Mai en décembre (Godard en Abitibi)
2000 · 25m · Canada
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard travels from protest-era Montreal to a television station in Rouyn-Noranda that has given him free rein to experiment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Godard in the Quebec hinterland sounds like a legitimately weird historical footnote, but the essay-film treatment flattens what could've been a genuinely disorienting document into something too reverent—it wants to celebrate the experiment rather than let the experiment breathe on its own terms.
A film that understands its own genealogy: the essay-documentary form, the archive, the relationship between avant-garde ambition and institutional constraint—Godard en Abitibi positions itself deliberately within that lineage, and the restraint in how it handles 1968 Montreal and a regional TV station's radical gesture suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about form and historical responsibility.
The decision to shoot in a remote Abitibi station rather than Paris or a major center reframes everything—that geographic choice, and the formal economy required to make 25 minutes of contemplation work without fanfare, is what makes this land instead of disappear.