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Kino Lorber has bought all North American distribution rights to Jean-Luc Godard’s final short film “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” The 20-minute short played at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will next screen at Toronto and New York film festivals.

Kino Lorber is planning a theatrical roll out for the title this fall, followed by a run at New York’s Film Forum in December, alongside Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema.”

“Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars” was meant to be a feature film project but Godard died a year ago, at the age of 93, before finishing it. Godard had envisioned a complex mixed-media collage of history, politics and cinema through ideas, references and visuals.

Kino Lorber’s library already boasts several iconic films by Godard, including New Wave classics “A Married Woman,” “Alphaville,” and “La Chinoise,...

Exclusive: International sales rights for late iconic director Jean-Luc Godard’s final work Trailer Of The Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars have been acquired by Goodfellas ahead of its world premiere in Cannes Classics on Sunday.

The 20-minute work was written and directed by Godard in collaboration with Jean-Paul Battaggia, Fabrice Aragno and Nicole Brenez.

Godard often transformed his synopses into aesthetic programs. This film follows that tradition and remains his ultimate gesture of cinema.

The filmmaker accompanied the trailer with the following statement: “Rejecting the billions of alphabetic diktats to liberate the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a necessary and true language by re-turning to the locations of past film shoots while keeping track of modern times.”

The work is billed as A Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and Vixens production, in coproduction with L’Atelier.

“Saint Laurent is honored to present a special work Jean-Luc Godard was working on before passing,...

Christian Petzold’s latest film Transit—his third consecutive period piece, second successive literary adaptation, and first theatrical feature to not star Nina Hoss in quite some time—continues what might be described as the German director’s ongoing European project. It is telling that the title of his 2000 feature The State I Am In, after which last year’s New York retrospective of his work was named, suggests a filmmaker concerned with taking the pulse of a nation. Adapted from Anna Seghers’s 1942 novel of the same name, drawn from the writer’s experience of fleeing to Mexico during World War II, Transit completes Petzold’s self-dubbed “Love in Times of Oppressive Systems” trilogy, comprised of the 1980s spy-melodrama Barbara (2012) and his post-wwii Vertigo-facelift Phoenix (2014). From its first frame, though, one would be forgiven for echoing the enduring refrain of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)—for though...

Mubi takes project’s UK theatrical and streaming rights.

Streaming service Mubi has secured a significant Cannes acquisition in the form of Jean-Luc Godard’s Competition title The Image Book (Le Livre D’Image).

The film, which premiered at the festival last week to strong reviews and also scored an impressive 3.0 rating on Screen’s Cannes jury grid, has had both its theatrical and streaming rights for the UK taken by Mubi.

The Image Book is an essay film examining the role of cinema in world history. The release will mark the Breathless director’s first UK theatrical roll-out in seven years,...

There are 18 films in competition will screen at the Cannes film festival this year. The 71st edition of the international festival in the south of France runs from May 8 to May 19. A filmmaker’s history at the festival offers insights as to who might be out front to take home the coveted Palme d’Or. Eight of the entries are by filmmakers that have had their work honored at past closing ceremonies. This year could definitely see someone new in the mix as four of the filmmakers are making their debuts on the Croisette while another four are having their films shown here in competition for the first time. The jury will be headed by two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett.

Below is a breakdown of the 18 films competing this year and the history of their helmers at the festival.

Stépane Brizé (“At War”)

When a company that has asked for...

