9 MINUTES 43

It’s a sequence, an interlude in the film *Bande à part*, before the story takes a turn for the worse. From this daft idea sprang another equally daft one: to have seven actors and actresses from La Troupe du Théâtre de la Cité race through Godard’s entire body of work at breakneck speed.

What do these two mad dashes – separated by sixty years, which is practically a lifetime – tell us about ourselves? About who we were?
About who we are? About what we have become? About what we wanted to be?

More than half a century covered at the speed of light. Are those hurried young people of yesterday still, today, brothers and sisters, or complete strangers? And have we not, perhaps, also become complete strangers to ourselves?

Nine minutes and forty-three seconds – an eternity. For the audience members who have just entered the theatre, all we can say is a few words: cheap dragons, struggle, criticism, transformation, *Cahiers du cinéma*, the Algerian War, Technicolour, geometry, evil genius, editing, Palestine, seven hundred characters, semiology, 1968, contradiction, argument, language, revolution, the *Herald Tribune*…