Tag Archives: jean-luc godard

ANNA KARINA IN NEW YORK CITY

Anna Karina will be in New York City for three special presentations of films she made with onetime husband Jean-Luc Godard

Who: Anna Karina
What: Screenings and discussions in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens
Where: BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100
Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria, 718-777-6800
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
When: BAM: Tuesday, May 3, $20, 7:30; MoMI: Wednesday, May 4, $25, 7:00; Film Forum: Friday, May 6, $14, 7:30
Why: Legendary Danish-French actress Anna Karina will be making three rare New York City appearances next week at a trio of special screenings of films she made with Jean-Luc Godard. On May 3, the seventy-five-year-old Karina, who was married to Godard in from 1961 to 1965, starred in seven of his films in addition to works by Agnès Varda, Roger Vadim, Jacques Rivette, Volker Schlöndorff, Tony Richardson, Benoît Jacquot, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Raoul Ruiz, and others, will be at BAM for a members-only screening of 1960’s A Woman Is a Woman, for which she won the Best Actress Award at the Berlin Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with Melissa Anderson. If you’re not a BAM member, you can see Karina on May 4 at the Museum of the Moving Image, where she will participate in a conversation with Molly Haskell after a screening of 1965’s Pierrot le fou. And on May 6, Film Forum will present 1964’s Band of Outsiders, with Karina taking part in a discussion and audience Q&A following the 7:30 show. Band of Outsiders continues there through May 12, alongside the series “Anna & Jean-Luc,” which also includes Vivre Sa Vie, Alphaville, Le Petit Soldat, Made in U.S.A., A Woman Is a Woman, and Pierrot le Fou.

BAMcinématek FAVORITES — GALLIC 60s: A MAN AND A WOMAN / PIERROT LE FOU

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, March 2, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour-de-force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. A recently restored print of the original will be shown on March 2 at 7:30 as part of the BAMcinématek series “BAMcinématek: Gallic 60s,” in honor of the film’s fiftieth anniversary. The two-day treat continues March 3 with Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina should be more excited about recent restoration of Jean-Luc Godard classic

PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, March 3, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Art, American consumerism, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, Hollywood, and cinema itself get skewered in Jean-Luc Godard’s fab faux gangster flick / road comedy / romance epic / musical Pierrot Le Fou. Based on Lionel White’s novel Obsession, the film follows the chaotic exploits of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, Godard’s then-wife), former lovers who meet up again quite by accident. The bored Ferdinand immediately decides to leave his wife and family for the flirtatious, unpredictable Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot despite his protestations. Soon Ferdinand is caught in the middle of a freewheeling journey involving gun running, stolen cars, dead bodies, and half-truths, all the while not quite sure how much he can trust Marianne.

Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and styles appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, who are more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy. A few years ago, when the film was shown at Anthology Film Archives as part of a series selected by John Zorn, the avant-garde musician explained, “Pierrot holds a special place in my heart — I am really a Romantic, not a Postmodern — and this film’s music never ceases to reduce me to tears.” You can see and hear for yourself when last year’s fiftieth-anniversary restoration of this Nouvelle Vague favorite screens on March 3 in the two-day BAMcinématek series “BAMcinématek: Gallic 60s,” which begins March 2 with Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman.

PIERROT LE FOU

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are excited about brand-new restoration of Jean-Luc Godard classic

PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 18-24
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and styles appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, who are more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy. Two years ago, when the film was shown at Anthology Film Archives as part of a series selected by John Zorn, the avant-garde musician explained, “Pierrot holds a special place in my heart — I am really a Romantic, not a Postmodern — and this film’s music never ceases to reduce me to tears.” You can see and hear for yourself December 18-24 when Film Forum unveils the brand-new fiftieth-anniversary restoration of this Nouvelle Vague favorite.

THE HOLLYWOOD CLASSICS BEHIND WALKERS: BE KIND REWIND

Mos Def and Jack Black have a wacky plan to save their video store in BE KIND REWIND

BE KIND REWIND (Michel Gondry, 2008)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, November 8, 4:30
Series runs through November 8 – December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

