Reality comes to us in fragments. We open a door, a telephone starts ringing, a helicopter flies overhead, then a child enters the room carrying a picture of a fish. This is a 20-second reality-bite from my own life, as it happens. We constantly organise the information we receive into an ordered whole: I knew that opening the door did not cause the telephone to ring, so I simply took the call. I noted the sound of the helicopter, surmising that it was providing traffic reports, then ignored it. My six-year-old daughter is very proud of her drawings and makes a point of showing them to me. We observe the world with what is, effectively, editorial insight, comparable to that which is provided for us by cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard, defining force of the European art film, unfolded this multilayered mode of perception and eventually transferred it from its implicit role in his more widely known cinema releases into an explicit, defining function within his later, even more specialised works. Certain of these have had further incarnations as sound recordings on ECM: firstly the soundtrack of Nouvelle vague, and now this ambitious package, which is the complete soundtrack of Godard's video project presenting a somewhat impressionistic history of the form via poeticised, non-linear narrative.
The contents are formidable. There are five CDs, each mixing spoken text (largely, of course, in French) with sound plus expertly integrated music drawn from the ECM roster. Then there are four slipcased hardback books which carry the entire text in French, German and English, although the latter is a disappointingly lumpen translation which lets the whole enterprise down a little. There are also some arresting stills and an interview - also in English - which makes for an enlightening crib, but which is punitively concealed at the end of the fourth volume, so cheat and go there first. This will probably not be enough to sell this item to the non-francophone, although anyone who gets by on the subtitles of a Godard film would probably not care to part with the £70 or so required to purchase it. However, devotees of art cinema have no doubt already done a swift division sum and realised that this set is in fact very good value. Certainly any library or educational institution seriously involved with film should acquire a copy.'