“I disappear between these two moments of speech/ self-portrait not autobiography” – Jean-Luc Godard Never has Godard been so melancholic and comedic in one film. JLG/JLG: self-portrait in December (hereafter referred to as JLG/JLG) is a portrait of an artist, the artist of cinema, at sixty four. Part documentary, part film essay, JLG/JLG is a …
From the pool party dive in Boogie Nights inspired by Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba to the steering wheel scene in Hard Eight that so deftly recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, playing spot the reference with Paul Thomas Anderson is always fun. It is through these moments that we can fully appreciate the voracious depth at which one man is embroiled in his art; forever the immersed student …
The first time I saw anything from a Godard film, I hated it. My first encounter with his work was perhaps appropriately abrupt and fragmentary. I was in my first year as a Film Studies major, in an introductory class about the French New Wave. Having grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood classics, …
Over fifty years after Godard helped changed the face of Western cinema with Breathless, his work remains divisive, innovative and for lack of a better word, avant-garde. While Adieu au Langage is Godard’s second foray into 3D technology, it is his first feature length effort using the technique and is far more complex than his …
France ruled the film world in 2013, producing some of the most critically acclaimed and controversial titles. La Vie D’Adele took home the Palme D’Or and has since been subject to intense debate around the ethics of the film’s production and its depiction of sexuality. Among the other highlights was Alain Guirandie’s L’Inconnu du lac, …
“The rich man may fall for a stock exchange ruse, but the poor man’s got nothing to lose.” In case you hadn’t gathered the sentiment of Soldate Jeanette around two-thirds of the way into its brisk 80-minute runtime, the man strumming his guitar at the dinner table says what everyone’s thinking, through his musical praise of a slender existence. The meal takes place at a farm, where former financial high-flyer Fanni (Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg) has escaped to start a new life, away from the hollow boardrooms and into the tangled textures of the forest, surrounded by beings with a detectable pulse, from humans to barnyard critters. Her last remaining wads of cash can be found in the nearby thicket, burnt to a crisp atop a bonfire.