Godard entered the new century with this immense film, a sombre poem and testimony to the lack of understanding in our world. Commissioned by the Cannes Festival to commemorate the new millennium, it is far from celebratory in its review of the past century and its homage to cinema and history as weapons in the fight against forgetting. Ultimately, the origins of the 21st century and what we are today are the concentration camps, Vietnam, the turmoil in Yugoslavia, the Spanish Civil War, the sound of explosives and the cries of suffering. At one point we hear “You need to understand that men, as a crowd, always play someone else’s game, never one’s own”, amongst the many quotations which are not merely a stylistic affectation in Godard’s work, but a crucial matter of cinematographic creativity. This includes self-referencing the famous shot of Jean Seberg in “A bout de souffle” (1960) after a series of images from the Vietnam War: “Qu’est-ce que c’est dégueulasse?” Forty years later, “De l'origine du XXIème Siècle” may be the answer. (MD)