Anticipating Film Socialisme, Part 2:

"When it comes to a love of the cinema, cinephilia, fond citations from old movies, he believed (as did everybody else) that he's 'been there, done that'. To such an extent in fact that his name is now emblematic of a passion which even his detractors have had to concede, namely a passion for the cinema. The name 'Godard'... designates an auteur but it is also synonymous with a tenacious passion for this region of the world of images that we call cinema...

A love of the cinema desires only cinema, whereas passion is excessive: it wants cinema but it also wants cinema to become something else,it even longs for the horizon where cinema risks being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis, it opens up its focus onto the unknown...

He is caught between a recent past and a near future (unlike prophets who can easily combine archaism and the future), he is crucified between what he can no longer do and what he cannot yet do, in other words, he is doomed to the present...

Godard has been so easily described as an 'enfant terrible', an 'avant-garde filmmaker', an 'iconoclast' and a 'revolutionary' that we have failed to notice that, right from the start, he respected the rules of the game (unlike Truffaut). In fact, Godard is troubled by the absence of rules. There is nothing revolutionary about Godard, rather, he is more interested in radical reformism, because reformism concerns the present..."

selections from Serge Daney's 'The Godard Paradox'