5:15pm
Film SocialismeA scintillatingly deconstructed filmic essay that’s as lyrically persuasive as it is visually and sonically fractured,
Film Socialisme might be Godard’s most rigorous and thorough reinvention of cinema yet. Opening on a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean sea , the film unfolds elegantly into a global tryptic whose second panel shows us a family-run garage in France, and whose final segment explodes across a half-dozen historical Mediterranean nexus points. A humanist critique of how culture and commerce intersect and collide across international borders,
Film Socialismes kaleidoscopically color-saturated screen overflows with life – spies, would-be-presidents, ornery children,
Patti Smith(!), immigrants, and even a llama help make up the film’s populist panorama. The soundscape is an even more densely populated, intricately edited polyglot maze of overlapping languages and ambient recordings. For all its fractured experimentation,
Film Socialisme is nearly seamless — it doesn’t so much shatter cinematic conventions as melt them.
Our screenings of Film Socialisme are presented with FULL English subtitles (for the first time ever in the U.S.!), rather than previous international screenings’ “Navajo English” subtitles.Dir.
Jean-Luc Godard, 2010, HD presentation, 102 min.
Shown with -Vivre Sa Vie (aka My Life To Live) – 7:45pm
One of Godard’s saddest and most influential films, the masterpiece
Vivre Sa Vie streamlines the director’s defiant aesthetic into the sharpest crystalline vision out of all his earliest efforts — and also acts as a microscope under which his emotions toward wife/frequent collaborator
Anna Karina can be viewed through highly engaging formal rigor. The film eavesdrops the viewer into the vicinity of Karina’s bob-coifed “Nana”, a young, beautiful Parisian who dreams of becoming an actress, and, in a series of increasingly heartbreaking tableaux, falls into casual prostitution to makes ends meet. Though Godard tackles the heavy-duty thesis of the sexual alienation of women with aplomb,
Vivre Sa Vie’s greatest heights occur in its brief narrative asides: Nana’s late night, tear-stained spiritual with Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, her existential café debate with philosopher
Brice Parain, and her seductive-yet-sad jukebox-accompanied stride around a grimy pool-hall — a moment which forever cements Nana as the most haunting out of any Godard character creation.
Dir.
Jean-Luc Godard, 1962, 35mm, 85 min.
More Here... FILM SOCIALISME / JLG / FILM ANNONCE 3 from Lieutenant D. on Vimeo.
New 35mm Print! 
