This extraordinary item appeared in the New Yorker last week (at least it appeared online last week; I no longer subscribe to the print weekly and also I killed the book industry,  just for fun). I only discovered it this morning because I do have other things to do, you know. Get off my iCloud, okay?

Richard Brody, the movies editor for that magazine’s “Goings On About Town” and a Godard scholar who’s written a very fine book called Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard compiled for the NYer a brief log of his experiences tracking down and watching Godard movies over the course of three decades, in the dark pre-Criterion days when you actually had to search out rare showings of his movies, and if you missed one you were just out of luck, buster. (In fact, some of the mid-70s movies he talks about are still unavailable on DVD and rarely shown.)

It’s a useful reminder, to me at least, that not everything that happened in the last decade or so has been a harbinger of impending doom leading us blindly down the primrose path towards our destruction. Or something like that. If you feel yourself in need of a brief refresher on the recent history of film, you should read Mr. Brody’s story.