With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave. (Criterion)Read More »

In Scénario de ‘Sauve qui peut la vie’ (1979), director Jean Luc Godard discusses many of the themes, motifs and film-making practices that would eventually be utilised in the creation of his following film, Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). The film is interesting in the same way that Leos Carax’s later short film Sans Titre (1996) was interesting; offering us a window into his particular creative world and establishing many of the ideas and characteristics that would later be found in Carax’s own underrated masterpiece Pola X (1999). Carax, of course, is one of the filmmakers most clearly influenced by Godard, even appearing as an actor in Godard’s widely criticised adaptation of King Lear (1987), as well as paying homage to the older filmmaker with his earliest films, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986).Read More »

Jean Luc Godard’s first short film. A documentary financed by his work as construction worker in Switzerland.Read More »

Godard’s meditation on things Russian and cinematic, featuring JLG himself as “The Idiot” My own not very good quality VHS recording from a NTSC TV broadcast, but I know of no other source for this. With some English narration and French dialog with subtitles. Video collages of Russian films, in the style of Histoire(s) and other Godard films of this period.Read More »