Letter to Freddy Buache
This movie missive to the head of the Cinematheque Suisse, Freddy Buache, made by repatriated Swiss Jean-Luc Godard, was commissioned by the city fathers and mothers of Lausanne to commemorate the city's 500th anniversary. Godard uses Lausanne as an inspiration for an 11-minute work of art, “the city as a collection of lines, compulsions... The town is fiction,” Godard's voice asserts over the camera's slow motion street scenes, pans of the countryside and quick dips into Lake Geneva. Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman writes, “Letter to Freddy Buache has a master's sureness of form and strikes me as the best Godard film since Numero Deux.”