Jean-Luc Godard

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Captured in beguilingly chic noir et blanc, Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman) is an erudite, somewhat autobiographical, handsome and twisted examination of female infidelity. Although it has been rather overlooked amidst Godard’s formidable body of work, it is one of his most alluring and personal cinematic endeavours and represents a critical juncture in his evolution as a film-maker.
Originally titled La Femme Mariée (The Married Woman), Godard bowed to the French censors, Commission de Contrôle, who were fearful of the film’s potential to be interpreted as an incendiary indictment of womankind. Read More »

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

Lemmy Caution investigates a German ruins.
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Jean-Luc Godard’s Germany Year 90 Nine Zero – the title being a pun on Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1947) – was made for French television in 1991 and continued his reflexive cinema/video image/sound practice that reached its zenith with Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989-97). Germany Year 90 Nine Zero can be considered a sort of loose sequel to Godard’s Alphaville (1965). The film follows the adventures of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), “the last of the secret agents,” as he wanders through a post-Berlin-Wall Germany (from the East to the West) through a landscape littered with history. It is 26 years later, and Lemmy is looking exhausted, vulnerable, as befits the landscape of East Germany.Read More »

The idea is simple: A married woman and a single man meet. They love, they argue, fists fly. A dog strays between town and country. The seasons pass. The man and woman meet again. The dog finds itself between them. The other is in one, the one is in the other and they are three. The former husband shatters everything. A second film begins: the same as the first, and yet not. From the human race we pass to metaphor. This ends in barking and a baby’s cries. Read More »

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Le Petit Soldat is an early Jean-Luc Godard film that was made on a shoestring budget. Michel Subor (who would surface years later in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail [1999] to great critical acclaim), stars here as Bruno Forestier, a young revolutionary living in Geneva who is fighting against French involvement in the war in Algeria. He meets and falls in love with rival revolutionary Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina, soon to be Godard’s wife), and the mutual recriminations begin. Shot like a newsreel, much of the film is photographed with a hand-held camera, with sound post-synchronized; a “film noir” narration holds the film together, but the narrative, as is usual with Godard, is slight.Read More »

André Labarthe part à la recherche de Godard et de son “Voyage(s) en utopie”, installation inachevée du cinéaste au Centre Georges- Pompidou en 2006. Le film crée l’illusion d’une discussion entre les deux hommes. Extraits de films et entretiens composent ce voyage passionnant dans le temps et l’oeuvre godardiens.Read More »

Synopsis:
Born in a decade of political turmoil, La Chinoise has become a cinematic marker for the significant historical events that surrounded its creation. Five Parisian students, their political awareness aroused by Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, envision an overthrow of Western governmental systems – which they aim to bring about through acts of terrorism. One of Godard’s most brilliant films of the 60s, its success lies in the rejection of traditional narrative techniques: it is a dialectical charade which is as disturbing as it is comical. Though criticised in its day as a political manipulation, La Chinoise has proven alarmingly prophetic and its impact on audiences during the late 60s is echoed amongst viewers today.Read More »

“Charlotte et son Jules was made the year before Breathless and in many ways prefigures the arrival of that major film. Shot entirely in or from a single hotel room, it centres on Jules, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo who delivers a rapid-fire tirade about his girlfriend and their relationship when she turns up back in the apartment. The poverty of the production is indicated by the fact that the voice of the Belmondo character is that of Godard himself. But its machine gun dialogue and restless jump-cutting camera is almost an advance preview of the long sort of love scene between Michel and Patricia in Patricia’s tiny apartment in Breathless.”Read More »

A romance between young Parisians, shown through a series of vignettes.Read More »