Tag Archives: jean-luc godard

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.

NYFF52 MAIN SLATE: 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, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, September 27, 9:00, and Wednesday, October 1, 9:00
Festival runs September 26 – October 12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

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 is screening at the New York Film Festival on September 27 at 9:00, followed by a Q&A with star Héloïse Godet, and October 1 at 9:00. You can check out the NSFW French trailer here.

LE WEEK-END

Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) reevaluate their relationship while celebrating their thirtieth anniversary in Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END

LE WEEK-END (Roger Michell, 2013)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, March 14
www.musicboxfilms.com

Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? meets Richard Linklater’s “Before” series in Roger Michell’s bittersweet romantic black comedy, Le Week-end. Professor Nick Burrows (Jim Broadbent) and teacher Meg Burrows (Lindsay Duncan) are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary by returning to Paris, where they spent their honeymoon. But whereas their first visit was filled with love, hope, and dreams of a bright future, they have come to the realization that their life together didn’t quite turn out as planned. While Nick still seems to be in love with his wife, Meg is reevaluating their relationship, continually lashing into him and spending what little money they have with reckless abandon. When they unexpectedly bump into an old colleague of Nick’s, the self-absorbed chatterbox Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), they are invited and go to a party where they imagine what could have been, forcing them to face some brutal truths.

Jeff Goldblum is a hoot as a self-absorbed writer in New York Film Festival selection LE WEEK-END

Broadbent (Iris, Topsy-Turvy) and Duncan (Mansfield Park, Traffik) are marvelous together, inhabiting their roles with a beautiful grace, evoking what Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) might be like in the third or fourth sequel to Before Sunrise. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Goldblum (The Fly, The Big Chill) playing the jittery Morgan so wonderfully. Director Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi, who previously collaborated on The Buddha of Suburbia, The Mother, and Venus, have created a very funny, honest, mature, and heart-wrenching portrait of a couple in sudden crisis after three decades of marriage, not necessarily knowing what, if anything, went wrong when. Le Week-end, which pays tribute to Jean-Luc Godard both in its title and in a late scene, opens March 14 at Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN

Jean-Pierre Melville and Pierre Grasset are involved in a lurid cover-up in Melville’s TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN

CINÉSALON: TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (DEUX HOMMES DANS MANHATTAN) (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1959)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 4, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through March 18
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

When French U.N. delegate Fèvre-Berthier goes missing in director Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1959 noir, Two Men in Manhattan, reporter Moreau (Melville) of the French Press Agency and freelance photographer Pierre Delmas (Pierre Grasset) go out on the town, trying to find out what happened. While Moreau is seeking the truth, Delmas is after a sensationalist photograph he can sell to the highest bidder. They meet up with several women who knew the married diplomat — some much better than others — including his secretary, Françoise Bonnot (Colette Fleury), actress Judith Nelson (Ginger Hall), stripper Bessie Reid (Michèle Bailly), and jazz singer Virginia Graham (Glenda Leigh). As the men make their way through Rockefeller Plaza, Times Square, Greenwich Village, Broadway, the subway, and the United Nations, Marial Solal’s and Christian Chevallier’s jazzy score dominates the outdoor scenes, soaking the viewer in the New York at night atmosphere. And all the while, the reporter and photographer are trailed by someone in a mysterious car. As they get closer to their destination, they are faced with some serious ethical choices, not just about journalism, but about life itself. Nearly fifty-five years after its release, Two Men in Manhattan feels as stiff and dated as Melville’s (Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos, Le Samouraï) lead performance, his only starring role and his sole appearance in one of his own films. It’s difficult to tell if Two Men in Manhattan is a serious procedural, an homage to classic noirs, a tribute to New York City, or a sly genre parody — perhaps it’s all of them, but far too many of the twists and turns are hard to swallow, especially when it comes to Delmas’s selfish decisions and Moreau’s often absurd brainstorms that seem to exist just to quicken the plot despite their incredulity. Still, it’s beautifully shot in shadowy darkness by Nicholas Hayer, and it was proclaimed by Jean-Luc Godard to be the second best film of the year. A digitally remastered version of Two Men in Manhattan is screening March 4 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be presented by Phillip Lopate, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues March 11 with Claire Denis’s Chocolat, introduced by African Film Festival founder Mahen Bonetti, before concluding March 18 with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Truth.

