JLG/JLG

In the 90s, Godard was commissioned by Gaumont to make this film, a close look at himself and his place in the world (the world of his home, his immediate natural surroundings, the landscape of Europe, the historical span of his lifetime). A film that is by turns playful, somber and – when it settles on the heart-stopping image of the quiet heart of a snow-covered forest at twilight – exalted.

Screening with:

Germany Year 90 Nine-Zero
Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1991 | 62m | 35mm

In 1989, producer Nicole Ruellé approached Ingmar Bergman, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick and Godard to make a television film about solitude. Godard accepted the commission and decided to make a film not about the solitude of an individual but of a state: East Germany. A few months later, when there was no more East Germany, he conceived the idea of a Don Quixote character wandering through the former nation, and the character eventually became a reprise of Alphaville’s Lemmy Caution, reprised by the 73-year old Eddie Constantine, as a mole whose assignment collapses after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. The result was a film, perhaps the only film, that captured the feeling of Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain.