jean-luc godard: movieman june 27 - july 17, 1997 photo: a scene from CONTEMPT

Ranging from early New Wave love-poems to cinema to contemporary, spiritual contemplations of the art Godard did much to reinvent, our program samples three decades of radical filmmaking by the once and future master, Jean-Luc Godard, beginning with a beautiful new print of CONTEMPT (1963) and climaxing with HÉLAS POUR MOI (1993). Note: All films are subtitled in English; CONTEMPT and BREATHLESS have some spoken English. calendar program notes and times

a scene from FOR EVER MOZART a scene from FOR EVER MOZART a scene from NOUVELLE VAGUE

CONTEMPT/ LE MEPRIS Brand New 35mm Wide-Screen Print! France-Italy, 1963; 103 minutes Godard loved Hollywood's movies, but hated its crass moneymen. When producer Joseph E. Levine gave him a big budget, the director who had just made the sublime Vivre sa vie shot a brilliant, "trashy"-looking, wide-screen, color movie about fear and loathing in the factory of filmmaking--spiked with special contempt for his own producer. Michel Piccoli is a screenwriter drawn by vulgar entrepreneur Jack Palance into making a movie of Homer's Odyssey under the direction of Fritz Lang (playing himself). Brigitte Bardot (Godard's Kim Novak) is Piccoli's bored wife, and Godard makes us see and feel the death of their marriage. A superbly sad, vicious epitaph for cinema as art--on the occasion of only one of its many Godardian demises. Friday, June 27: 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 pm Saturday, June 28: 4:30, 6:30, 8:30, and 10:30 pm Sunday, June 29: 4:30, 6:30 and 8:30 pm Monday, June 30: 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 pm Tuesday, July 1: 2 & 4 pm Wednesday & Thursday, July 2 & 3: 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 pm FOR EVER MOZART New York Premiere! Switzerland-France, 1996; 85 minutes To describe FOR EVER MOZART as Godard's Bosnian film is both a simplification and a reduction. The conflict in that state lies at the film's heart and occupies its central sections, but as with all of Godard's work, nothing is ever that simple. For this great iconoclast always asks many questions in every film questions about the cinema, our relationship as an audience to the images he constructs, and our relationship to a world many of us take for granted. One of the most concrete of filmmakers, he is at the same time among the most transcendent and spiritually intense. --Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival The "story" is a complex tapestry in four panels, with the character of the Director linking the sections. A film is planned but is stymied by casting problems; a play is produced in Sarajevo, but the actors are swept away by war; the Director is frustrated in completing the film that initially couldn't get off the ground; and the magnificence of Mozart puts a period to Godard's wandering--but never adrift--drama. Woven into the fabric of FOR EVER MOZART are examinations of the tools humankind uses to craft truth and beauty out of chaos: art, politics, movies, every kind of "framed" image of ourselves and our experiences. Friday, July 4: 2, 4, 6, 7:45 and 9:30 pm Saturday, July 5: 4:15, 6, 7:45 and 9:30 pm Sunday, July 6: 4:15, 6 and 7:45 and 9:30 pm Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday, July 7, 8 and 9: 2, 4, 6, 7:45 and 9:30 pm Thursday, July 10: 2, 4 and 9 pm NEW WAVE / NOUVELLE VAGUE France, 1990; 90 minutes Claiming to be "only the conscious organizer" of the ravishingly beautiful NOUVELLE VAGUE, Godard creates movie-as-spiritual-quest from some of the fragments he--and perhaps Everyperson--uses to defend against despair: love, memory, each of the arts, and nature. Richly aged Alain Delon plays two parts: the first is a lost soul run down by a beautiful young businesswoman who takes him to her lakeside mansion to recover (Godard enjoyed a happy childhood at this chateau, his grandparents'). Delon's second part is his twin brother's opposite: a dominating fellow who knows exactly where he's going. Another Godardian "resurrection machine". . . a movie meant to reanimate the soul. Friday, July 11: 2, 6, and 9:30 pm Saturday, July 12: 6:15 and 10 pm BAND OF OUTSIDERS / BANDE A PART France, 1964; 95 minutes Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Louisa Colpeyn, Chantal Darget Adapted from a novel titled Fool's Gold, BAND OF OUTSIDERS mines the conventions of Hollywood movies--gangster and wild-teen genres--to play with grabby but faux fictions. Young Arthur, Franz and Odile dream up a heist, then act it out--and real life intrudes on reel ideals with all of the off-kilter romantic nihilism a French New Waver like Godard can muster. As Pauline Kael says, "It's as if a French poet took a banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines; Godard re-creates the gangsters and the moll with his world of associations--seeing them as people in a Paris café, mixing them with Rimbaud, Kafka, Alice in Wonderland." Friday, July 11: 4 and 7:45 pm Saturday, July 12: 4:20 and 8 pm

a scene from HELAS POUR MOI a scene from MY LIFE TO LIVE a scene from MY LIFE TO LIVE