Since the beginning of his career, Terrence Malick has been exploring the relationship between men and their landscapes during periods of significant cultural shifts. From the threatened Rousseauian utopia of The New World to the increasingly industrialized pastures of turn-of-the-century Texas in Days of Heaven, to the homogenized suburbs of 1950s America in Badlands, Malick’s characters are shaped by their geographical surroundings. Despite too often being unfairly written off as a filmmaker who treads water, both thematically and stylistically, Malick’s filmmaking is consistently attuned to the particular rhythms of whatever place and time he chooses to set his lens on.Knight of Cups marks a fascinating progression in Malick’s cinema, being his first to restrain its action to a contemporary city. We see recognizable motifs and aesthetic tics from Malick’s nature films—running water, roving cameras tracking across empty planes of land, interstitial shots of air...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSThe big news in Hollywood is that "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has approved a series of major changes, in terms of voting and recruitment, also adding three new seats to the 51-person board — all part of a goal to double the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020. The changes were approved by the board Thursday night in an emergency meeting," Variety reports. A major step, certainly, but we've still to see what the results will be. And certainly Academy membership does little to alter what kinds of movies get produced and by whom.Charles Silver, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Study Center, passed away last week. IndieWire is running an homage by Laurence Kardish, a former MoMA film curator:"Perhaps,...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Ace Hotel has several amazing photos by Stefanie Zoche and Sabine Haubitz of movie theatres in India. It sure makes us wish our neighborhood multiplex gave a damn about conjuring excitement for going out to the movies.We love Hou Hsiao Hsien's The Assassin, but it undoubtedly a difficult film to market. Most trailers have tried to pass of this contemplative drama as an action movie, but the above trailer gets the closest, so far, to the tone of the entire film.Speaking of trailers, we don't know what to say or think about the one for Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which seems to be combining the lean look of his great Pain & Gain with the "seriousness" of Pearl Harbor and his gross, overall...

There's a companion site for the new edition of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener's Film Theory: an Introduction Through the Senses that's chock full of some of the best recent audiovisual essays on cinema. Also in today's roundup: Jean-Luc Godard's illustrated scenario for Film Socialisme; Martin Scorsese on three of his favorite actresses, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland and Teresa Wright; Kenneth Turan on Dorothy Arzner; J. Hoberman on Nadav Lapid; David Fear's interview with Julien Temple and Neil Fox's with Alex Ross Perry; Joe Swanberg and Kris Swanberg in conversation; and Adam Schartoff's interviews with James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour), Patrick Wang (The Grief of Othersv) and Alex R. Johnson (Two Step). » - David Hudson...

There's a companion site for the new edition of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener's Film Theory: an Introduction Through the Senses that's chock full of some of the best recent audiovisual essays on cinema. Also in today's roundup: Jean-Luc Godard's illustrated scenario for Film Socialisme; Martin Scorsese on three of his favorite actresses, Gene Tierney, Olivia de Havilland and Teresa Wright; Kenneth Turan on Dorothy Arzner; J. Hoberman on Nadav Lapid; David Fear's interview with Julien Temple and Neil Fox's with Alex Ross Perry; Joe Swanberg and Kris Swanberg in conversation; and Adam Schartoff's interviews with James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour), Patrick Wang (The Grief of Othersv) and Alex R. Johnson (Two Step). » - David Hudson...

Jean-Luc Godard in his youthful days. Jean-Luc Godard solution for the Greek debt crisis: 'Therefore' copyright payments A few years ago, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, while plugging his Film Socialisme, chipped in with a surefire solution for the seemingly endless – and bottomless – Greek debt crisis. In July 2011, Godard told The Guardian's Fiachra Gibbons: The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore ...' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore ...' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it. If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans.

When Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film premiered it Cannes, it was like someone just opened the window and let in some much-needed fresh air into the festival. Relegated in a detail of obscure festival politics to the second-tier Un Certain Regard section, where in recent years such too-adventurous works like Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme and Claire Denis's Bastards were shunted aside, I came to Cemetery of Splendour assuming the director was going to follow-up on his Palme d'Or of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives with something as grand if not grander, and as bizarre if not even more bizarre. I should have known Apichatpong would move in mysterious ways and defy expectations.A small, humble film, in fact the most constricted of his full features, Cemetery of Splendour rather than working the surface of story, the surface of space, and the surface of drama and reality,...

Today the festival turns for me, beginning as it did with Volume 2 of Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights trilogy, told in tantalizing serial progression every other day at the Directors' Fortnight. What could be more fitting than eagerly awaiting more stories from this project inspired by Scheherazade's 1001 tales? Indeed, I wonder if film is actually the best format for Gomes's ambitious project, which I could easily see sprawling into television or web episodes, an all consuming process of ingesting a never ending series of idiosyncratic, telling events of Portugal's contemporary history. Volume 2: The Desolate One suggests as much after a singular opening episode—this part begins without Volume 1's wild, meta-prologue—of a rural murderer told as a traveling pastoral through the countryside. It is a single story of crime and Rural freedom telescoped into a sunny, roving short film that imagines not the man's horrible deed but...

