DE L'ORIGINE DU XXIèME SIèCLE

You are all the sudden overwhelmed by so much beauty: a landscape, a tree, pedestrians, an aria and a young girl on the bicycle. A little later a bus is silently traversing the night, as if it was floating; you may be thinking of a prisoner’s transport during the war in Yugoslavia – a mysterious trace, that is losing itself in the darkness. This is the beginning of <![CDATA[<i>]]>De l’origine du XXIe siècle<![CDATA[</i>]]> (The Origin of the 21st Century) – an applicator, that was the opening film of the Cannes Film Festival 2000 – an attempt, he says.
“I tried to cover up the memories of terrible explosions and crimes through children’s faces and the tears and smiles of women.” The attempt was of course doomed to be a failure, because in this retrospection there are no remedies for the abhorrences of the passed century. Godard makes the 20th century go by in reverse; his floats of images consist of armies and fugitives, of cannonades and prisoners, of freight trains and dead bodys, of conquests and occupations, of humiliation and torture. And when one scene is searching for a lost century, then it does not find sweet memories, but an era that is lost, because violence and war demolished it.

Will be screened together with <filmlink id=\"2596\">La Vie commence demain</filmlink>.