Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
JEAN-LUC GODARD (1930-2022)
December 3 – December 13
To mark the passing of one of the titans of cinema, we present two of Jean-Luc Godard’s most rarely-screened series of films: the politically and aesthetically radical works he made between 1968-71 – including those produced as part of the Dziga Vertov Group, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin and others – and his later, magisterial collage-work, HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA, which is often cited as one of the finest achievements of the second half of his career.
Special thanks to Bret Berg (American Genre Film Archive) and Louise Paraut (Gaumont).
THE DZIGA VERTOV GROUP
Upon the completion of WEEKEND in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard shifted gears to engage more directly with the radical political movements of the era – thus creating a new kind of film, or, as he eventually put it: “new ideas distributed in a new way.” This method involved collaborating with the precocious young critic and journalist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. Both as a two-person unit, and as part of the loose collective known as the Groupe Dziga Vertov (named after the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker/theoretician), Godard and Gorin would realize “some political possibilities for the practice of cinema” and craft new frameworks for investigating the relationships between image and sound, spectator and subject, cinema and society.
These films, long out-of-circulation except in film dupes and bootleg video copies, represent one of the least-known chapters in Godard’s extraordinary career. They provide a crucial glimpse of his radicalization, and of the aesthetic dialogue between Godard and Gorin that, in essence, invented a modern militant cinema. As Godard told an English journalist of the era, film is not a gun, but “a light which helps you check your gun.”
For this series we present screenings of three of the Dziga Vertov Group films (WIND FROM THE EAST, STRUGGLE IN ITALY, and VLADIMIR AND ROSA, as well as two preceding films that led directly to the formation of the group (A FILM LIKE ANY OTHER and BRITISH SOUNDS).
“Are these films ready for a second chance? It would be quite something if they finally joined the great Godardian corpus. They have been the gaping wound in the man’s authoritative canon for so long, the films that are allegedly ‘better read about than seen.’ […] It’s possible that time and history have caught up with the Dziga Vertov Group, in the sense that two of the discourses that permeate the films – socialism and fascism – are now once again very much on the table. This is not to say that ‘Godardian pedagogy’ will find its rightful place as the aesthetic mode of the 21st century, but the films’ handmade, declamatory style does fit nicely with the age of rampant amateur media production and a younger generation for whom activism and technology are entirely coextensive.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK
