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:

Camera Eye (from Far From Vietnam)
Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1967 | 11m DCP

Godard’s contribution to the S.L.O.N. collaborative 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? DCP Courtesy of Icarus Films.