Out of an extremely interesting pairing of influential film personalities comes the most obnoxious interview I have ever seen. Godard cannot refrain from "intellectually" strong- arming another filmmaker if in contact with them. I have never seen an interview as terrible as this one. Not only does Godard torture the viewer on purpose, beginning right after he questions Allen about his then recent release of Hannah and Her Sisters with abrupt recurring title cards meant to scoff at Allen's film and segueing without direction into random and exasperatingly repetitive moments where music swells to the point where it drowns out the clearly uncomfortable Woody and displays inexplicable freeze frames of indeterminable screen time. Godard shows no respect to Allen at all, yet Allen shows a great deal of politeness and respect to Godard even when Godard belts out questions in French without allowing his off-camera translator to catch up or be heard over his voice. Woody makes the effort to mask his discomfort, while Godard seems determined only to sustain that discomfort by employing indirect tactics designed to catch him off-guard.<br /><br />Godard has now to my knowledge brandished immature affronts to two of the most talented filmmakers working today, Steven Spielberg, accusing him of capitalizing on the tragedy of the Holocaust with Schindler's List, and Woody Allen, for an unclear reason, not to mention Jane Fonda because of her political activism, just subsequent to directing her in one of his films, which itself served as political activism. I believe that, based on what I have seen of Godard's work, which is entirely self-regarding and faux artsy even when it is good, that he is a jealous intellectual snob. He snipes at superior filmmakers for reasons that are only projections of his own faults. Guilty of selling out in order to market his film Contempt in the United States, he falsely blasts Spielberg for selling out. And frankly, Woody and Fonda have potentially similar personalities, people who make artistic careers out of pushing their audiences further toward a more progressive collective conscious, whether incidentally or on purpose. This is something Godard wants to do with his work, if only in his own condescending way, and I believe he finds their similar prompts to be challenges.<br /><br />What made me anxious to see this film, the longest and most frustrating 26 minutes of my life, was my interest in seeing two greatly admired filmmakers make each other's acquaintance and interact. I believe that they are polar opposites of each other, not in their innate personalities but in their intentions. Out of Allen's entire filmography, including the movies he has made since this terrible episode, he has never made a pretentious film, but strangely the aim he claims with an indifferent attitude are behind his creative process are admittedly self-indulgent. Godard's every effort, no matter how dormantly, panders only to him and leaves the audience to concede to the humble illusion of being below it, yet he claims with suavity to be making social, political and cultural statements as well as the idea inherent in the French New Wave movement, which was to challenge the convention of cinema and perhaps reinvent it. Why is it that Allen almost always succeeds in doing what Godard claims to do without purposely incongruous editing, contrived defiance of sincere film techniques and unfocused stories? Inversely, why is it that Godard succeeds with Allen's claims but has never made a film without a pompous affectation? And then why does Godard have the big head where Woody knowingly demotes himself?