MOTION(LESS) PICTURES, PGM. 1: LA JETÉE AND CHAFED ELBOWS

Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE is a postapocalyptic thriller about movies and memory, told almost exclusively through still images

LA JETÉE (Chris Marker, 1962) and CHAFED ELBOWS (Robert Downey Sr., 1966)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, February 28, 7:30
Series runs February 28 – March 4
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

“Photography is truth,” Michel Subor tells Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat, “and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” Anthology Film Archives explores the relationship between photography and cinema — films are called “movies” for a reason — in the new series “Motion(less) Pictures,” five days of films that make innovative use of still images in telling their stories. The festival begins February 28 at 7:30 with the inspired pairing of two wildly different low-budget, experimental works, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Robert Downey Sr.’s Chafed Elbows. Marker’s nearly half-hour postapocalyptic dystopian thriller is set in a world that calls “past and future to the rescue of the present.” Told almost completely in dark, eerie black-and-white photographs — the camera moves only once, pulling back on the opening establishing shot of the titular pier at Paris’s Orly airport, and at another point a woman opens her eyes in bed — La Jetée explores time and memory as a WWIII survivor (Davos Hanich) in the underground Palais de Chaillot galleries revisits an event that occurred with a woman (Hélène Chatelain) on the jetty. The film, referred to in the credits as “un photo-roman,” is narrated by Jean Négroni, with the only dialogue occasional unintelligible whispering by the German scientists in charge of the mysterious operation; the soundtrack also includes lush music from Trevor Duncan and a repeated thumping that mimics heartbeats. The film explores both art as memory and memory as art as well as the cinema itself; Marker (Sans Soleil, Le joli mai) references Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo when the man and woman look at the rings of a Sequoia tree, while La Jetée has gone on to influence such films as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the Matrix trilogy, and countless other movies and videos. It’s a mesmerizing work that brings fresh insight upon each viewing.

Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) is harassed by a church sock sniffer (Elsie Downey) in Robert Downey Sr.’s hyperactive cinematic collage, CHAFED ELBOWS

“What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?” Dr. Oliver Sinfield (Lawrence Wolf), also known as Baldy, asks in Downey’s Chafed Elbows. “About a dollar,” his oddball patient, Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan), responds. Where La Jetée is enigmatic and foreboding, Chafed Elbows is crazy and hyperactive. The hour-long film, consisting of still images and live action that shifts between color and black-and-white in manic collages, follows the wacky adventures of Walter as he suffers through his annual November and January breakdowns in New York City. He has sex with his mother (Elsie Downey, Robert’s wife, who plays all the women in the movie), gives birth to money via a Caesarean through his hip, encounters a sock sniffer, shoots a cop, becomes an actor and a singer, and meets the Virgin Mary and St. Peter. Along the way, Downey (Putney Swope, Greaser’s Palace) takes on art, psychiatry, incest, race relations, sexual obsession, health care, the NYPD (which is thanked in the credits for being a “hindrance”), and the Hollywood system — the film is so low budget that he had it developed at a local drugstore. He also shares an inside joke when Walter stops by a theater that advertises Downey’s Sweet Smell of Sex, prints of which are now lost. Most of the film is dubbed extremely poorly (on purpose), with Wolf providing thirty-four voices, each one more playfully annoying than the last. And Downey is relentless in his skewering of clichés; when Dinsmore comes upon a man painting a white line down the middle of an alley street, the man says, “You gotta draw the line somewhere.” Like La Jetée, Chafed Elbows is also an examination of the past, present, and future of the art of cinema, pushing boundaries while refusing to draw any lines; they are seemingly two widely disparate works that strangely have more in common than one might think when seen together. “Motion(less) Pictures” continues through March 4 with screenings of films by Lynda Benglis, Peter Bo Rappmund, John Baldessari, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Godard, Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, Morgan Fisher, and others.