MacBean is the author of Film and Revolution and a contributor to Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, Cineaste, and Jump Cut. He discusses the film in a short lecture following the screening.

"This film is a pinnacle in a career marked by many Everests, an affecting saga from a restless mind constantly probing for meaning everywhere."-Piers Handling, TIFF

(Éloge de l'amour). Jean-Luc Godard, the supreme iconoclast of the postwar generation, is still wrestling with the questions that have informed his cinema over four decades. Éloge de l'amour is his most accessible film in ten years; it is also one of the finest of his illustrious career. The first part, shot in 35mm black-and-white, takes place as a director interviews potential actors, and meets a young woman whom he feels he has known before. The second half, shot in color digital video, takes place two years earlier, when the director visits an elderly couple who are about to sell their life story of the Nazi Occupation to a Hollywood studio. As usual with Godard, plot is merely a framework on which to offer metaphysical questions about life, the world and politics. The film centers on questions of memory and the past-not surprising given its themes of the Holocaust and the Occupation. But it is also a profound reverie about Godard's own past, giving him a chance to revisit his '60s masterpieces, reflect on his own mortality and rage with wry humor against Hollywood and America. This film is a pinnacle in a career marked by many Everests, an affecting saga from a restless mind constantly probing for meaning everywhere.