A Wikipedia article is not a Wikipedia article

I was too tired to watch Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman is a Woman on Monday night. There's no two ways about it. On nights like that you watch 84-minute films, which is what I was trying to do with A Woman is a Woman, but even the brief length and the lightness of tone was not enough to overcome my extreme exhaustion. I slept a couple times during it (always pausing when I did so) and was foggy at best during others.

To be honest, this is probably not a terrible way to watch Godard. You are dealing with a man who was always experimenting with cinema, especially with this, only the second film he ever released. (There was another film completed first whose release was delayed by censors.) Even when you're at full stamina and attention level, there's going to be something elliptical about its storytelling/editing/just about everything else.

And so I gave it the milquetoast star rating I give many films I feel like I didn't fully get but generally appreciated: three stars.

The next day I went to check out the Wikipedia page to find out more about it. I wanted to find out more about its themes. I wanted to take in some other critical appreciations, gathered together in one place. I wanted to find out some of the unique details of its production schedule, which there must have been, given what we've learned about the making of Godard's first film, Breathless, via last year's Richard Linklater film Nouvelle Vague.

Nope there was none of that.

You see, this Wikipedia page is just a stub.

What is a stub, in Wikipedia terms? I will let AI enlighten us:

"A Wikipedia 'stub' is an article containing only basic information that is too short or incomplete to provide in-depth encyclopedic coverage. Generally, these are very short, often only a few sentences, serving as a placeholder for future expansion by editors."

That doesn't jive with my understanding of both Wikipedia, and my perception of the high esteem in which A Woman is a Woman was likely held.

Opening paragraph? Check. Plot synopsis? Check. Cast list? Check. Awards section? Just a link to the 11th annual Berlin Film Festival and a couple bullet points with winners and nominees from the film.

And that's it. 

I don't know how many movie Wikipedia pages you've been to, but they are on average about three to four times this length. There are almost always paragraphs discussing the production, the themes, the critical consensus, even the circumstances of the release. Any of these sections might have multiple paragraphs, and the plot synopsis, even for a short film, might be considerably longer than the 164 words we get here.

I mean they're not lying. They say right at the bottom that it's a stub and they are waiting for more contributions. Which no one has provided yet.

Oh well. The movie's only 65 years old, someone is probably still planning to get to it.

I just think it's strange, because my overwhelming experience of Wikipedia is that everything I read there is remarkably expansive. Like, a news story will occur one day, and the next day there are already 3,000 words on it, neatly divided into sections, and written in that style that so perfectly parrots the style of every other Wikipedia article that you'd swear they were all written by the same person. It's miraculous.

But I had to know there were gaps out there in the database, and on Tuesday I stepped right into one of them. 

It makes me wonder if, indeed, A Woman is a Woman is in fact held in such high regard, or if most people found it mildly perplexing, as I did. And I don't mean "perplexing" like it was too hard for me to understand. This is a cheeky movie, riffing on the traditions of Hollywood musicals and also being very self-referential, such as a moment when Jean-Paul Belmondo's character talks about wanting to see Breathless -- a movie he starred in two years earlier. (Jules and Jim and at least one other French New Wave movie are also referenced. Though this last I find very strange as that movie didn't come out until a year later. Among his many other accomplishments, was Godard also a time traveller?)

It also makes me wonder if this pattern holds for other Godard films on Wikipedia. I could randomly check out a number of them -- there are like 60 -- but, nah. I mean, plenty of them I do expect to be that way, because they'd be significantly more obscure than A Woman is a Woman. But I bet many of even those obscure ones are more fleshed out than this. 

At least I'm getting up to speed on Godard. Just this year I've added both this and Alphaville, having watched Contempt last year. Including the couple others I'd seen before that, I guess that means I only have about 55 more to go.