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IN MAY 2018, A SHORT VIDEO CLAIMING TO BE THE NEWEST work by Jean-Luc Godard began making the rounds. Entitled Vent d’ouest (“Wind from the West”), it was notable for two things. First, it looked like a Godard film; that is, it had the kinds of things—images, clips, texts, references to his own career, his own voiceover—that his works since Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) tend to be comprised of. Second, Vent d’ouest was about something happening at that particular moment in time, namely the dismantling of the ZAD: the community set up in 2008 to protest an airport in the west of France. Indeed, much of the video was comprised of the surveillance footage of the destruction of the encampment. Watching the video, it was hard to remember the last time that Godard had been so emphatically topical.
was, it turned out, a fake (although, as Orson Welles would remind us, that does not mean it was bad). But the same month, May 2018, saw the release of what was verifiably Godard’s newest film, , which premiered at Cannes and won the first “Special Palme d’Or” in the festival’s history. What is striking is that it shares a good deal with : it looks like a Godard film, and it deals with the current moment.
