A self ascribed “film adrift in the cosmos”, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend begins with a scene of affluent domesticity, the camera moving through the expansive spaces of a wealthy couple’s home as blackness seeps in from their mutually destructive schemes and bored infidelities. The ... Read More »
Far from Vietnam is a dizzying cinematic pastiche directed by Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais that encapsulates the idealistic fervor surrounding the war in Vietnam like a manic television viewer flipping th... Read More »
Six of the pinnacle figures in French cinema all come together to establish an intellectual climate much like the central pillars of Parisian architecture. They explore different classes and realities of a day in the life of Paris, each offering their unique filmic language to th... Read More »
To say Jean-Luc Godard is a confrontational filmmaker would be an extreme understatement. Each and every one of his films is either a commentary on film and filmmaking or politics and occasionally both simultaneously. He regularly flouts the rules and creates unique pieces that... Read More »
In Godard's pop-noir, Made in U.S.A, he takes that now infamous quote and executes it using the flavors of the film-noir masters and his muse and former wife Anna Karina as a stand-in for noir heroes like Philip Marlowe and creates a stylistic homage to the genre with his usual p... Read More »
A female hand sensually graces a plain white canvas in eager anticipation of the male's hand that eventually grasps it with firm affection. Her naked back replaces the white canvas as the male sits just out of frame, their mutual desire more important than either party's identity... Read More »
The tenth (tenth!) bullet fired in Godard’s 1960’s cinematic fusillade, Masculine Feminine begins not, as many recollect, in a café with its idealistic male avatar, Paul (a young Jean-Pierre Léaud), stumbling through clumsily written poetic passages, but with the sound of someone... Read More »
Jean-Luc Godard begins his iconoclastic 1965 road movie Pierrot le fou with an excerpt from a book about Diego Velázquez as recited by Jean-Pierre Belmondo: “Velázquez, past the age of fifty, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twiligh... Read More »
By opening his fifth film with a quote by Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Luc Godard establishes that Les carabiniers lives in a fabled reality and will use the warm metaphors built by the shared human experience as a universal shorthand, suggesting that the characters and events in the ... Read More »
“Andre Bazin said ‘cinema shows us a world that fits our desires.’ Contempt is the story of that world.” Love and loss echo throughout human history, both tragically temporal and in some sense eternal. These are perhaps the two greatest themes that art attempts to tackle, twin... Read More »
Drawing chiefly from Bertold Brecht and Robert Bresson, Godard’s Vivre sa vie is at once a detached yet highly ascetic portraiture of a woman’s venture into the sex trade. In depicting a woman absent of humility, Godard treats this series of presentations not as a fall from grace... Read More »
Jean-Luc Godard has moved through several different stages as a filmmaker, but he’s always remained the great innovator. Whether landing a political point, highlighting social problems or toying with film tradition, he’s constantly tried to break free from convention. In Band of... Read More »