When old man Fletcher (Danny Glover) takes off for a week, leaving Mike (Mos Def) in charge of his soon-to-be-demolished video store called Be Kind Rewind (they don’t have any DVDs or recent movies), his most important rule is to “Keep Jerry Out.” Jerry (Jack Black) is a crazy conspiracy theorist who covers himself in metal to ward off alien rays. After a botched attack on the local power plant, Jerry becomes a walking magnet (in a laugh-out-loud hysterical scene) and unknowingly erases all the videos in the store. Taking a page from the Little Rascals plots when Spanky and Alfalfa would suddenly put on a show for some local cause, Mike and Jerry recruit Alma (Melonie Diaz) as they proceed on their very strange attempts at Sweding — making their own versions of such films as Ghostbusters, Rush Hour 2, and Robocop and renting them out as if they were the real thing. Following the brilliant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the extremely strange The Science of Sleep, writer-director Michel Gondry has fashioned a really stupid movie that has an overabundance of heart and charm. Glover and Mos Def are soft and gentle in this Capra-esque comedy, offsetting Black’s hyperactivity. Every time you’re ready to write the film off as being just too silly and ridiculous, something comes along to make you double over in laughter. Be Kind Rewind kicks off the Museum of the Moving Image series “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” being held in conjunction with the new exhibition that examines how contemporary artists have used iconic Hollywood imagery in their work, with sculptures, photographs, paintings, videos, drawings, and more by Francis Alÿs, Richard Avedon, Jim Campbell, Gregory Crewdson, Jean-Luc Godard, Douglas Gordon, Isaac Julien, Martin Kippenberger, Guy Maddin, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Prince, Tom Sachs, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Piotr Uklanski, Pierre Bismuth, and many others. Be Kind Rewind is screening November 8 at 7:00, preceded by Oscar winner Bismuth’s Where Is Rocky II? trailer. Bismuth will introduce the films, then participate in an artist talk with curator Robert M. Rubin afterward. After a break, the series picks up after Thanksgiving, continuing through December 27 with such iconic and influential classics as Dr. Strangelove, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, Chinatown, Psycho, and The Wild Bunch as well as several cult faves by Maddin, who will be on hand to talk about his latest, The Forbidden Room, on December 12.

CONSEQUENCES: ALPHAVILLE

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) seeks help from Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful ALPHAVILLE

ALPHAVILLE: A STRANGE ADVENTURE OF LEMMY CAUTION (ALPHAVILLE: UNE ÉTRANGE AVENTURE DE LEMMY CAUTION) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 16, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box).

Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) attempts to shed light on a grim situation in intellectual sci-fi film noir

Meanwhile, Caution travels everywhere with his paperback copy of Paul Éluard’s Capital of Pain, which includes such short poems as “To Be Caught in the Trap,” “In the Cylinder of Tribulations,” and “The Big Uninhabitable House.” Paul Misraki’s relentless noir score fits right in with Raoul Coutard’s bleakly beautiful cinematography, which often shows Caution through glass doors and windows and in enclosed spaces. Godard infuses Alphaville with cinematic flourishes, inside jokes, political statements, and intellectual references, directly and indirectly evoking Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, American cartoons (a pair of white-coated professors who announce a memory problem with 183 Omega Minus are named Eckel and Jeckel, played by Cahiers du cinema’s Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean-André Fieschi), and even his own films, with Jean-Pierre Léaud making a very brief cameo as a waiter. But one of the myriad pleasures of Alphaville — which won the Golden Bear at Berlin and at one time had the working title Tarzan vs. IBM — is that it can be enjoyed on many different levels, as dystopian warning, fascist parable, cinema about cinema, individual vs. the state thriller, or, quite simply, classic French noir. Recently digitally restored with a new translation and subtitles by Lenny Borger and Cynthia Schoch, Alphaville is screening October 16 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Consequences” and will be introduced by Buddhist studies professor Christopher Kelley. “All is linked, all is consequence,” a scientist tells Caution in the film. The series is being held in conjunction with “Karma: Cause, Effect and the Illusion of Fate,” which continues through December 30 with conversations (David Eagleman + Whoopi Goldberg, Noah Hutton + Jonathan Demme, Gary Indiana + Tracey Emin, Ian Somerhalder + Carol Anne Clayson) and such other karma-related films as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Ken Russell’s Altered States, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and Sherwood Hu’s Prince of the Himalayas.

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIERE — WRITING THE IMPOSSIBLE: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye) and Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) nearly get swept away in Jean-Luc Godard’s born-again film, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF

CinéSalon: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF (SAUVE QUI PEUT [LA VIE]) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, June 16, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through July 28
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

In 1980, Jean-Luc Godard told journalist Jonathan Cott, “When you have a first love, a first experience, a first movie, once you’ve done it, you can’t repeat it,” the French auteur said about his latest film, Every Man for Himself, which he considered his “second first” film. “If it’s bad, it’s a repetition; if it’s good, it’s a spiral. It’s like when you return home — to mountains and lakes, in my case — you have a feeling of childhood, of beginning again. But in films, it’s very seldom that you have the opportunity to make your first film for the second time.” For Godard, whose real first film was 1960’s Breathless and who went on to make such other avant-garde masterworks as Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Every Man for Himself might have been somewhat of a return to narrative, but only as Godard can do it. He still plays with form and various technological aspects, including a fascination with slow motion and an unusual, often very funny use of incidental music, and his manner of episodic storytelling would not exactly be called traditional. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad. Jacques Dutronc stars as mean-spirited, self-obsessed Swiss television director Paul Godard, who has recently broken up with his girlfriend, Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), who wants to leave their apartment in the city for the idyllic greenery of the country. (Yes, the characters have such names as Godard and Rimbaud, and the voice of Marguerite Duras shows up.) Paul then meets a prostitute, Isabelle Rivière (Isabelle Huppert), who is interested in Paul and Denise’s apartment, planning on bettering her life even as she still must submit to the whims of her clients, including a businessman who orchestrates a strange orgy that would make Secretary’s James Spader proud.

