Is this an audiovisual essay or a mere blasphemy? Even though, if nobody else I’m sure Godard would approve this playful approach, I have serious doubts about the value of such ‘poetic’ video essay as ‘serious’ scholarship. It took me about 2 hours to create this clip. The idea was triggered by a quote from Carol Vernallis. According to her “[o]ne can’t just speed up Godard and put music against it" (2013: 4). Well, it seems one can just do that. The result is another thing, of course. I agree, on the one hand, that the clip could have been shorter (after all, within 1 minute everybody gets the idea), but, on the other hand, I couldn’t speed up more the images in order to keep them perceptually comprehensible, furthermore I wanted to ‘quote’ the whole movie and keep its speed synchronized with the theme song of The Benny Hill Show (James Q ‘Spider’ Rich and Homer ‘Boots’ Randolph III’s Yakety Sax from 1963). I looped the music around 2 and a half times to cover the sped up version of Godard’s 1960 À bout de souffle. Enjoy it!
