Moi je ne veux rien dire, j'essaie de montrer, ou faire sentir, ou permettre de dire autre chose après.
- Jean-Luc Godard¹

By now I recognise that compassionate look students reserve for when they think I'm exaggerating. For instance, when I pause Psycho (1960) on the brief close-up of the plate on Marion's car and segue into an exposé on the obsessive-compulsive subtext of Hitchcock's oeuvre. Or when I wax lyrical about the vertiginous depths of the opaque surface after a full-length screening of Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1964) or Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). And, yes, also when I've come to Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) in my crash course on Jean-Luc Godard. However, the tolerant magnanimity of these youthful film-makers-to-be - I can hear them thinking: Herman will switch back to Mad Men, YouPorn or Palestinian film soon enough - doesn't last much past a showing of Chapitre 1(a): Toutes les histoires, the first part of Godard's four-and-a-halfhour video work. Involuntary exposure to this radial, multiple and multilayered piece in an educational setting at times generates bafflement, boredom and resentment. In these students' defence, most were only just born when the French film-maker started his magnum opus, a year before the Berlin Wall came down. Yet that generational distance doesn't quite explain the vexation: Godard's films from the early 1960s do excite almost unanimous approval from the same target audience. The irked reaction to his later work - Week-end from 1967 seems to be the cut off point - seems to me rather due to its dogged pedagogy, which wags a finger without ever really