Jean-Luc Godard Pays Homage to Jacques Rivette: March 2016

— for the Cinémathèque Française, citing the interview "Le secret et la loi" ["The Secret and the Law"] in the March 2016 issue of the Cahiers du cinéma — (my translation) — ===

Ever since Parmenides, and his duel

between being and not-being, the

greatest minds have jabbered

on and on about this

brotherly squabble, wringing hands over

Socrates' alphabet, in vain until

Google:

power and glory,

liberty and fraternity,

peace and war,

infinity and totality,

penury and democracy,

terror and virtue,

poetry and truth,

et cetera,

I actually for a second wanted to add

nature and metaphor

to all this charivari,

believing to grasp reality, like

it's said by the pros and the

amateurs of the profession,

mixing shot and reverse-shot,

but this evades one

last time all those

vanities, that the little boy

from Rouen, having in the end taken back

his mind from his movie life,

as a man simple and complicated

as he was, a match for

himself and justly proclaiming:

secret and law — for the screen

did not hide anything from anything.

—Jean-Luc Godard, March 2016

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