“A body of work that is truly rich and strange, and as ambitious, diverse, and inspiring as anything (Godard) produced in his supposed 1960s heyday.”-Michael Temple & James S. Williams
Our year-long Jean-Luc Godard retrospective continues with some of the master's more recent films, as well as two of his monumental rarely screened serial essays, France/tour/détour/deux/enfants and Histoire(s) du cinéma. Godard's cinematic provocations are best summarized by critic J. Hoberman as “elegies for twentieth-century Europe, the cinema, and himself.” Valuing philosophical interrogations, political musings, and historical investigations over traditional narrative plots, these works are bound together only by the limitless curiosity of their maker, and of their viewers. “As with so many of Godard's films,” wrote the Washingon Post's Desson Thomson of Notre Musique, “you are put into a profound dialogue with the director, with life, and ultimately with yourself.”
Whether essays or elegies, these films possess a passion and a thirst for knowledge of a mind eternally young. Questions of art, politics, spirituality, and war are posed, with any answers only leading to more inquiries; the truths and myths, images and texts, power and oppression of European culture are constantly probed and interrogated. Combative, often willfully obscurist, these pieces distrust simple truths and commercial imagery. “If anyone understands me,” as a character notes in Notre Musique, “then I wasn't clear.”