Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms
Tickets
See Godard for $10 (General Public) or $7 (Member, Student & Senior)!
Swing by the Film Center to pick up a Jean-Luc Godard tote bag designed by Nathan Gelgud for just $20!
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.
Beginning in the second week of the 51st New York Film Festival and continuing through the end of October, we’re presenting a retrospective of one of the greatest artists at work in any medium, Jean-Luc Godard. Co-curated by Kent Jones and Jacob Perlin.
Alphaville
Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi hymn to love and savage attack on the impersonality of modern life takes place in a visually abstracted Paris ca. 1964, refracted through 1940s Hollywood.
Band of Outsiders
Presented in 35mm!
One of Godard’s most beloved films, based on Dolores Hitchens' novel Fools' Gold. Godard’s pitch? "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka." But that doesn't quite account for the magical spell that the film casts, which has a lot to do with the youth and grace of its three young stars Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur.
Breathless
Presented in 35mm!
How much more can possibly be said of this fresh, buoyant, surprising film about a small-time gangster on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his capricious American girlfriend (Jean Seberg)? The denatured post-synched sound… the vivacity of Raoul Coutard’s cinematography… the springy pace that seems to skip like a stone across the action… the energy of Breathless seems self-replenishing.
British Sounds
Presented in 16mm!
This commission from Kestrel Productions – a blunt 52 minutes of political sloganeering, with opening and penultimate images (followed by a waving red flag) of fists punching through the Union Jack and readings from The Communist Manifesto . Two films later, Jean-Pierre Gorin would work with Godard to take his left-wing cinema beyond mere agitprop.
Screening with: Pravda (1970, 58m).
Les Carabiniers
Presented in 35mm!
Godard’s bolt from the blue, shot to evoke the look and the energy of early cinema, about two lame-brained guys in an imaginary country who leave their wives to go to war, where they pillage and plunder and from which they later return with their spoils.
La Chinoise
Jean-Pierre Léaud is one in a small group of French students who passionately debate the impact of Mao’s cultural revolution and what chance terrorism might have in triggering comparable radicalization in the West in Godard’s dazzling lightshow of slogans, posters, and revolutionary images.
Comment ça va
A lovely, muted film-video hybrid work, in which a need to inquire about the nature of audio-visual communication and to understand it on a personal level is split between multiple characters. Screening with shorts.
Screening with: Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982, 11m)
Contempt
Palance is the producer who brings screenwriter Michel Piccoli and his wife (Bardot) to Cinécittà to work on Lang’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and the conflicts between commerce and art, the ancient and the modern, the legendary and the mundane, the tender and the cruel commence.
Détective
Please note that this screening has been moved to the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
“I’m a renaissance painter looking for commissions,” said Godard of this project, which began as a gleam in producer Alain Sarde’s eye: Paris, pulp fiction, Claude Brasseur, Nathalie Baye, Johnny Halliday, and an aging Jean-Pierre Léaud (in various disguises).
Every Man for Himself
Presented in 35mm!
"What’s that music?" It’s the music of Godard’s return to (relatively) mainstream moviemaking, composed in four movements—The Imaginary, Fear, Commerce, and… Music—with Nathalie Baye and Jacques Dutronc as a kind of alter ego.
Un film comme les autres
Presented in 16mm!
Two 54-minute segments, with identical successions of images but different soundtracks. Students from Nanterre (where May 68 more or less began) sit on the grass (shot from the neck down) and discuss where the movement will go next; two Renault workers discuss their own ideas of a revolutionary future—their images are intercut with black and white footage of May 68, their words mingle with Godard’s own rhetoric. When the film was shown at the 1968 New York Film Festival, Godard told the projectionist to flip a coin and decided on the spot which 16mm reel to begin with. According to D.A. Pennebaker, the American distributor, the audience “began to tear up their seats.”
Film Socialisme
This is Godard’s first film shot entirely with digital cameras, and, as Amy Taubin put it in Film Comment, the images prove that Godard is "as much a master colorist in digital media as he has been in celluloid."
First Name: Carmen
Presented in 35mm!