BREATHLESS / A BOUT DE SOUFFLE France, 1959; 90 minutes Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville One of the films that gave rise to the French New Wave tsunami, making Jean-Paul Belmondo a star and morphing the face of an affectless American blonde gamine--Jean Seberg--into that of a heartless noir femme fatale. Belmondo imagines himself a Bogart or a Cagney, but is really a two-bit Parisian hood who falls hard for the little girl in a T-shirt peddling newspapers on the street. BREATHLESS moves, sounds, and looks like a love story--with cinema. It should be a revelation to contemporary cinéastes suspicious of too much style, over-impressed with Significant Content, and blithely unaware of the artful marriage of form with meaning. Sunday, July 13: 4:15 and 7:45 pm Monday, July 14: 4 and 7:45 pm EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF / SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) France, 1980; 87 minutes With Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Roland Amstutz, Anna Baldaccini Godard called EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF "my second first film;" it was his first foray into commercial filmmaking in over a decade. Three lives are intertwined in this stylistic exercise in seeing and hearing more deeply and clearly in a culture mesmerized by the "things" of commerce. Godard follows the destinies of a country girl who comes to the city to become a prostitute and a man who has left his wife for love of a young woman who in turn deserts him for pastoral innocence. Sunday, July 13: 6 and 9:30 pm Monday, July 14: 2, 6 and 9:30 pm PASSION aka GODARD'S PASSION France, 1982; 88 minutes Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, Isabelle Huppert, László Szabó A variation on the theme of CONTEMPT (1963): this time, Michel Piccoli plays a documentary filmmaker plagued by producers. As this Godardian alter ego tries to shoot a movie called Passion about classical paintings by Rembrandt and Delacroix, he's surrounded by characters named Hanna, Michel, Jerzy and Laszló as well as backers who hang about challenging his every decision and bombarding him with annoying and stupid queries. In comparison with Day for Night (1973), Truffaut's celebration of the joys of making movies, PASSION is Godard's dark side of the moon. Wednesday, July 16: 2, 6 and 9:45 pm WEEKEND France, 1967; 105 minutes With Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky A major critical success for Godard and a savage indictment of contemporary existence, gridlocked in violence and sex for sensation. The world seems to be coming to an end in a series of traffic jams, bloody collisions and terrorist attacks, as an alienated bourgeois couple drive ever deeper into apocalyptic territory, finally succumbing to actual instead of metaphorical cannibalism. A virtuoso "crash" that makes David Cronenberg's 1997 cause célèbre look shallow and tame indeed. Wednesday, July 16: 4 and 7:45 pm WOE IS ME / HÉLAS POUR MOI France-Switzerland, 1993; 90 minutes With Gerard Dépardieu HÉLAS POUR MOI is inspired by the Canti texts of the great 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi and the myth of Amphytrion and Alcimedes. A married couple living in a Swiss village must suddenly deal with the fact that the husband's body has apparently been borrowed by a "god." Might a god, the creator of humankind, be grieved by the endless misfortunes of mortals and even dream of love like that experienced by mere men and women? Godard's inquiry into the nature of faith and love wonders where such emotions begin and why their endings so often generate tears, bloodshed and war. A movie that demonstrates great spiritual self-possession, the earned wisdom of an artist who has never ceased his investigations into life and cinema. Thursday, July 17: 2, 6 and 9:30 pm MY LIFE TO LIVE / VIVRE SA VIE France, 1962; 85 minutes Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Brice Parain, Peter Kassowitz You might want to speedread Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait--a story of love and obsession and art--before watching what is arguably one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Godard's New Wave valentine to wife-muse-star Anna Karina essentially incarnates her as a holy whore of cinema. We follow Nana, a Parisian prostitute, through several days of her life, watching her charm camera, director and audience--if not the inhabitants of her movie world. Godard runs the gamut of filmmaking and other arts, philosophy, and even sociology and utilizes closeups, musical interludes, monologues, silence, documentary vs. sensationalistic action--all this and more in his extraordinarily fruitful investigation of Anna's/Nana's impenetrable yet simultaneously transparent soul. Thursday, July 17: 4 and 7:45 pm