At the time I found It begins with a question. Why does the West want to invade Russia? The response: because it is the home of fiction, and the West has run out of stories to tell. To achieve this, Godard creates a film that is part detective thriller, part video essay; where the staggeringly apocalyptic declaration, that the future is "at stake", establishes a sense of foreboding more befitting a Hollywood disaster movie than the kind of films Godard is best known for.
However, The Kids Play Russian is in many ways as much a disaster-movie as anything produced by Irwin Allen; a film where not only is the future at stake, but where Europe has been condemned to death.
The style is perfect for presenting the various lines of thought and discussion that pass back and forth - between the soundtrack and the pictures on screen - and the often disorientating montage of images, in which each cut seems to work on a vague level of visual symbolism, or association.
One of the most obvious of such motifs is the stock footage inserts of seagulls or other such birds whenever the narrator discusses the concept of freedom. It also illustrates Godard's sense of humour, with each cut in many ways becoming a kind of visual pun, like the combination of shots in Histoire s du cinema, in which Godard illustrates the triumph of the Hollywood blockbuster over the independent spirit of the art-film by cutting to a pornographic insert of penetrative anal-sex.
Such stylistic devices complement Godard's recurrent interest in quotes, puns, anagrams and word games, as well as the general aesthetic appropriation of various cultural or literary iconography into the framework of the film.
