a documentary about their country's national cinema.

But John Lick-Ga-Dard and Anne-Marie-Miaville were commissioned to do the episode on France, and what they came up with technically fulfills the mandate.

A certain number of clips we are seen here. French film history is chronicled,

but instead of an attempt to encapsulate and celebrate French film history, they use it as a

platform to question many of the assumptions of the whole century of cinema project, as well as

what they perceive as the disappearance of cinema from the popular memory.

I mean, I think the first part of the film is intellectually interesting when they're having

the My Dinner with Andre style conversation. But the second part of the film was more emotionally

interesting to me because it managed to be, I think, both, for me anyway, a celebration of French cinema,

you know, all these wonderful little clips from different films over different decades.

It managed to celebrate all of those.

And despite the, you know, sort of somewhat pedantic and abstract line of questioning near the

beginning of the film, I mean, the film really does believe clearly these are special.

There's special pieces of art. They meant something and, you know, they still mean something.

At the same time, the film is clearly, you know, a lament. There's kind of an elegiac quality to, you know, maybe the last third of it.

I mean, particularly the part that you mentioned earlier where there are different lines about film criticism extracted from the prose of different critics. I realized I took it down,

but I didn't, uh, I didn't actually make a note of, uh, who said it or where it appeared in my

notes. It might have been from Godard himself, but somewhere in the movie, the line appears,

cinema is mortal and it is natural that it should stop.

And I mean, there's such an undercurrent of tragedy to that.

Certainly when I saw it on screen, it very much felt like the film was actually conveying that

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