3 week retrospective of JEAN-LUC GODARD launching during NYFF & 20th anniversary of DAZED & CONFUSED

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER WILL HOST
A THREE-WEEK RETROSPECTIVE OF
JEAN-LUC GODARD – THE SPIRIT OF THE FORMS
LAUNCHING DURING THE 51ST NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

20TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING OF DIRECTOR
RICHARD LINKLATER’S DAZED AND CONFUSED ALSO ANNOUNCED
          

New York, NY (September 5, 2013) — The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that the 51st New York Film Festival (NYFF, September 27 – October 13) will serve as the launching pad for a retrospective of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s work. The film series, entitled Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms, will begin during the second week of the festival, on October 9, and continue through the end of the month, October 30. (Specifics for the schedule and titles playing after NYFF will be distributed next week.) This year’s NYFF will also play host to the 20th Anniversary screening of Richard Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED on October 10 at 9PM, presented by New Wave, and with the director and members of the cast in attendance. 

Reflecting on the retrospective, NYFF Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said, “No matter how many times you’ve seen VIVRE SA VIE or FRANCE/TOUR/DETOUR/DEUX ENFANTS or NOUVELLE VAGUE, you can never know them completely: their beauties run as deep as their mysteries, their disturbances and disjunctions are as numerous as their revelations. Whenever they appear to settle into a fixed rhythm, they upend and reconfigure themselves in order to arrive at another rhythm pitched at a higher level. Godard’s work, whether it’s on film, video or HD, unfolds like no one else’s, and shocks the viewer into a new relationship with the world and with images.”

Between 1955 and today, Godard has made 45 shorts, 11 medium-length films, 40 features, three television series, a handful of commercials, and several of his own trailers. Throughout every “period” of his working life—his early heyday with the French New Wave, his explicitly political films made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the aftermath of May ’68 in France, his collaborative television and video work in Switzerland during the 70s with Anne-Marie Miéville, his movement between film and video from the 80s onward—he has always continually ventured into new territory.

Six Fois Deux (1976), France/Tour/Détour/Deux enfants (1979) and Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard’s three monumental series, will screen during the retrospective. Opening night on October 9 kicks off with the premieres of a new DCP of Alphaville (1965) from Rialto Pictures and a new print of Hail Mary/The Book of Mary (1985), followed by a new DCP of For Ever Mozart (1996) on Oct 11, both from The Cohen Media Group.

A longtime favorite of the film festival from its inception, Jean-Luc Godard’s films have frequently screened as part of NYFF’s Main Slate. Among the many NYFF-screened films that will be revisited during the retrospective will be; LE PETIT SOLDAT (1960), A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961), LES CARABINIERS (1962), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965), PIERROT LE FOU (1965), MADE IN U.S.A. (1966), MASCULIN FÉMININ (1966), 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (1966), WEEKEND (1967), LE GAI SAVOIR (1968), WIND FROM THE EAST (1969), TOUT VA BIEN (1972), Every Man for Himself (1979), HAIL MARY (1985), NOUVELLE VAGUE (1990), IN PRAISE OF LOVE (2001), NOTRE MUSIQUE (2004) and FILM SOCIALISME (2010).      

Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms is co-curated by Kent Jones and Jake Perlin. Special thanks to Bruce Goldstein, Adrienne Halpern and Eric Di Bernardo at Rialto Pictures; Tim Lanza at The Cohen Media Group; Morgane Toulouse at Gaumont; Antonin Baudry, Muriel Guidoni and Florence Almozini at French Cultural Services; Sarah Finklea at Janus Films; Rebecca Cleman at Electronic Arts Intermix; Gary Palmucci and Richard Lorber at Koch-Lorber Films; and Hanna Bruhin at Swiss Films.

Also announced today, Richard Linklater will return to NYFF for the 20th Anniversary screening of the 1993 hit DAZED AND CONFUSED on October 10 at 9PM. It’s hard to believe that his hair-raisingly perfect autobiographical film about the last day of high school in 1976, extending through the hard-partying night to the next morning, is now 20 years old. The evening will be presented by New Wave, the Film Society’s young patron program, and include the director and cast members in person! Print courtesy of the filmmaker. Linklater last attended NYFF with his 2001 film WAKING LIFE.