I left Marie-Pierre the task of teasing out the nuances of Chinese director Jia Zhangke's film in competition, Mountains May Depart, which thankfully leaves me some space to talk about it without assuredness but with avid curiosity. Because, you see, it is a tremendously odd film, as dramatic a change from his last film as that one, A Touch of Sin, was from what came before it. I don't think of Jia as a filmmaker who constantly surprises, yet looking back on his last features, I realize he keeps doing just that: I Wish I Knew, A Touch of Sin—all come from a new, acute angle than the previous film, sweeping up in their dramatic and visual expanses new ways of telling stories about a China both old and new. Here, thankfully, is an art house master whose inspiration cannot be quelled, who refuses to fall into habit.Imagine...

“Yet if you should forget me for a whileAnd afterwards remember, do not grieveFor if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once we hadBetter by far you should forget and smileThan that you should remember and be sad.”—Christina Rossetti, Remember (1862)An opening title card from director Thom Andesen’s new feature film, The Thoughts That Once We Had, directly identifies the cinematic writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the project's primary subject and inspiration. Deleuze’s two volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), are today synonymous with a certain modernist school of thought that, while integrated in academia to such a degree as to be all but understood, remains quite radical. Unquestionably dense and provocatively pedantic, the French empiricist’s filmic texts integrate an array of theories and conceptualizations into a fairly delineated taxonomy, and are therefore fairly conducive...

Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas opens with a series of disguises, image overlays revealing to us Fantomas’ various personas.Often used by silent filmmakers attempting to conjure the supernatural, they conjure the abstract instead:“It’s a visual medium”–John Ford“[Erich von] Stroheim asked me personally to take on the assignment (after the studio removed him from the film), and I did so without any protest on his part…”– Josef von Sternberg***We move from dissolves to hard cuts:Later in The Wedding March:Counterpoints:And beyond:We call for help, mere seconds later our cries our answered: “We’ve got a trial ahead of us.”Time is meaningless: there is no difference between past and present.Impressionism becomes Expressionism:But we keep being reborn:Love exists:Love unites us all, re-engages us with the world:We cease being individuals:And become a collective--We become a crowd:None of us are alone:*** Sources:Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913)India Matri Bhumi (Roberto Rossellini,...

Considering it is the halfway point in this current decade of ours, 2014 is about as good a time as many to begin making "Best of the Decade (So Far)" lists -- which I have actually attempted to do over on Letterboxd -- and it seems the fine folks over at streaming site and film blog Fandor agree, as just yesterday video essayist Kevin B. Lee posted a video that counts down the 26 best films of the decade so far, as determined by a poll he took of "290 film critics and movie lovers on Twitter and Facebook." Lee took to Slate yesterday to explain the results a bit more in-depth, including the importance of social media played in the poll, how Cannes was a better predictor than the Oscars, how movies' fortunes rise and fall over time, and more. It's an interesting read, so if you want to check it out,...

Jean-Luc Godard has been marginalized, and even film critics, the lone voices one would assume would ably confront and digest and contextualize the work, have been running scared. (Certainly, few writing today seem to be even very aware that his newest, Goodbye to Language is not at all unlike Godard's recent features, especially 2001's In Praise of Love, 2004's Notre Musique, and 2010's Film Socialisme, and therefore should hardly be much of a head-slapper.) Somehow, the fourth dimension that Godard brought to cinema so long ago, and which has been copied and homaged so often since, has become an alien language, unfit for the twenty-first-century media life of hyper-convenience, data delivery, corporate-sponsored distraction engines and mega-populist "personal" entertainment matrices.>> - Michael Atkinson...

Jean-Luc Godard has been marginalized, and even film critics, the lone voices one would assume would ably confront and digest and contextualize the work, have been running scared. (Certainly, few writing today seem to be even very aware that his newest, Goodbye to Language is not at all unlike Godard's recent features, especially 2001's In Praise of Love, 2004's Notre Musique, and 2010's Film Socialisme, and therefore should hardly be much of a head-slapper.) Somehow, the fourth dimension that Godard brought to cinema so long ago, and which has been copied and homaged so often since, has become an alien language, unfit for the twenty-first-century media life of hyper-convenience, data delivery, corporate-sponsored distraction engines and mega-populist "personal" entertainment matrices.>> - Michael Atkinson...

