The Thinking Machine #97

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

In 1958, Jean-Luc Godard, writing as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, was faced with an impossible object: Montparnasse 19, a biopic of the artist Modigliani. Max Ophüls died before making it, and Jacques Becker, under some duress (and only two years away from his own passing), took the reins.

Godard turned his review into a poetic eulogy to imperfection: “I would give the whole of postwar French cinema for that one shot, badly acted, badly composed, but sublime …”. But was he really seeing the evidence on screen?