The film is divided into four main sections, “The Imaginary,” “Fear,” “Commerce,” and “Music,” as the protagonists’ paths cross both thematically and, ultimately, physically. Among the motifs Godard explores are violence against women, incest, freedom, and choice, in addition, of course, to the art and craft of filmmaking itself. Along the way he pokes fun at commercialism, with numerous references to Marlboro (including a man who drives up to a gas station convenience store in a Formula One racecar sponsored by the cigarette brand) and Coca-Cola. Men don’t fare very well either; interestingly, while the U.S. title is Every Man for Himself, the film was released as Slow Motion in England, and the original French title, Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), can be translated to colloquially mean “Run for your life!,” and that’s what you’d most likely do if you ever met any of these male characters in real life. (Godard has said that Save Your Ass would be a better translation.) Godard, who is credited with “composing” the film as opposed to directing it and wrote the screenplay with Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Claude Carrière, also makes frequent mention of anal sex and assholes, both literally and figuratively. “You happy?” one of Isabelle’s johns says to his imaginary wife in a hotel room. “That’s what you wanted, right?” “No,” a woman’s voice responds. “I wanted something else.” In Every Man for Himself, each character wants something else as they search through their most inner desires. The film looks and sounds dated today, very much a product of its time; add half a star if you think Godard can do no wrong, and delete a full star if Godard makes you want to bang your head against the wall. Nominated for three César Awards, for Best Director, Best Film, and Best Supporting Actress, which Baye won, Every Man for Himself is screening June 16 in the French Institute Alliance Française’s CinéSalon series “Jean-Claude Carrière: Writing the Impossible.” (The 7:30 show will be introduced by a special guest, and both the 4:00 and 7:30 shows will be followed by a wine reception.) The two-month festival consists of a wide range of films written by two-time Oscar winner Carrière, who, at eighty-three, is still hard at work. The series continues through July 28 with such other Carrière collaborations as Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, and Louis Malle’s May Fools.

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

Jean-Luc Godard’s GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE speaks for itself

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (ADIEU AU LANGAGE) (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St., 212-875-5050
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771
Opens Wednesday, October 29
212-875-5050
www.kinolorber.com

After the New York Film Festival advance press screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D Goodbye to Language, a colleague turned to me and said, “If this was Godard’s first film, he would never have had a career.” While I don’t know whether that might be true, I do know that Goodbye to Language is the 3D flick Godard was born to make, a 3D movie that couldn’t have come from anyone else. What’s it about? I have no idea. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s about everything, and it’s about nothing. It’s about the art of filmmaking. It’s about the authority of the state and freedom. It’s about extramarital affairs. It’s about seventy minutes long. It’s about communication in the digital age. (Surprise! Godard does not appear to be a fan of the cell phone and Yahoo!) And it’s about a cute dog (which happens to be his own mutt, Miéville, named after his longtime partner, Anne-Marie Miéville). In the purposefully abstruse press notes, Godard, now eighty-three, describes it thusly: “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.” Yes, it’s all as simple as that. Or maybe not.

Jean-Luc Godard has fun with 3D in GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

Godard divides the film into sections labeled “La Nature” and “La Métaphore,” cutting between several ongoing narratives, from people reading Dostoyevsky, Pound, and Solzhenitsyn at an outdoor café to an often naked man and woman in a kitchen to clips of such old movies as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Snows of Kilimanjaro to Lord Byron and the Shelleys on Lake Geneva. Did I say “narrative”? It’s not really a narrative but instead storytelling as only Godard can do it, and this time in 3D, with the help of cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. Godard has a blast with the medium, which he previously used in a pair of recent shorts. He has fun — and so do we — as he toys with the name of the film and the idea of saying farewell (he plays with the French title, Adieu au langage, forming such puns as “Ah, dieu” and “Ah, dieux,” making the most of 3D layering); creates superimpositions and fast-moving shots that blur the image, making the glasses worthless; changes from sharp color to black-and-white to wild pastel-like bursts of red, blue, and green; evokes various genres, with mystery men in suits and gunshots that might or might not involve kidnapping and murder; and even gets a kick out of where he places the subtitles. These games are very funny, as is the voiceover narration, which includes philosophy from such diverse sources as Jacques Ellul (his essay “The Victory of Hitler”) and Claude Monet (“Paint not what we see, for we see nothing, but paint that we don’t see”). And for those who, like my colleague, believe the film to be crap, Godard even shows the man sitting on the bowl, his girlfriend in the bathroom with him, directly referencing Rodin’s The Thinker and talking about “poop” as he noisily evacuates his bowels. So, in the end, what is Godard saying farewell to? Might this be his last film? Is he saying goodbye to the old ways we communicated? Is he bidding adieu to humanity, leaving the future for the dogs, the trees, and the ocean? Does it matter? A hit at Cannes, Goodbye to Language opens October 29 at the IFC Center and Lincoln Center after screening at the New York Film Festival earlier in the month. You can check out the NSFW French trailer here.