Comment ça va? (How Is It Going?) (1978)

Comment ça va is a troubling examination of the politics of representation by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The film, framed as a letter from a communist newspaper editor (M. Marot) to his son, is about the editor's attempt to collaborate with his typist (Anne-Marie Miéville) on a video about their newspaper and printing press. Their disagreements about how to edit the tape lead to an extended conversation about how images are chosen by the media, and the differences between words and pictures. Over the course of that conversation, the film considers images of the struggle against dictatorship in Portugal, a French strike, and the death of Francisco Franco. This formally difficult film investigates the way newspapers make meaning and in whose interests they do so. Comment ça va was the third collaboration between long-term film making partners Godard and Miéville. As in their first two films, Ici et ailleurs (Here And Elsewhere) and Numéro deux (Number Two), the use of text and video images in the film foreshadows Godard's work in his television series Histoire(s) du cinema ~ Louis Schwartz, Rovi