Godard’s powerfully physical modern rendering, which goes deep into sexual desire and longing and moves with the rhythms of Beethoven’s final quartet, with Maruschka Detmers, Jacques Bonnaffé, Myriem Roussel and JLG himself.
Screening with: Armide (1987, 12m)
For Ever Mozart
An acting troupe arrives in Bosnia only to be taken captive, tortured, and executed in Godard’s cinematic reflection on the recently concluded war.
France/Tour/Detour/Deux enfants
Godard was commissioned by the Antenne 2 TV channel to do a series based on the 19th century French children’s classic La Tour de la France avec deux enfants. The final result, co-created with Miéville – an utterly remarkable examination of childhood within the contexts of family, home, work, and the shared idea of life and time within the greater culture – may have displeased the TV executives, but it is, as Colin McCabe put it, “probably as great as anything Godard has ever done.”
Le gai savoir
Presented in 16mm!
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.
Screening with: Cinétracts (1968, 40m).
Godard 60s Shorts Program
A selection of short films made by Godard and excerpted from omnibus films: Le Nouveau monde / The New World (from RoGoPaG, 1963, 20m); Anticipation, ou l’amour en l’an 2000 / Anticipation, or Love in the Year 2000 (from Le Plus vieux Métier du monde / The Oldest Profession in the World, 1967, 20m); and Montparnasse-Levallois (from Paris vu par… and shot in glorious 16mm by the great Al Maysles, 1965, 18m), La Paresse/Sloth (from Les sept péchés capitaux / The Seven Deadly Sins, 1961, 15 m), Le Grand Escroq / The Great Swindle (from Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde / The World's Greatest Swindles, 1963, 25 m).
Godard Early Shorts Program
A program of Godard’s first shorts, including: Opération Béton (Switzerland, 1955, 20m); All the Boys Are Called Patrick / Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (France, 1957, 21m); Une histoire d’eau (France, 1958, 18m); and Charlotte et son Jules (France, 1958, 20m).
Godard Shorts Program 1
A selection of Godard’s later video/digital work: Les Enfants jouent à la Russie (France, 1993; 63m); Pour Thomas Wainggai (France, 1991; 3m); Liberté et patrie (Switzerland, 2002; 21m); Origins of the 21st Century / De l’origine du XXIème siècle (France, 2000; 13m); and The Old Place (France/USA, 2002; 49m)
Godard Shorts Program 2
A selection from Godard’s video work of the 80s: Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (France/Switzerland, 1979; 20m); Scénario du film Passion (France/Switzerland, 1982; 54m); Changer d’image (France, 1982; 10m); and Puissance de la parole (France, 1988; 25m).
Godard Shorts Program 3
Free and open to the public!
A program comprising 11 short works by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard Shorts Program 4
Free and open to the public!
A program comprising seven short works by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard Trailer Program
Free and open to the public!
Unlike the majority of filmmakers from around the world, Godard made many of his own trailers. They will be presented in a package by the series co-curator Jake Perlin and projected on 35mm, including the trailer that Godard created for Bresson’s Mouchette.
Grandeur and Decadence
On a French network TV commission, Godard created this Série noire anthology episode, a funny, melancholy video piece about a director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and producer (Jean-Pierre Mocky) trying to make a movie out of James Hadley Chase’s 1964 novel The Soft Centre.
Hail Mary
Presented in 35mm!
Condemned long before it was ever seen by the public from Vatican City to Manhattan, Godard’s film is a glorious cinematic hymn, an attempt to reconcile spirit and flesh, science and nature.
Screening with: The Book of Mary (Anne-Marie Miéville, 25m) and Notes on Hail Mary (Jean-Luc Godard, 20m).
Hélas pour moi
Presented in 35mm!
A detective (Bernard Verley) tries to verify a visitation from God, who has inhabited the body of Simon (Gérard Depardieu) in order to lie with his wife Rachel (Laurence Masliah). But Godard’s version of the legend of Zeus’s seduction of Alcmene in the form of Amphitryon is a secret journey through sound, light and shadow to the world of a man and a woman.
