This spring the Film Forum in NYC mounted a complete retrospective of all the films made by French master Jean-Luc Godard during the 1960s, films whose impact on world cinema was “cataclysmal and sweeping.” (The Film Encyclopedia) Godard was Cinema in the 1960s.
“From Breathless[1960] through Weekend [1967], Godard reinvented cinema. Not since D.W. Griffith was knocking out a weekly two-reeler at the Biograph studio on 14th Street had there been anything to equal it.” (J. Hoberman)
This fall Cornell Cinema presents ten of these films, all in recently restored or new prints (Breathless, Vivre sa Vie, Contempt, and La Chinoise).
The Film Forum’s introduction to the retrospective follows:
Throughout the 1960s, cinephiles eagerly awaited the latest film—or two—by Jean-Luc Godard (born 1930). A founding father of the nouvelle vague, the former critic was its most innovative in form, with each new work seemingly rewriting the grammar of film. Jump cuts, asynchronous soundtracks, self-narration, cinema as essay, cinema as collage, self-referential cinema, cinema of anarchy—you name it, Godard’s 60s oeuvre redefined “cutting edge”—and, with location and available-light shooting, now provides a near-documentary time capsule of Paris and environs. Through JLG’s movies, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and Anna Karina became New Wave icons, with the dark-eyed, appealingly vulnerable Karina doubling as the director’s muse through seven quintessential collaborations—and a four-year marriage. Forty years after the tumultuous events of May ’68, and blessed with 100% hindsight, one can almost see the chaos coming through the satire and social criticism in Godard’s chronicles of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” His eventual ever-more outré stylistic leaps would leave even art house audiences behind, but for at least one pivotal decade, Godard was a seminal force in redrawing the map of film.
The series at Cornell is cosponsored with the French Studies Program. Special thanks to the Film Forum.