Breathless his first feature--a witty, romantic innovative chase picture with a Parisian hood and the America girl who casually turns him in to the police when he becomes an inconvenience. The film is light and playful and off-the-cuff, the characters just don't give a damn.

Godard was the first filmmaker to make movies reflect themselves, to invite the audience to take the props and levers in hand and manipulate their own emotions. To put it plainly, Godard would make a gangster picture like Breathless (1960) in which the hero was deliberately imitating movie myths, constantly checking the mirror to make sure he was smoking a cigarette like Bogart, hiding out with his young lover (Jean Seberg) and saying things to her like "You're a pretty little bitch, you know that" Not because he was motivated by passion, but because by grace of a pop-culture overload, that's what he figures Young Lovers on the Lam ``do" and ``say." This was an incredibly fresh statement in 1960. With time it has even proved prophetic: we live in an age dominated by movie myths. All of our finest filmmakers have, since Godard, become consciously absorbed in the mining of these mythologies, whether to entertain (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars) or to explore their life-and-death effects on the human soul (Badlands, Mean Streets, Cotton Club). I seriously doubt Godard likes many of the gnarled offspring of baby boomers that have flown out in the years since he opened this Pandora's Box, but that's not the point: he freed filmmakers to face the consequences of their work. If  he's still too abstract to be popular, and his disciples are sentimental too often to be as original as he, that's as it should be. To borrow Richard Ellen's elegant sentence on James Joyce, we're still struggling to be Godard's contemporaries. This festival includes the cream of his work: Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Masculine/Feminine (1966), Weekend (1967) and Passion (1982). The most special event is the showing of Le Petit Soldat {The Little Soldier, 1963). Banned in France for over three years because of its candid commentary on the volatile French Algerian conflict and unseen in this country since 1967, Le Petit Soldat centers on the activities of a poker-faced terrorist and his passion for a beautiful woman who may be informing on him (Anna Karina). I have to say that word ``passion" with a smile. Like so much of Godard, this film is bleached of emotion: the narrator's ,ectionless voice wins us over with his repeated insistence, not with any outward show of feeling. Out of this odd, deadpan quality springs Godard's energy and his humor. He's like a mirthless Buster Keaton, making Sartre's Being and Nothingness into a two-reeler: we laugh not at any gags but at the eerie affirmation of the timing.

The problem is how not for me to let my veiw take over of what it should be, but to take the personality of the people in the film (like Renoir) at the films expense to keep a clear idea of what I want to show U.S film makers making the film as well as the film people being film to tell and show when we try and change it. Does the presents of the film maker change the nature of the film event

This theoretical critique of film was elaborated as developments in video technology offered the imagemaker previcously undreamed-of control over the image. ``Some Filmmakers tend to despise television as an institution and video as a medium: Television is ruled by scheduling and the regular delivery of predictably popular and bland programs and video provides a poor-quality image; only in film can one innovate at the cutting edge of popular taste or produce images that are valued as much for their quality as their content. There are few filmmakers who have challenged these conventional pieties to engage either the medium or the institution. The outstanding exception is Jean-Luc Godard, whose work recorded their self-criticism session throughout the seventies was commis- \ video, but the equipment was not yet visioned by television and shot largely on adaptable enough and the film finall video. Iacked this technological apotheosis of

The first-stage of this engagement was \ ninist practices. By the early seventie crudely exploitative. When Godard abanded however, diffchnhologic.abil!tmyp fanesca crudely exploitatlve. when distribution Systems of  both systems of distribution in 1968, he turned to television to finance his Marxist-Leninist experiments in sound and image. European television companies queued up to commission a Godard documentary on their country and then predictably declared as unschedulable the resulting ``Dziga-Vertov" production, which inevitably concerned itself  with the very problem of representation.These television productions were shot on 16mm film. In the early seventies, Godard turned to video itself. As early as 1967. Cinema and television. When Godard moved out of Paris in 1972, he intended to equip a video studio and produce cassettes that would circulate through networks of friends and political sympathizers. But these networks never provided sufficient unds for production, and Godard's whole strategy of building completely alternative distribution circuits seemed doomed. That strategy relied totally on the voluntaristic dard turneu to belief that political commitment could he had tried to use video cameras and transform all activities. cassette recorders in his film La Chinoise: \ These beliefs were challenged by Go-The small group of Parisian students whil- \ dard's collaboration with Anne-Marie Mie-ing away their summer in a bourgeois ville. In opposition to the Maoist call to apartment as they wait to accomplish an ``put politics in command,"  These television programs, from their totally original form to their almost untranslatable titles, pose enormous difficulties and compioxities for the viewer, but they are probably the most profound and beautiful material ever produced for television.

