This is every bit how you might imagine Godard making an anti-war film would look and feel like—it’s darkly comic, blistering in its attack on warmongers and a fairly underrated work of his early phase.
Godard collaborates with Jean-Pierre Leaud in this rarely-seen TV movie whose reach would have surely escaped its audience as the iconoclastic auteur philosophises the end of cinema, complications of production and the malleability of video aesthetics in his inimitable esoteric style.
This is Godard having fun with colours and language as its crime-noir trappings somewhat mask the auteur’s increasing fixation on Marxist politics, though the film isn’t always coherent or compelling.
This early Godard sees Anna Karina at her most bewitching (those soul-staring eyes that break the fourth wall!) as the auteur reinvents the ‘rom-com’ with wilful abandon and artistry.
Banned for a short while in France, Godard’s second feature boldly and stylistically depicts the moral complexities of the Algerian war, throwing audiences at the time an early political curveball.
Godard’s anarchic work of gleeful nihilism is not just a challenging treatise on the corruption and destruction of bourgeois values, but one of his most essential films about the end of civility and civilisation.
Emotions run deep in Godard’s masterwork as it charts the deterioration of a couple’s marriage whilst set against the chronic uncertainties of a movie production.
Godard’s attempt at mashing multiple genres together in a mystery-type film doesn’t really go anywhere, and in fact, the characters are ironically searching for some kind of direction.
An experimental audiovisual essay by an increasingly iconoclastic ‘90s Godard that abstractly ruminates about religion, philosophy, love and politics in the only way he can.
Continue reading →Could be one of Godard’s most beautifully-shot films, but its experimental use of unsync dialogue combined with a fragmentary and obtuse narrative makes this challenging to appreciate.
Eternality Tan 