JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December

Godard at his own house in Rolle, in Switzerland. December, winter, the edge of the lake. The camera moves around inside: books on the table, papers on the wall, the editing bench, the water through the window. Godard talks without explaining; he reads, he quotes, he leaves his own sentences unfinished. People come into the house now and then: a tax official, a blind woman working as an editor. The subject is what cinema is, what it might have been, and where the director stands in that history. Jean-Luc Godard directs; sixty-two minutes, and he is in it himself. The title calls it a self-portrait, but it is not a documentary in the usual sense; it is an essay film. He was working on his long Histoires du cinéma project in this period, and this film stands beside that work.