Jean-Luc Godard
Birthday: 1930-12-03 Place of Birth: Paris, France
Synopsis
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.
Acting
See You Friday, Robinson
"We should start with a correspondence, maybe we will not correspond to one another. Ebrahim can send me a letter this Friday, and I'll answer him next Friday. So, see you Friday, Robinson!" And so, Jean-Luc Godard stages himself in his daily thought, wisely desperate, and sends images and words from Switzerland to the other side of the Channel. In his mansion in Sussex, Ebrahim Golestan tries to decode these UFO-messages and skilfully seeks to bring them back to the appearance of reason. And so on, until the day a veil falls over the two Gods on the run. Does the existence of poets still have any meaning in these times of distress?
My Dick Smells like Cheese and fish
A meditation on the French new wave film movement, MA BITE SENT LE FROMAGE ET LE POISSON stylistically pays homage to the icons of the movement, including its head figure, Jean Luc Godard, and Jean Pierre Leaud, one of the most popular actors of the movement.
Printtemps
For Jean-Luc Godard,
with all the admiration and affection of Jacques Perconte and Nicole Brenez.
December 3, 2020.
The Image Book
In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
Cléo from 5 to 7
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
A German Youth
At the end of the 1960s the post-war generation began to revolt against their parents. This was a generation disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state apparatus in which they believed they saw fascist tendencies. This generation included journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lawyer Horst Mahler, filmmaker Holger Meins as well as students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader.
Letter in Motion to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux
Rather than writing a simple letter to explain his absence from the press conference for his latest Cannes entry, "Goodbye to Language," at the Cannes Film Festival, instead, legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard created a video "Letter in motion to (Cannes president) Gilles Jacob and (artistic director) Thierry Fremaux." The video intercuts from Godard speaking cryptically about his "path" to key scenes from Godard classics such as "Alphaville" and "King Lear" with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald, and quotes poet Jacques Prevert and philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Two in the Wave
An in-depth analysis of the relationship between New Wave pioneers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, as seen through rare archival footage, interviews, and film excerpts — written and narrated by former Cahiers du Cinéma editor Antoine de Baecque.
Back to Room 666
What is the future of cinema? In 1982, in Cannes, Wim Wenders invited many movie makers to answer this question. 26 years later, the question remains, but Wenders is now on the other side of the camera.
Notre musique
Divided into three “kingdoms” — Enfer (Hell), Purgatoire (Purgatory) and Paradis (Paradise) — Notre Musique is an indictment of modern times.
Histoire(s) du Cinéma 3a: The Coin of the Absolute
Part 5 of Godard's 8 part examination of the history of the concept of cinema and how it relates to the 20th century.
2 x 50 Years of French Cinema
At a lakeside hotel, Michel Piccoli discusses the centennial of cinema with Jean-Luc Godard. Godard asks why should cinema's birthday be celebrated when the history of film is a forgotten subject. Through the remainder of his hotel stay, Piccoli tests Godard's hypothesis.
JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December
Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.
First Name: Carmen
The protagonist is Carmen X, a sexy female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen's escape with the guard, her uncle's attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.
Room 666
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"
1 P.M. (One Parallel Movie)
Lighter and livelier than the films Jean-Luc Godard had made in France, his U.S. collaboration with Direct Cinema documentarian D. A. Pennebaker was meant to be One A.M., as in “one American movie”; but Godard quit the project and the U.S., where to his dismay he discovered that revolution wasn’t imminent, and Pennebaker edited Godard’s material, to which he and Richard Leacock even added a bit more, releasing the result as One P.M., as in “one parallel movie.” It’s a stunning mixture of cinéma-vérité, political theater, and interviews of key sixties figures.
Godard in America
Spring 1970: Godard and Gorin, on the road, visiting colleges, speaking with Andrew Sarris, and explaining, through illustrated notebooks, their newest Dziga Vertov Group project, a film on Palestine.
The Joy of Learning
Night after night, not long before dawn, two young adults, Patricia and Emile, meet on a sound stage to discuss learning, discourse, and the path to revolution. Scenes of Paris's student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to their words. Words themselves are often Patricia and Emile's subject, as are images, sounds, and juxtapositions.
The Married Woman
A superifical woman finds conflict choosing between her abusive husband and her vain lover.
Contempt
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
La Nouvelle Vague par elle-même
Made for Cinéastes de notre temps series. In 1964, several French New Wave auteurs discuss the success and crisis of the wave. Featuring Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rozier, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Jean Rouch, and many others.
Paris Belongs to Us
A young woman joins a theatrical troupe where she slowly believes that the director is involved with a secret group and that he is in grave danger.
Charlotte and Her Boyfriend
This short features a man who is visited by his ex-lover. The moment she arrives, the man starts his constant barrage of speech; the woman doesn't say much. She just mocks the man and pretends she isn't listening. She pulls faces at him and larks about; while the man is trying his best to get her back in his life, then in the next sentence he says he hates her.
Operation Concrete
Godard returned to Paris briefly before getting a job as a construction worker on a dam project in Switzerland. With the money from the job, he made a short film about the building of the dam called Opération béton (Operation Concrete).
