[Godard loves] defiantly simple definitions. Let me try one: a Godard film is one in which several people play a game which ends in a death. Yes, but that's not enough: let's try something even simpler. The cinema is made of pictures on a strip of moving celluloid through which light passes. The existences of Godard's characters are unstable; just as precarious is the enterprise of making such a film. Godard makes us feel his awareness of the constant fragility of his fiction, the illusoriness of his medium.

His films have been compared with Pop Art, and they share its planned obsolescence…. Godard's films are as mutable as his characters' grasp on their own existence. To accuse him of flippancy, to claim (as John Coleman did recently) that his switching of tones is just a stylistic affectation, is like telling Picasso that a bicycle seat is a bicycle...