by MATTHEW HAYS

Heralded as either a cinematic genius or a pretentious fop, Jean-Luc Godard has proven one of the most controversial filmmakers in the history of the medium. His narrative-defiant, often abrasive style has set about to turn cinema on its head, forcing audiences to question what it is they are engaged in as spectators in front of the big screen.

In particular, Godard has worked to analyze the social and ideological implications of cinema through the philosophies of Bertolt Brecht, the poet, author, playwright and political refugee (forced to flee several regimes for his beliefs), who famously preached that radical messages could only be delivered through art if the art itself was dissected. If it sounds like I'm writing a paper for film school, that's because I'm basically regurgitating one of my papers from film school.

Which is the perfect place to segue to the birthing of Godard's latest project, a hugely ambitious, three-part analysis of the history of cinema and its intersection with history itself, logically titled Histoire(s) du cinéma. The local angle on this story is that Godard was struck with the idea for this project while delivering a series of lectures at Concordia University in 1979. Apparently, Godard came at the behest of World Film Fest impresario Serge Losique; those who attended the lectures say they were brilliant, dumbfounding and wildly incoherent - much like one of his movies. He occasionally delivered his lecture wearing army fatigues, chain smoking throughout.

The project that Godard completed some 20 years later feels a lot like that. Not surprisingly, the man who has made non-linearity his mode of anti-storytelling approaches the medium in a deeply personal, unconventional fashion: there are rapid montages, fleeting images of film stars, genocide and silent-era porn - a bricolage of clips from everything from A Place in the Sun to Tex Avery cartoons.

Also not a shocker is the fact that Godard takes a very grim view of cinema and its place in history. There was a time, one gleans from this rather dour crank's perspective, when cinema was made full of a sense of moral urgency, but no more. In true existentialist form, Godard suggests that cinema - often held up as the new religion of the 20th century - is now dead. The historical implications are clear, especially when Godard uses images of the Holocaust to indicate that, despite the reach of the medium, cinema actually helped the Nazis more than it hindered them.

Neatly pointing up all of this pessimism about the failure of progressive art and the cinematic medium itself is the fact that Histoire(s) du cinéma is projected in video. We see shots of Godard's hands, fiddling with celluloid (in between chomps on a stogie), as he insinuates that all things filmic are lost to a new and not improved digital universe. As Godard declares, in his own histrionic manner, the end of cinema is nigh.

Episode One of Histoire(s) du cinéma screens May 20–22, Episode Two, May 23–24, Episode Three, May 25–26 at Cinéma du Parc

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