One approach to “Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinema,” Jean-Luc Godard’s 85-minute redaction of his five-hour long “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” is too understand it as something like his “Tarnation,” a half-mad plunge into a lifetime’s memory, thought, and emotion. Indeed, the rare glimpses we get of Mr. Godard find him alone, wreathed in cigar smoke, seated before a typewriter or editing table.

Divided into eight enigmatic chapters, the work is otherwise a collage of quotation: film clips, newsreel footage, photographs, and paintings, overlaid by a punning play of onscreen texts. The soundtrack is just as eclectic, mixing film scores, classical music, dialogue in several languages, commentary by Godard and others, mechanical noises, and all manner of unidentifiable squawks and whirs.

Both image and sound are subject to one of the most radical applications of montage in cinema, an entire catalog of effects: hard cuts, weird irises, odd wipes, interlaced images and melodies, countless innovations of layering and transparency. While the ideas zipping through this intricate mesh can be traced back through Mr. Godard’s legacy of critical filmmaking, nothing in his oeuvre can prepare you for the richness, velocity, and brooding hermeticism of the “Histoire(s).”

Indeed, the video has most often been compared to the polyglot dreamscape of “Finnegans Wake.” It’s an apt analogy for the feeling one has while immersed in, and grappling with, the dense textures of the “Histoire(s).”The surface is bound to look simply impenetrable, as outrageously obscure an approach to the “history of the cinema” as a page of the “Wake” is to the narrative novel. As you struggle to find a path through the labyrinth, cognitive epiphanies flash out from the tangled surface, only to recede back into darkness. Patterns begin to emerge; the outline of a theme gradually takes shape. You begin to realize that a major point is to rethink the very notion of reading a book or watching a movie, to liberate the mind from old habits and see things anew.

Also to pay very, very close attention to the elemental stuff of the medium. As Joyce treats language in the “Wake,” so Mr. Godard treats images in his “Histoire(s).” The controlling idea is to examine the connotations, implications, and contexts of the image by dismantling them, inspecting their parts, projecting them into fresh combinations, juxtaposing them with other kinds (more explicitly than in the “Histoire(s)” proper, “Moments Choisis” sustains a dialogue between film and painting).

Explicating what any given pas sage is up to would require a lengthy essay – as, for instance, the 10-pages written by a New Zealand film professor on the montage between a single image of Elizabeth Taylor and the crucial subject of the Holocaust. Mr. Godard isn’t just twiddling knobs and geeking out in his library. He has a lot to say about the relationship between cinema and history, and an obsession with the moral failings of the art.

One arresting moment overlays a flight of Hitchcock’s fearsome “Birds” with a formation of bombers. That simple act of montage is enough to light a spark in the imagination. Whether that spark catches flame, and what that flame starts to feed on is another question. Is the bird image an echo of World War II, a prophecy of Vietnam, or both? Watching “Histoire(s)” can feel like tumbling down a series of rabbit holes. There may be nothing to greet you at the bottom, but the fall is thrilling, and you’ll learn an awful lot about the walls on your way down.

As a critic of the cinema, of its forms and feelings and ideological imperatives, Mr. Godard may have no living rival in any medium. But his way of getting his ideas across – a very French fusion of philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, and a certain amount of hokum – will always repel those put off by his High Modernist sonorousness. Shutting yourself off from this rhetorical style would risk closing yourself off not only from its intellectual playfulness (Mr. Godard gets little credit for his mischievousness), but also from the shiver of moods that pulse beneath the surface.

“Moments Choisis” whispers with fear and joy, tenderness and terror, hope and remorse, rage and reconciliation. In its final glinting moments, this magisterial summation of a great man’s care declares itself opposed to “global abstract tyranny.” That’s no small task, but Mr. Godard is as big as they come.

Opens November 20 at the Museum of Modern Art (11 W. 53 Street, 212-708-9400).