Few know that in the late 1970s Jean-Luc Godard had intended to make a film about the history of cinema. Godard and long-time friend Serge Losique, founder of the Montreal World Film Festival, together envisaged a collaborative film that would be based around a series of lectures Godard gave to students at Concordia University, where Losique taught. For a variety of reasons the film was never made. But the lectures have survived and are currently held by the university archive. Preserving and making them accessible has been a long and often challenging ordeal. AI and Natural Language Processing tools have helped immensely in this endeavor. In particular, the use of AI to transcribe and sub-title source material with dialogue frequently inaudible to the average human ear has provided the prospect of recovering and purveying more of the footage than was previously imagined.
