By turns vicious and plaintive, this history of French cinema was commissioned by the British Film Institute to mark the centenary of film (an event which Godard characteristically rejects as a capitalist ruse). It first sets up Michel Piccoli, the star of Contempt and countless French classics and president of the French centenary celebrations, as a straw man, and then proceeds into dense, elegiac mode, paying homage through clips, texts, and stills to Godard's heroes: Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, André Bazin, Eric Rohmer, et al. Ruing the state of French cinema and the mortality of the art form in general, this idiosyncratic history is also malicious and self mocking.