New York Film Festival: The Dinosaur and the Baby

The Dinosaur and the Baby is a documentary film by André S. Labarthe from 1964 that paired the legendary Austrian film director Fritz Lang in conversation with the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard.  Lang was a revered idol in the pantheon of the "auteurs," ensconced there by Godard and his colleagues during their formative years when they were film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.  By 1963 Godard had already established himself as the true modernist of the "French New Wave," and had convinced Lang to play a mirror image of himself in his film Le Mépris. This documentary reunites the two directors in a discussion that ranges from camera placement to the use of improvisation.  Their conversation is interspersed with scenes from Godard's film as well as sequences from M, Lang's 1931 masterpiece about the manhunt for a child murderer. The film is being shown as part of the New York Film Festival.  The entire film is posted on YouTube, so if you are unable to attend the festival showing of this interesting documentary, you can watch it right here.