Just in time for Halloween, Daniel Radcliffe gets some special powers and couple of appendages growing from his temples in Radius’ Horns, which will be this week’s biggest rollout among specialty newcomers. The title received a warm welcome at a Cinema Society event attended by its stars this week in New York. This week’s newbies are dominated by nonfiction fare, though with some exceptions. Kino Lorber is opening French/Swiss maestro Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language following a successful festival run. It has been critically acclaimed, and the company is expecting it to be a box office winner too. The 2014 Best Documentary winners from South by Southwest and Tribeca are going head-to-head in their theatrical debuts. Radius’ The Great Invisible (SXSW) opened in limited release Wednesday in an exclusively theatrical rollout, and The Orchard is bowing Point And Shoot (Tribeca) in a single NYC run. Submarine Deluxe...

This is a reprint of our review from the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, they say. Some filmmakers become so set in their ways that others, like Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbergh, vow to hang up their viewfinders before they ever reach that point. But over 50 years after his feature-length debut "Breathless" turned the form on its head, and at the grand old age of 83, Jean-Luc Godard has returned to Cannes (not, it should be said, in person) with his first film in Competition in over a decade to prove them wrong — "Goodbye To Language 3D." And prove them wrong he has: Godard's bite-sized latest (running barely 70 minutes long) isn't going to turn around anyone who gave up on the director long ago: it is very much a Jean-Luc Godard joint. But there's also a lot to chew on here, and a sense of...

The experience of being eluded by Jean-Luc Godard has its consolations, foremost among them the 83-year-old director's prerogative to elude. If a Godard film appears held together by random imagery, whispered non sequiturs, and a roll of duct tape, that's exactly the point. To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended. Especially with Godard's later films, including Film Socialisme and now Goodbye to Language 3D, to lose the plot — or, indeed, to watch it marched off of a short pier — is to win.

That's the story, anyway, currently attached to Godard's work, and surely to his Goodbye to Language, a neon-tinged 3-D collage about couplehood,...

The Hype Cycle: Contenders Arrive in Theaters

Excuse the absence in this column for the last few weeks. I’ve been covering the Chicago International Film Festival, catching up with a few of the Foreign Language Oscar contenders while there. Now however, many of these movies are finally making their ways into theaters, providing an extra wrinkle into the race as both critics and fans weigh in on their quality… click here to read the full article.

31 Days of Horror: 200 Greatest Horror Films

The hardest part about choosing my favourite horror films of all time, is deciding what stays and what goes. I started with a list that featured over 200 titles, and I think it took more time to pick and choose between them, than to actually sit down and write each capsule review. In order to hold on to my sanity, I decided to not include short films, documentaries,...

Jean-Luc Godard, and more specifically his 1965 film Pierrot le Fou, literally changed my life, and set me on a path toward intense and everlasting cinephilia. Since the first time I saw that film, it has remained my favorite movie of all time and Godard my favorite director. So when I finally had the chance to see Film socialisme in 2010, his first feature film in six years, I had high hopes that the old master was going to yet again bring something new to the table. Those hopes were assuredly met. I considered the film the best of that year and still believe it is an astonishing movie, rife with so much of what defines Godard in this is fourth(?), fifth(?), in any case, current, phase of his career.

The first words of Film socialisme, at least according to the “Navajo English” subtitles, are “money – public – water.” Literally, this refers to...

The New York Film Festival is finally about to begin and here is Glenn on one of the must-sees of the fest, Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language.

Much like the film itself, you’ll have to bear with me here. If I get lost or end up on tangents then don’t worry – it’s not only to be expected, but probably the intent. This will probably be messy, but this is a film titled Goodbye to Language so I feel it’s a safe zone, yes? You see, there is a lot to talk about. How about the use of 3D that is perhaps the best I have ever seen. And then there’s the bravura directions that director Jean-Luc Godard goes even once you think you may have his shtick down. And that’s before we get into the concept of subjectivity of ideas. For all I know,...

Thoughts occasioned by the release of Adieu au langage

Godard and the Permanently New

One “It has to face the men of the time and to meet/The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has/To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, and, like an insatiable actor, slowly and/With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat…”

Two “…no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. …what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it….novelty is better than repetition.”

