Jean-Luc Godard: Expect Everything from Cinema

11/8/14 to 12/13/14

Godard's films from the 1980s, the focus of this installment in our ongoing retrospective, mark a (relative) return to narrative. Genres from slapstick to detective stories are mined, juxtaposition and fragmentation are enlisted, and sound and image angle for supremacy. Ultimately, though, Godard continues to interrogate what cinema means to him. "The(se) films . . . are arguably deeper, more technically accomplished, and more daring than the early ones" (Richard Brody, The New Yorker).

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Past Films

Passion
Saturday, November 8 7:30pm
Jean-Luc Godard (France/Switzerland, 1982). Isabelle Huppert and Hanna Schygulla in Godard's visceral, visually enthralling film about a film called Passion, based on tableaux vivants of famous paintings. (87 mins)
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First Name: Carmen
Saturday, November 15 6:30pm
Jean-Luc Godard (France, France/Switzerland, 1983). (Prénom Carmen). Anne-Marie Miéville and Godard's Bizet adaptation captures “the spirit of erotic feverishness . . . A violent lunge at the carnal mysteries” (David Denby). (85 mins)
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Détective
Friday, November 21 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard (1985). Godard's send-up of and tribute to film noir follows a dozen or so characters as they wander about a Parisian hotel, looking for mysteries, love, and money. With Johnny Hallyday and Jean-Pierre Léaud. (95 mins)
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Keep Your Right Up
Friday, November 28 7:30pm
Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1987). (Soigne ta droite). Godard's episodic comedy stars himself as an Idiot Prince, ordered to make a movie in one day. Godard at his most light-hearted and inquisitive, inspired by Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Jaques Tati, and Dostoevsky. (82 mins)
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Hail Mary
Saturday, November 29 8:15pm
Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1985). (Je vous salue, Marie). New 35mm Print! The story of Mary Magdalene, as filtered through the sensibilities of Godard. “I wanted to make a sincere, reverent film about faith, even if it's not the film the Church would have wanted,” he wrote; critics raved, while the Pope condemned it as “blasphemous.” (103 mins)
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JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December
Wednesday, December 10 7pm
Jean-Luc Godard (France, 1994). The “first film of Godard's old age” finds the great artist turning the camera on himself. “An inebriating dialectical diary of words, sounds, images, and landscapes” (Variety). Preceded by Origins of the 21st Century (2000). (73 mins)
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King Lear
Friday, December 12 9pm
Jean-Luc Godard (US/France, 1987). Introduced by Tom Luddy. “More Cocteau and Beckett than Shakespeare” (TIFF Cinematheque), Godard's take on King Lear features one of the most eclectic casts ever assembled: Woody Allen, Peter Sellars, Norman Mailer, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, and Godard himself. “A grand statement about the power of moviemaking ”(The New Yorker). (90 mins)
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Nouvelle Vague
Saturday, December 13 8:30pm
Jean-Luc Godard (Switzerland/France, 1990). A rich businesswoman accidentally injures, then takes home, a hitchhiker (Alain Delon) in Godard's meditation on beauty, silence, and the inadequacy of language. "Jean-Luc Godard on love as the antidote to the bankruptcy of modern materialism” (Variety). (90 mins)
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Jean-Luc Godard: Expect Everything from Cinema

11/8/14 to 12/13/14

"The films that Godard has made . . . since 1979 are arguably deeper, more technically accomplished, and more daring than the early ones."-Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Godard's films from the 1980s, the focus of this installment of our ongoing retrospective, are sometimes referred to as the director's Second Wave because of their (relative) return to narrative and larger budgets. With Passion, Godard embraces cinematic beauty, elegantly re-creating paintings by Delacroix, Rembrandt, and others. As in his explorations of Shakespeare's King Lear, Bizet's Carmen, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and even the biblical story of Mary, allusions to art, music, and literature are reference points for an exhilarating, perhaps overwhelming, range of concerns. Godard: “People like to say, ‘What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, ‘I mean, but not exactly.'” Breathlessly, he continues to interrogate what cinema means to him. Genres from slapstick to detective stories are mined, juxtaposition and fragmentation are enlisted, and sound and image angle for supremacy. Certainly a counter-cinema, yet Godard doesn't focus on battling Hollywood, but instead on making his cinema. In JLG/JLG, his study of himself and his art, Godard was interested to see if a self-portrait could exist in motion pictures, as it does in painting. In an interview soon after its completion, Godard remarked, “Now I say, “I've done nothing, everything is to be done.'” In the spring, we present his late films, as well as a selection of his long, serial video essays.

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We are indebted to Kent Jones and Jacob Perlin, as well as Isa Cucinotta, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where a Godard retrospective took place at the 51st New York Film Festival, as well to James Quandt at TIFF Cinematheque, which hosts a Godard retrospective this year. We also thank the French Cultural Services, New York, and the French Consulate San Francisco.