Histoire(s) du cinéma
Godard began to think about his own audiovisual history of cinema in the late 70s. He began thinking of the project as a collaboration with Cinémathèque Française director Henri Langlois, then developed a series of lectures at Concordia University, and then started working on what would develop into an 8-part series one chapter at a time in the mid-80s. The result, a massive meditation on cinema within the framework of the 20th century and the greater history of visual art, is a truly monumental work.
In Praise of Love
Presented in 35mm!
In Praise of Love is structured as a diptych. The first half, set in Paris and shot in lustrous 35mm black and white, is about a young director (Bruno Putzulu) preparing a project on “the four stages of love”; in the second half, set two years before and shot in fauvist digital color, the same man visits an aging couple who have taken part in the resistance.
JLG/JLG
Presented in 35mm!
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 (1991, 62m)
Keep Your Right Up
Presented in 35mm!
Keep Your Right Up is about speed—the speed of life, the speed of a jet plane and a moving train, the speed of thought—relative to "a place on earth." It might be Godard’s most underrated film; in its Jerry Lewis-inspired sequences involving the Idiot, it is also one of his funniest.
King Lear
Presented in 35mm!
An eye-opening reconsideration of Shakespeare couched within a story of his fictional ancestor (Peter Sellars), who is charged with the recreation of culture after the calamity of Chernobyl. The cast is as filled with stars as a northern sky, but the ravishing layers of sound and image and the profound faith in art are the real source of wonder.
Made in U.S.A.
Please note that this screening has been moved to the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Jean-Pierre Léaud is featured as a slapstick tough guy named Donald Siegel in Godard’s harsh goodbye to ex-wife Anna Karina—a looney adaptation of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novel The Jugger, reshaped by the details of the Ben Barka affair.
A Married Woman
Presented in 35mm!
May, 1964 – Godard meets Luigi Chiarini, the director of the Venice Film Festival, who tells him that he is sorry to have missed the chance to present the premiere of Band of Outsiders. Godard tells Chiarini that he can have another movie ready by August, goes to Columbia Pictures and pitches a story of adultery to be called The Married Woman, and hires Macha Méril to play the lead. The result is an exciting hybrid of fiction and documentary that was made in three months and greatly admired in Venice.
Masculin féminin
Parisian youths play at sex and politics in Godard’s freewheeling portrait of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” starring Léaud as a young, self-styled radical-intellectual.
Nôtre musique
Presented in 35mm!
For many years, Godard has scored his films with pre-existing music, a great deal of it released by Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records. Nôtre musique began as a film about ECM and Eicher, but, as has happened so often with Godard, it slowly changed over the years into something wholly different. Screening with: <em>Je vous salue Sarajevo (1993, 2min).
Nouvelle Vague
Presented in 35mm!
One of Godard’s most powerful and beautiful films, set on an estate in the lush Swiss countryside near a long and winding road where a wandering stranger (Alain Delon) is hit by a wealthy woman (Domeniziana Giordano) in a sports car, kept by her and then cast aside when the frustrating work of being a couple takes its toll.
Numéro Deux
Presented in 35mm!
Godard’s first film after his Dziga-Vertov period was the result of multiple factors: his new partnership in life and work with Anne-Marie Miéville, his deep interest in video and his close relationship with Aäton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala, who Godard followed to Grenoble. An extraordinarily complex work, a beehive of multiple images and sounds, generated by Godard’s excitement over video as a new creative and industrial tool.
Passion
Presented in 35mm!
A buoyant, often ecstatic film made in the teeth of the Polish Solidarity movement; a film singing with color and light, peopled with the faces and bodies of Isabelle Huppert, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli and László Szabó, the recreated light of Rembrandt and Rubens and the quattrocento (in the film within the film) contrasting and harmonizing with the clear winter sunlight of Switzerland.
Le Petit soldat
Presented in 35mm!
Godard's follow-up to Breathless, about a right-wing terrorist (Michel Subor) during the Algerian conflict (the film was made before the creation of the OAS) who falls in love with an FLN sympathizer (Anna Karina) and is then accused of being a double agent.
Pierrot le fou
Presented in 35mm!
Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo leave middle class life behind for a life on the run, out in the trees under the sun and the stars, by the wide blue sea.
