Seeing Godard’s Masculine Feminine at Wesleyan effected some change in me, on a cellular level. Contrary to its not being “the total film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live,” as Jean-Pierre Léaud explains in some narration Godard, I later learned, cribbed from Georges Perec’s novel Things, my high school friends and I, watching it twenty years after it was made with older college students and the few cinephiles there were in central Connecticut, really did feel like we had discovered a secret key to life. Everything about it had an immediate and visceral effect. The sound cuts, with their audible jumps within scenes, did something to my brain that changed me. Léaud’s subsequent narration in the film about his job as a pollster probably had more to do with my actual subsequent professional life than I would like to admit: “Do vacuum cleaners sell? Do you like cheese in tubes? Do you know there’s a war in Iraq on?”