What struck me most about King Lear is the fact that it is a film essentially about reconstruction, a marked departure from Godard’s usual proclivities toward deconstruction. With King Lear, Godard attempts to reconstruct the famous Shakespeare play rather than pulling it apart piece by piece to see what he can make of it. Instead, Godard uses the pretext that all art is lost after Chernobyl, and that the only way to recover it is to somehow reconstruct it. Of course, this is Godard, so it’s not as simple as all of that.

Godard is using this pretext in order to offer up his take on art and the old addage that there’s nothing new under the sun. In reconstructing Lear, Godard is essentially hashing over old terrain, albeit in a radically new form. As Norman Mailer (who, we are shown, is the “writer” of the film) says at the beginning of the film, the only way to make a film out of Lear is to make it as a gangster picture. Basically, plots and narratives are always used and re-used, there’s no getting around it. Narrative has been dying a long death for centuries, a fact which Godard has himself contributed to.