-and modernity, novelty, superventing contemporareity in his cinema begins with a re-evaluation of screen time, direction, and space and his satisfactions at segmenting space as determined by...

I fear to write about a film quickly is to write it weakly. But there is an obligation here because, finally, Godard. Oh, Godard. Ah, dieu. (Adieu, Godard?) Jean-Luc is in Competition again, his first inclusion since over a decade ago for my favorite of his films, In Praise of Love. This could be his last; it feels like his last. Not the solemn, Mediterranean tableaux canvas of Film Socialisme nor the thicket-dense essay of his first 3D film, Les trois désastres,. No, Adieu au langage is softer, smaller, lighter and light filled. A poem, not an essay.

A poem about a dog who connects two people, a couple having an affair. Nearly half the film is the dog and the dog's roving vision, in scalding, phosphorescent colors and smudgy 3D. The couple, sensual and lucid, eventually wilt under the weight of domesticity and inequality not just in the home...

You can't teach old dog new tricks, they say. Some filmmakers become so set in their ways that others, like Quentin Tarantino or Steven Soderbergh, vow to hang up their viewfinders before they ever reach that point. But over 50 years after his feature-length debut "Breathless" turned the form on its head, and at the grand old age of 83, Jean-Luc Godard has returned to Cannes (not, it should be said, in person) with his first film in Competition in over a decade to prove them wrong. And prove them wrong he has: Godard's bite-sized latest (running barely 70 minutes long) isn't going to turn around anyone who gave up on the director long ago: it is very much a Jean-Luc Godard joint. But there's also a lot to chew on here, and a sense of play that was decidedly lacking in "Film Socialisme," not least when the director's messing around with his new toy: 3D.

Welcome back to Cannes Check, In Contention's annual preview of the films in Competition at next month's Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 14. Taking on different selections every day, we'll be examining what they're about, who's involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Jane Campion's jury. Next up, the oldest director (with the shortest film) in the lineup: Jean-Luc Godard's "Goodbye to Language."  The director: Jean-Luc Godard (French-Swiss, 83 years old). How to sum up Godard in a paragraph? One of the founding fathers of the French New Wave, and arguably its most persistently radical innovative member, with a career spanning seven decades, 39 feature films and an indeterminate number of creative phases. One of the sizable school of French filmmakers who had a formative stint as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, Godard was born and educated in Paris -- the very city...

Will 2014 finally be the year we see Jean Luc-Godard's "Goodbye To Language 3D"? It has been four years since his garishly digital headscratcher "Film socialisme," and while he did contribute to the omnibus "3X3D," it's "Goodbye To Language 3D"—his first feature entirely in the format—that everyone has been waiting for. A teaser (soon yanked) dropped online as long ago as last summer, but with the Cannes Film Festival around the corner, could the movie finally be seeing release? (The status of his one is so ephemeral, we had left it as an honorable mention in our predictions for this year's fest.) Well, with a batch of stills arriving, it perhaps suggests the movie is closing in on the finish line. And while previous descriptions of the plot suggested a story about a talking dog who intervenes between a man and a woman who no longer speak the same language,...

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, a frighteningly tense and beautiful film about a gay cruising spot haunted by murder. Even Godard produced a film, a 3-D short about cinema and truth in 3x3D, alongside Peter Greenaway and Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pera. This is just the tip of the iceberg as filmmakers like Claire Denis, Michel Gondry, Roman Polanski, and Phillipe Garrel also released new French-produced films in 2013.

Looking forward, though it may seem unlikely that France will repeat its 2013 effort, there are many great French films on the horizon for 2014. The new year promises new...

As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there's only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here are 10 films you won't want to miss in 2014.

1. Adieu au language (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard)

Jean-Luc Godard, master of the French Nouvelle Vague, proved with 2010's extraordinary Film Socialisme that he remains among the most accomplished filmmakers working. His latest effort, the 3-D experiment Adieu au language (Goodbye to Language), looks no less ambitious or exciting, as the three-minute trailer released over the summer quite compellingly suggests.

2. Under the Skin (Directed by Jonathan Glazer)

The best film at 2013's Toronto International Film Festiva...