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Jones also includes: Dennis Lim, FSLC Director of Cinematheque Programming; Marian Masone, FSLC Associate Director of Programming; Gavin Smith, Editor-in-Chief, Film Comment; and Amy Taubin, Contributing Editor, Film Comment and Sight and Sound.

General Public tickets to NYFF will be available September 8. The film schedule and titles screening in the Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms series after NYFF (Oct 14-30), will be announced and available for purchase next week. For more information on the festival, visit Filmlinc.com/NYFF.

JEAN-LUC GODARD – THE SPIRIT OF THE FORMS
Films, Descriptions & Schedule
The below titles are only screening during NYFF. Additional schedule and titles will be announced next week.

ALPHAVILLE (1965) 99 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France
“Humble secret agent” Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives from the Outlands in Alphaville, the becalmed territory ruled by the computer Alpha 60 where “No one has ever lived in the past, no one will ever live in the future, the present is the form of all life.” When Caution meets Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina), the forbidden, illogical power of love opens the path to liberation. All of science fiction is a commentary on the present by way of an imagined future; Godard visually abstracted the Paris of 1964 by way of 1940s Hollywood in order to foreground its smoothly engineered consumer-driven impersonality. Alphaville is presented in a new print from Rialto Pictures.

FOR EVER MOZART (1996) 85 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Countries: France/Switzerland
An acting troupe journeys to Bosnia to mount a production of Musset’s “On ne badine pas avec l’amour.” When the actors arrive, they are taken captive, tortured, and executed. Godard returned to the war in Sarajevo in his films and his short videos many times. This 1996 feature was the most sweeping of those projects. “It may be a depressing film made in honor of those who have shed blood,” wrote Olivier Séguret in Libération, “but it depends also on a mad physical exultation.” For Ever Mozart is presented as a new DCP from Cohen Media.

HAIL MARY (Je vous salue Marie) (1985) 72 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Countries: France/Switzerland/UK
Hail Mary was condemned long before it was ever seen by the public, from Vatican City to Manhattan – anyone who attended a screening at the 1985 New York Film Festival will remember running a gauntlet of pamphleteers, prayer circles and newscasters outside Alice Tully Hall. The irony, of course, is that the film itself is far from blasphemous, but rather a glorious cinematic hymn, an attempt to reconcile spirit and flesh, science and nature. “Somehow I think we need faith, or I need faith, or I’m lacking in faith,” Godard told Katherine Dieckmann. “Therefore maybe I needed a story which is bigger than myself.”
Preceded by:
THE BOOK OF MARY (Le Livre de Marie) (1985) 25 min.
Director: Anne-Marie Miéville
Countries: France/Switzerland, 1985; 25 min.
Preceded by Anne-Marie Miéville’s exquisite Book of Mary, about the broken affections between a husband and wife through the eyes of their young daughter.
Shown with:
Notes on Hail Mary (Petites Notes à propos du film Je vous salue Marie)
Jean-Luc Godard, France/Switzerland, 1983: 20min.
Godard’s video notebook for Hail Mary.

WEEKEND (1968) 105 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Country: France
Godard’s farewell to commercial cinema begins as a savage critique of French bourgeois/consumer culture and ends in a state of pastoral calm, along the way incorporating Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, Emily Brontë, cannibalism, Mozart’s 18th piano sonata played in the middle of a farmyard and Lautréamont’s “Chants de Maldoror” reinvented as a revolutionary anthem with a beat. With this unforgiving, incendiary and wildly inventive film, Godard not only caught the mood of the moment but anticipated the events of May 1968 by almost a year. Weekend will be shown in a new 35mm print, courtesy of Janus Films.
Screening with:
Caméra-oeil (1967) 11 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard,
Country: France,
Godard’s contribution to the S.L.O.N. omnibus film Far from Vietnam, a montage of images from North Vietnamese films, La Chinoise and a 35mm camera with the filmmaker himself behind it and Godard’s voiceover in search of a concrete answer to the question: how is it possible, as a French filmmaker, to help the North Vietnamese in their struggle?

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious “Chaplin Award.” The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.

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