Six fois deux (Part 1)
When Godard was approached by the National Audiovisual Institute to make a 100-minute feature to fill one of six Sunday night slots on FR3, Godard made a counter-offer to fill all six slots, with the airdate for the first slot a month and a half away.
Six fois deux (Part 2)
When Godard was approached by the National Audiovisual Institute to make a 100-minute feature to fill one of six Sunday night slots on FR3, Godard made a counter-offer to fill all six slots, with the airdate for the first slot a month and a half away.
Struggle in Italy
Presented in 16mm!
Godard and Gorin’s second film together and the first under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group was financed by Italian television, a three-part study of a young revolutionary (Christina Tullio Altan) who realizes that she is not as committed as she had imagined, from a text by Louis Althusser.
Screening with: Ici et ailleurs (1976, 60m).
Sympathy for the Devil
Presented in 35mm!
The Rolling Stones in the studio, recording the title song one track at a time; Anne Wiazemsky as “Eve Democracy,” sauntering through the woods and the streets of London in a diaphanous gown as she is being interviewed by a TV reporter. Despite the majesty of the film’s final boom shot—to be more precise, of Eve’s body draped across a soaring camera crane—the producer Iain Quarrier was unhappy that Godard had never included the finished version of the Stones song in the movie, originally called One Plus One. Quarrier froze the last image, let the lengthy song play out, and released it as Sympathy for the Devil. Godard punched him in the face and the stomach onstage at the London Film Festival.
Tout va bien
Presented in 35mm!
This film about a left-wing filmmaker (Yves Montand) and journalist (Jane Fonda) who investigate a strike at a sausage factory, his last completed project with Jean-Pierre Gorin, is by turns melancholy and antic, the peak of Godard and Gorin’s partnership, inspired by Jerry Lewis in general and The Ladies Man in particular.
Screening with:
Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972, 52m).
Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Presented in 35mm!
Her is Marina Vlady as a Parisian housewife, supplementing her income by turning a few tricks on the side in order to afford the latest fashions and appliances; and Her is the city of Paris, as it undergoes a massive urban renewal. Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard render both with the clarity and wonder of the first filmmakers, and Godard stretches his cinematic form to accommodate shifts in public and private spaces from consciousness to consciousness, including his own.
Vivre sa vie
Presented in 35mm!
Here is Manny Farber’s description of one of Godard's greatest films, made with, and for, his wife Anna Karina: "The fall, brief rise, and death of a Joan of Sartre, a prostitute determined to be her own woman... The unobtrusive acting inches along in little, scuttling steps, always in one direction, achieving a parched, memory-ridden beauty. A film of extraordinary purity."
Vladimir and Rosa
Godard and Gorin’s take on the trial of the Chicago Seven trial, shot in their editing suite, with actors declaiming their roles as Hoffman, Seale, Dellinger et al. against primary colored walls. When financier and Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset saw Vladimir and Rosa, he was shocked and deeply offended by the irreverence with which Godard and Gorin had treated his heroes. He screened it for Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, filmed them as they watched and caterwauled at the screen, and edited them into the movie (some of those prints have survived).
Weekend
Presented in 35mm!
Godard’s savage critique of French bourgeois/consumer culture not only caught the mood of the moment but anticipated the events of May 1968 by almost a year.
Screening with: Camera Eye (Jean-Luc Godard, 11m) from Far From Vietnam
Wind from the East
Presented in 16mm!
In 1969, the radical student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit suggested the idea of making a left-wing spaghetti western in Italy to Godard, who wrote a story about the kidnapping of an executive by strikers and asked the left-wing Italian actor Gian-Maria Volonté to star. When the shoot devolved into complete chaos, Godard brought in his young friend Jean-Pierre Gorin, who was recuperating from a motorcycle accident. In the editing room, at Gorin’s urging, the film was re-shaped from a chronological narrative into a conceptually manufactured propaganda tool.
A Woman Is a Woman
Presented in 35mm!
Godard’s third film is a thing of great beauty, a "neorealist musical" (with a score by Michel Legrand) about a woman (Anna Karina) who wants to have a baby with the man she lives with (Jean-Claude Brialy) but who turns to his friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). A richly colored, funny, and moving film about one of Godard’s great subjects: being a couple.