I started writing this piece a little over two years ago when, wondering if this was a debate whose terms I wanted to propagate, I thought twice. After the recent Godard retro in New York, however, thinking thrice, I've decided not to think about it again. With very special thanks to Sam Engel, Matthew Flanagan, Danny Kasman, Andy Rector, Gina Telaroli, who provided so much of the source code for this piece. There's no greater fount of wisdom in the world for a guy to plagiarize.

And so:

***

“Pauvres choses! Elles n’ont que le nom qu’on leur impose.”

“Poor things! They have nothing but the name imposed upon them.” — Film Socialisme

“You can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll.

Very sorry baby, doesn’t look like me at all.” — Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song”

"Three Jewish characters, it's a lot for a single film. The fourth...

The New York Film Festival will kick off a three-week Jean-Luc Godard retrospective on Oct 9.

Films will include Le Petit Soldat, Alphaville, Masculin Féminin and Film Socialisme.

Festival top brass will also host a 20th anniversary screening of Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused with director and cast in attendance.

The 51st New York Film Festival will run from Sept 27-Oct 13.

“If images don’t do anything in this culture,” I said, plunging on, “if they haven’t done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing them, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence—the subject of criticism and not its object. And this,” I concluded rather grandly, “is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect—to the rhetoric of how things look—to the iconography of desire—in a word, to beauty!” I made a voilá gesture for punctuation, but to no avail. People were quietly filing out.  —Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon.

“Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the...

#18. Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language 3D

Gist: The idea is simple: A married woman and a single man meet. They love, they argue, fists fly. A dog strays between town and country. The seasons pass. The man and woman meet again. The dog finds itself between them. The other is in one, the one is in the other and they are three. The former husband shatters everything. A second film begins: the same as the first, and yet not. From the human race we pass to metaphor. This ends in barking and a baby’s cries. In the meantime, we will have seen people talking of the demise of the dollar, of truth in mathematics and of the death of a robin. Ought to be one of the most experimental and irreverent uses of 3D technology yet.

Prediction: Can’t see this not playing in Cannes, and if Godard...

#75. Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, & Edgar Pêra’s 3x3D

Gist: Three directors world-renowned directors explore 3D and its evolution in the field of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard’s dive into the controversial format has been on every cinephile’s must-see list since it was announced a couple of years ago, while Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pera make ostensibly their first stabs at the third dimension in this omnibus project, in which all three films are set to explore the evolution of the spectator and time. Godard’s The Three Disasters is a film about the historical memory of the 3D; Greenaway’s Just in Time One crosses space with 900 years of compiled history; and Pera’s Cinesapiens will be a short history of the Cinema viewer, from the cave to silent cinema, through sound to color and from stereoscopic 3D to holocinema.

Prediction: À la last year’s atrocious, near genre-ending septet,...

When the opportunity arose at the Locarno Film Festival to interview Fabrice Aragno, one of the cinematographers of Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme as well as his forthcoming 3D film Adieu au langage, I jumped at it. It was a chance to uncover some of what went on in the making of what is one of the most exciting films in recent years, a great work that ennobles the potential of digital form(s). It was also a chance to get a different perspective on Godard himself, without having to read into his own coded words. Aragno is a filmmaker in his own right, and recently completed a documentary with Godard that was commissioned by Swiss Television (and actually features some footage from Adieu au langage). What our conversation revealed to me was a new, simpler image of Godard, of a curious, creatively generous man with a collaborative spirit. Not...

In his vitriolic review of Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard’s self-indulgent mess that screened at Cannes in 2010), renowned critic Mark Kermode said: “the movie is incredibly boring and incomprehensible, but so boring and incomprehensible that critics concluded it must be quite profound.” With that quote in mind, I carefully read every single glowing review I could find of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s new film The Master (including one already on this site) after watching it at the Toronto Film Festival. Before the love fest, I walked out of the theater feeling confident that everyone else in attendance hated it as much as I did. Instead, it seems as if everyone has found a safe place for their beloved director’s latest to hide by looking for praise anywhere they could. The film follows the life and tribulations of former sailor Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) whose rather random but instant bond with Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) turns...

