Subtitles:

• English (burned-in)

Extras:

Comment ça va? is one of the most dense and abstracted of the several essayistic videos Jean-Luc Godard made in collaboration with his partner Anne-Marie Miéville during the latter half of the 1970s. As with much of Godard and Miéville's work from around this time, this video concerns itself primarily with meta questions: questions about how to produce a video or a film, how to show certain things that they're interested in showing, how to communicate their ideas. They explore these subjects through the loosely structured story of an editor at a Communist newspaper (Michel Marot), who collaborates with the radical Odette (played by Miéville herself, though her face never appears) in order to make an educational video about the production of a newspaper.

Despite the blatant reflexivity of the film's premise, Comment ça va might have been a remarkably straightforward film about a newspaperman making an instructional video about the paper business with his partner. But as much as Godard has always been fascinated with process, the single question out of the journalistic "Five Ws" that is truly addressed here is "Why?" The complexity that will eventually push the film into some of the director's most challenging work to this point (no mean feat) is prompted by an almost childlike simplicity on behalf of the radical woman, Odette (Miéville), who oversees this project with the Communist newspaper editor (Michel Marot). Though her questions are complex, political, philosophical and aesthetic, they ultimately boil down to that simplest yet most agonizing of queries.

Gary Tooze

June 25th, 2013