Les Enfants jouent à la Russie

September, 2022, war, from west to east and from east to west, continuity of history, continuity of the film reel, which is born out of discontinuity, out of montage,...out of war, war of image against image, word against word, Slav against Slav. In a situation where on September 13, 2022, the reel of life of the "last utopian of the 20th century" was broken, as the obituary in Liberation put it, it is sad to note that the continuity of the world once again prevails over the utopian element of the freedom discontinuity - the war is being fought between two nation states, the vestige of the 19th century, and not for the reasons of Godard's main metaphorical idea of the film, namely that the West has been at war with Russia since the times of Napoleon and Hitler because it is a country where fiction is born as such and the West has stopped dreaming; in the same way, today's predominant film production revolves around decayed totems, whose Balzac and Hollywood foundations of linear continuity have ideologically rotted, still in the 19th century, while the Godardian modus operandi towards them appears as a pure disrupter of the unbridled flourishing of freedom. If Godard is cast here as Prince Myshkin, then he, who also died without offspring and without successors - leaving behind no school and no epigones because nobody was able to even unsuccessfully imitate his style - played the role of an idiot to the world, just as the character of a sad wise fool is played, whose work will perhaps be understood only by the future, which we ourselves will create, and better, anew, which we will not accept, but which we will find ourselves. Did Godard, therefore, die without true descendants? How will, as per his once expressed wish, the epitaph on his tombstone sound: "Au contraire." - On the contrary. (16.09.2022)