Sur et sous la comrnunication" analyzes the processes and problems of communication. Godard splits each program into two: The first part is a visual essay on some aspect of contemporary life the second a prolonged interview with an individual that comments, often in a very complicated fashion, on the previous material. For example, one program starts with a section entitled "Photo et cie,' which investigates the economics of the  photographic image. In one sequence Godard takes the French equivalent of Newsweek and removes every page that contains an advertising image. By the end of the sequence, there is no magazine left.

The root of Goddards obsession is a compulsion to break with stereotypes because even those pages that do not contain advertising images are connected to those that do. In another sequence Godard asks why those who appear in news images are not paid while those who appear in advertising images are. The answer, of course, is the difference between the ``ordinary person" and the ``professional model.' But Godard views this division into professional and nonprofessional as the root of our unhealthy relation to the image. Instead of a simple ``representation of reality," Godard sees a whole network of economic relationships that divide the consumption and production of images a division profoundly damaging because it results in our failure to understand the editing and construction that underlie the images of ourselves. Since we all consume images, we should all be engaged in their production. Godard is thus deeply contemptuous of  those leftist critiques that focus on private media ownership. Godard's prescription is far more radical: We must alter the structures of imagemaking until we are all producers as well as consumers.

This utopian ideal is counterpointed by the second part of the program, a long interview with an amateur filmmaker named Marcel. Marcel regards his filmmaking as a hobby a leisure pursuit and his only subject matter is the flora and fauna of the Alps. Other kinds of images are left to the "professionals." Here Godard's critique of the image develops into a critique of all our social relationships. Godard wants to abolish the divorce between work and leisure that is so crucial to modern capitalist societies. To develop a healthy relationship to the image, Godard argues, we must all become imagemakers who merge production and consumption, work and leisure.In the second program, Jean-Luc Godard is interviewed by two left-wing journalists. As he attempts to answer their questions without ever accepting the terms in which they are posed, poems from Brecht stressing the artist's solitude are printed on the screen, creating a counterpoint to Godard's useless, despairing attempt to make the journalists share his obsession with the image. At the root of Godard's obsession, the very basis of his extreme solitude, is an absolute compulsion to break with stereotype, to question all the assumptions, both technical and aesthetic, that govern the organization of sound and image.

In Jean-Luc Godard also discusses the revolt of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin, a major event in the unsuccessful Russian rebellion of 1905. These sailors have become an international symbol of revolution, but Godard argues that, in becoming a stereotyped image, the sailors' original intent has been forgotten. Godard claims that when the sailors protested the death of their comrades, they were simply communicating what had happened not trying to make a revolution. They invented a new form the demonstration but once this form ossified into an image of revolutionary politics, the original message was lost. Here Godard propounds a truly radical. Programmers aired Godard's videos in a ghettoized great filmmaker formated aesthetic: Each attempt to communicate must involve new forms.

This radical aesthetic makes these programs both extremely original and extremely difficult. Television constantly places us in relation to the image through direct address, telling us what we are about to see and why. Godard eschews direct address completely we constantly find ourselves overhearing discussions or being present at interviews without any of  the ``placing" to which we are accustomed. The interviews themselves are shot from a single-camera position without the shot variations particularly the shot-reverse shot that television uses. Godard wants us to ``attend" to the image and sound, whereas conventional television ``engages our interest" through direct address and visual variety. Godard leaves it to the viewers to interest themselves in the arguments they hear and the images they see.

This is television for the committed viewer, not the program scheduler. Not surprisingly, these programs were broadcast on a minority channel. But Godard and Mieville themselves criticized these first programs for demanding close attention over too long a period of time and providing too little structure for the viewer. Their second project of  twelve half-hour programs, France-Tour- Detour- Deux-Enfants, combined their startlingly original material with a rigorously repeated format.