*Well, he oughta know.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/12/jean-luc-godard-film-socialisme
(...)
"A man eaten by his own myth
"Godard's diehard disciples see it not just as a metaphor for Europe – a ship of aging malcontents adrift in their own history – but as a manifesto for a "new republic of images", free from the dead hand of corporate ownership and intellectual property laws. This new cinema will be cut and pasted together in a world beyond copyright, where droit d'auteur will soon seem as medieval as droit du seigneur. Until now, Godard has shed little light on his creation, having gone awol just as the film was premiered at Cannes this year, leaving only the message: "Because of Greek-style problems, I cannot oblige you at Cannes. I would go to the death for the festival, but not a step further."
"This is the kind of cartoon Godard we are familiar with, the Godard of the grand gesture, the Godard who has been a stock character of intellectual jokes ever since he veered off into Maoist obscurantism after rewriting the rules of cinema in the early 1960s with films like A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Egged on by Raoul Coutard, his brilliant director of photography, he shot on the fly with handheld cameras and no script to speak of, opening the way not just for the French New Wave but a whole generation of independent directors the world over. Scorsese, Tarantino, Altman, Fassbinder, De Palma, Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Paul Thomas Anderson – in one way or another, they and countless others modelled themselves on this enigmatic Swiss director with an inexhaustible line in snappy aphorisms that will keep film theorists in work for centuries: "Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second"; "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."
"Somewhere along the way, though, the man appears to have been eaten by the myth...."
