Two essential items in Jean-Luc Godard’s much-neglected video work. The first, made in 1982, is one of the video treatments he started making for each of his film features around 1980, and possibly the best of the lot; running 54 minutes, it’s built around Godard as image maker, facing his editing equipment, projecting images, and discussing his conceptual ideas for Passion with rare lucidity. Soft and Hard, a highly intimate 48-minute video made by Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville for English television three years later, shows Godard and Mieville at their home in rural Switzerland. In many ways the most intimate and domestic of Godard’s works, it broaches the matter of what distinguishes film from video. Both works can be viewed in retrospect as necessary preludes to his recently completed magnum opus, the eight-part Histoire(s) du cinema. (JR)