Jean-Luc Godard

As a model, one can see working the essential virtues of the Godardian question in a relatively unknown work from 1978 [recte 1976]—a two-minute video clip for a popular song by Patrick Juvet, Faut Pas Rêver.

As is the case with all the brief forms invented by Godard, this little opus is not in the least a minor work. It is made up of two shots: first, a medium fixed shot of a little girl who is eating an apple for her afternoon snack after coming home from school; she is responding to her mother, whom we don’t see (the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville is recognisable) and who asks her about her day, while the little girl watches, distractedly, a television set that is supposedly broadcasting the song of Patrick Juvet (whom we don’t see either) In this everyday dialogue, we find the emergence of a fundamental critical question that, in the mid-1970s, must have been perceived as quite violent (at that time we were right in the middle of the Giscardian regime, and it would take seven more years for the left to come to power).Read More »

PLOT: The protagonist is Carmen X (Maruschka Detmers), a female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director (played by Jean-Luc Godard himself) if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen’s escape with the guard, her uncle’s attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.Read More »

Godard & Gorin, according to the profitable contract signed with the publicity agency Dupuy Compton, from which they had a salary, were forced to propose one project per month and deliver at least one advertisement film per year. For Schick, they got the budget to pay the hole crew for a week, even though the shooting only took half a working day.
Enjoy!!Read More »

A film about politics and the media, in which two workers in a newspaper plant attempt to make a film.Read More »

In this astonishing twelve-part project for and about television — the title of which refers to a 19th-century French primer Le tour de la France par deux enfants — Godard and Mieville take a detour through the everyday lives of two children in contemporary France.

This complex, intimately scaled study of the effect of television on the French family is constructed around Godard’s interviews with a school girl and school boy, Camille and Arnaud. Godard’s provocative questions to the children range from the philosophical (Do you think you have an existence?) to the social (What does revolution mean to you?). The programs’ symmetrical structure alternates between Camille’s and Arnaud’s segments (or movements), each of which is labelled with on-screen titles: Obscur/Chimie is paired with Lumiere/Physique; Realitie/Logique with Reve/Morale; Violence/Grammaire with Desordre/Calcul.Read More »

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Simon and Rachel love each other simply, without ‘stories’, until a first argument. The breach then opens for God to take on the appearance of Simon in order to visit or tempt Rachel. She, however, seems able to make the difference between a god, a husband and a lover, even in the same person… and some later on have noticed something too.Read More »

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.Read More »

Like its predecessor (De l’origine du XXIe siècle), The Old Place examines the role of art in history, only this time in still rather than moving images. Says Michael Althen of this piece, commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1999, “[T]he aim is not to give an overview of art history but to cut a path through the forest by asking how art relates to reality and its horrors.” Throughout its mid-length duration, reflections on art and its traces cross swords with future-oriented impulses. The questions it poses are not meant to be answered, but taken as wholesale embodiments of cultural memory, which tends to account for reality via myths and legends. As in the opening image of a monkey dangling from a tree, it is dependent on the presence of gravity to give hierarchical sensibilities a grounding from which to suspend our inhibitions.Read More »

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On a movie set, in a factory, and at a hotel, Godard explores the nature of work, love and film making. While Solidarity takes on the Polish government, a Polish film director, Jerzy, is stuck in France making a film for TV. He’s over budget and uninspired; the film, called “Passion,” seems static and bloodless. Hanna owns the hotel where the film crew stays. She lives with Michel, who runs a factory where he’s fired Isabelle, a floor worker. Hanna and Isabelle are drawn to Jerzy, hotel maids quit to be movie extras, people ask Jerzy where the story is in his film, women disrobe, extras grope each other off camera, and Jerzy wonders why there must always be a story.Read More »