From a starting point of an adaptation of Rousseau’s Emilie, Godard made this vibrant, beautifully colored film about two young people, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliette Berto who “get together each night between midnight and dawn,” wrote Manny Farber, “to examine the meaning of words and the phenomena they describe. Practically all of the movie is structured on one static frontal image in boundaryless black depth, the edges of the two seated figures picked out by a powerful floodlight. This mysteriously inky-hot lighting is hypnotic, slowly joining usually unseen nooks and crannies in the sullen Léaud-Berto faces with some sense of the young leftists’ purpose and youthful energy.”

Screening with:

Cinétracts (selection)
France | 1968 | 40m

Godard’s on the spot, edited-in-camera filmed reports from the barricades during the events of May 1968.