JLG by JLG is subtitled "Self-Portrait in December": the enfant terrible turns sixty-four this year. Twenty-five years ago Godard declared, "My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof"; today his guns are turned toward his own status as a "living legend." JLG has been described as "an inebriating dialectical diary of words, sounds, images, and landscapes...(a) galloping reflection on the filmmaker's rapport with art, nature, politics, philosophy, history, and most of all, cinema." (David Rooney, Variety). It's the kind of list that only a Godard-no, only Godard-could attempt to assimilate, and he does so never leaving the seclusion of his Swiss lake area home. Rather, he delves into it, imbuing a photo of himself as a youth with the qualities of Proust's madeleine, youth that has a sad eye toward death. But it is the death of cinema that Godard really mourns. In doing so he chronicles its vitality in the dazzling, challenging, ongoing video series Histoire(s) du cinéma, made for Swiss television. We showed two parts-Toutes les histoires and Une histoire seule-in 1992 and are pleased to be able to continue with tonight's episodes: Only Cinema, in which Godard can understand A Place in the Sun's extraordinary close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor-her "dark happiness"-by realizing that director George Stevens had filmed the liberation of the concentration camps, for which Kodak entrusted him with the first 16mm color stocks. And Deadly Beauty, named after a film by Siodmak, with Ava Gardner, based on Dostoevsky's The Gambler: "My idea was that cinema is mostly boys filming girls, and it is proved fatal to this story."