Jean-Luc Godard: Movie Love in the Sixties

9/5/08 to 10/17/08

In the sixties, Jean-Luc Godard broadened the notion of screen romance to embrace a wide entrancing world: this was movie love. Godard celebrates and deconstructs his various inspirations-Anna Karina, Paris, cinema itself-in eight films, including several new prints.

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A Woman Is a Woman, October 2, 5

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Films
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Past Films

Band of Outsiders
Friday, September 5 6:30 PM
Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur are unlikely burglars in Godard's “reverie of a gangster movie.”-Pauline Kael. Repeated on September 6.
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Contempt
Friday, September 5 8:30 PM
Godard's Homeric homage to Fritz Lang, “one of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking.”-Film Comment. With Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance. Repeated on September 11.
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Band of Outsiders
Saturday, September 6 8:30 PM
See September 5.
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Contempt
Thursday, September 11 8:30 PM
See September 5.
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Vivre sa vie
Saturday, September 13 6:30 PM
Godard's fragmentary portrait of a prostitute makes Anna Karina an object of endless visual fascination. “A film of extraordinary purity.”-Manny Farber. Repeated on September 14.
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Vivre sa vie
Sunday, September 14 7:45 PM
See September 13.
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Breathless
Thursday, September 18 6:30 PM
Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the jazzy genre pastiche that launched Godard's career and embodied the breathless bravado of the New Wave.
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Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Saturday, September 27 8:45 PM
An incisive view of prostitution and Paris, with breathtaking color photography by Raoul Coutard. “Perhaps Godard's greatest feature.”-Susan Sontag
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A Woman Is a Woman
Thursday, October 2 6:30 PM
“A whimsical celebration of romance, sentiment, musical comedy, color film, the city of Paris and the abundant charms of Anna Karina.”-N.Y. Times. Repeated on October 5.
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Masculine Feminine
Thursday, October 2 8:15 PM
Jean-Pierre Léaud is one of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”-the young people of Paris circa 1965.
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A Woman Is a Woman
Sunday, October 5 5:15 PM
See October 2.
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Alphaville
Friday, October 17 6:30 PM
“Godard's conceptual masterpiece is a hardboiled, Pop Art, sci-fi gloss on Cocteau's Orpheus and Orwell's 1984.”-Village Voice
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Jean-Luc Godard: Movie Love in the Sixties

9/5/08 to 10/17/08

“Are you cold?” “No. I'm trembling with excitement.” A throwaway line of dialogue from Band of Outsiders perfectly captures the romance of Godard's cinema of the 1960s, in which he broadened the convention of on-screen love to embrace a wide entrancing world: this was movie love. The director described his “Band of Outsiders mood”: “Characters who live off the cuff . . . It is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them.” Even in the clinch it was not unusual to find Godard's camera wandering off to dwell on passersby, movie posters, cafe fronts, the life of the street at least as important and philosophically rich as the life of the individual. By the time of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, the “her” in the title was not a woman at all, but Paris itself.

Still, if Godard was the artist, his then wife Anna Karina was the...

Still, if Godard was the artist, his then wife Anna Karina was the model; together they explored the prism of her persona from every angle to look at love, or something like it, in a half-dozen films. Whether tentatively confident, as in Band of Outsiders; determinedly ambiguous, as in A Woman Is a Woman; or tragically self-knowing, as in Vivre sa vie, it is Karina who grounds Godard's notions about women in the real. Before Anna: Breathless. After Anna: Contempt.

We take the occasion of new prints of several Godard films to revisit this cinema that still trembles with excitement.

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Series curated by Kathy Geritz.

PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this series: Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum; Stéphanie Côté, Cinémathèque Québécoise; Sarah Finklea, Janus/Criterion Collection; Jonathan Howell, New Yorker Films; and Eric Di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures.