‘Godard par Godard’ Review: A Documentary Rich with Behind-the-Scenes Footage Captures How the Godard Persona Was as Fascinating as His Films

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic One of the grand paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, an outlier, a filmmaker who guarded his purity and always looked askance at “the system,” yet because the nature of filmmaking is that it requires a lot of money, and is connected to fame, and produces images that can spread with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; a poet of cinema who made himself a celebrity; an artist who bridged the larger-than-life, old-school ethos of movies with the forbidding imperatives of the avant-garde.

All of that contradiction is on full display, with a luscious kind of resonance, in “Godard par Godard,” an hour-long documentary, written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022.

The documentary was shown along with Godard’s final film, the 20-minute-long “Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’.” All of which sounds like one of those Cannes–only special events, but au contraire: This is a program that was meant to be seen by the world at large, and with any luck it will be distributed that way.

It’s an homage that invites us to look back, with fond fascination, on all the cinema Godard gave us, and on who he really was.