By his own admission, Godard no longer likes to watch the 'rushes' of his films, claiming that he lacks 'enough complicity with the crew' and directs from a state of 'solitude', in which he is present on the set, yet 'absent' as an organising or unifying force in the conventional directorial sense.

One is struck in watching In Praise of Love by an intense sense of depersonalisation in all Godard's set ups, which often obscure the actors and their faces from our view, and in his editing, which offers us only sections of each shot rather than a sustained gaze.

Godard's recent films are even more 'fragmented', not only in their temporal and spatial structure but also in Godard's use of brief sections of images rather than long takes and extensive use of off-screen space, in which his protagonists operate on the margins of the frame, just as Godard operates on the margins of cinematic discourse.

Dixon, from an article.