Five from Jean-Luc Godard
It might seem like a contradiction to say that one of the most influential artists of the last 60+ years was also one of the most inimitable, but Godard, whose death in 2022 marked the end of a cinematic era, was nothing if not a figure steeped in contradiction. This selection of three films can’t hope to encompass the whole of Godard’s restless innovation, but it does give a taste of the bitter romanticism and cynical compassion that define his revolutionary body of work as a whole.
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La Chinoise
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 96 mins | 1967
Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, and Anne Wiazemsky co-star in Godard’s rouge-tinted, slogan-splattered political comedy concerning five innocents passing their summer vacation in a shared apartment by discoursing on Mao, performing agitprop theater, a... -
Goodbye to Language
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 70 mins | 2014
An innovator to the end, Godard’s penultimate feature finds him experimenting with the possibilities of digital 3D, using the technology to plot the disintegration of both a couple’s relationship and the images of the relationship. A film of unpreceden... -
The Image Book
Leaving November 1
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 84 mins | 2019
A cinematic collage, an esoteric essay film, a wide-reaching, freewheeling ontological history of the moving image, and a sorrowful survey of the fallen world at the beginning of the 21st century, Special Palme d’Or winner The Image... -
Le Gai Savoir
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 92 mins | 1969
A pivotal film poised between Godard’s narrative films of the ’60s and radical Dziga Vertov Group works of the ’70s, "Le Gai Savoir" is a work of didactic filmed theater, with Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto performing on a black soundstage lit by a... -
Film Socialisme
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard | 101 mins | 2010
An essay on Mediterranean culture and history in triptych form that locates a new, scintillating kind of beauty in the digital image, "Film Socialisme" moves from a cruise ship of venal bourgeois passengers to a portrait of political struggle at a Fre...