Leviathan is yet another rich project hailing from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has brought us fascinating, anthropologically-driven experimental work since its inception in 2007, including award-winning films like Sweetgrass (2009) and Foreign Parts (2010). The lab was formed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who co-directs Leviathan with Véréna Paravel. The film takes place on a fishing boat, shot on cheap, tiny digital cameras that are attached to fishermen, dead fish and even thrown overboard on tethers. Just as Abbas Kiarostami's Five was a film that somehow articulated the essence of Yasujiro Ozu with its patient observation of the slow and beautiful ebb and flow of life, Leviathan does the same, though unconsciously, for the late Tony Scott with its kinetic, often aesthetically stunning visual noise. It is a film that evades description with its originality, something which is brought up in the following exchange I had with Véréna Paravel at the Locarno Film Festival,...

While Jean-Luc Godard's most recent effort, 2010's "Film Socialisme," wasn't met with the warmest of receptions, that hasn't put off the legendary French director. That came after a six-year gap, but Godard is reportedly already in production on his latest, titled "Goodbye To Language 3D," and according to the production company Wild Bunch he'll be shooting in 3D. Could this be the arthouse alternative to "Hugo"?

Godard has gone on the record expressing his interest in 3D in the past, saying that he likes "when new techniques are introduced" because "it doesn't have any rules yet." The cast is made up of entirely French actors (Heloise Godet, Zoe Bruneau, Kamel Abdelli, Richard Chevalier and Jessica Erickson), and while there's no official synopsis -- not that it would help -- this one seems to be taking the themes of "Film Socialisme" (which featured fractured, limited captions) to the next logical step.

Coming off the divisive Film Socialisme, French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard is not simply resting on his laurels. The Breathless director is already in production in his next film, titled Goodbye to Language and the production company Wild Bunch have revealed the currently shooting film will be in 3D, along with information on the cast and first sales poster for the film they’re taking to the Cannes market.

The cast is made up of French actors Héloise Godet, Zoe Bruneau, Kamel Abdelli, Richard Chevalier and Jessica Erickson. While there is no official synopsis, Godard previously expressed interest in 3D back in 2010, saying he likes “when new techniques are introduced. Because it doesn’t have any rules yet.” He went on to say this film will be about ”a man and his wife who no longer speak the same language. The dog they take on walks then intervenes and speaks.

Close-Up Film Centre has acquired and revived Vertigo Magazine, one of the most important film-related publications in the UK. Launched in 1993, Vertigo went silent two years ago, but Issue 30 makes for one hell of a comeback. The title: "Godard Is" — and, as Damien Sanville writes in the opening editorial, "His oeuvre is, just as color is…. Godard is one if not the most influential filmmaker to explore the role of the moving image within aesthetics, politics and history. His work represents in its most emblematic way the crossover between the poetical and the historical, cinema and the arts, which will also be at the core of our publication. A 'double bind,' Guattari's crayfish."

A quick run-through: Frieda Grafe on Vivre sa vie (1962); David Brancaleone at considerable length on the "Interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker into Contemporary Visual Art" and Adrian Martin on the 2006 exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie,...

Above: Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz. Photograph by Michael Ackerman.

“I am Ophelia. She who the river could not hold.” These words, taken from Heinrich Müller’s play Hamletmachine, are spoken by a girl playing an actress at the start of the beautiful new film Low Life, screening Sunday and Wednesday as part of Lincoln Center’s series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. She is one of a group of young people who gather together in the streets and in their rooms at night, quoting and making plays, films, novels, and songs in an effort to choose their own identities, and to resist identities imposed on them by the State. The binaries of native/immigrant, legal/illegal, and natural/unnatural come into relief in particular through the love story of Carmen (Camille Rutherford), born in Lyon, and Hussain (Arash Naiman), an Afghan poet threatened with deportation. When together they’re quiet...

The second edition of the N1FR, n+1's film review, "is very late," begins editor As Hamrah, but there's no need to apologize. The timing is perfect, arriving just many of us will be desperate for distraction from what promises to be a very noisy weekend. As Hamrah notes, there's not one piece in the entire issue on "even one film nominated for an Oscar this year."

Instead, we have Chris Fujiwara setting Vincent Gallo and George Clooney next to each other and riffing on the juxtaposition, Christine Smallwood on Apichatpong Weerasethakul and on Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Jeanette Samyn and Jonathan Kyle Sturgeon on Pedro Costa, Dmitry Martov on Serge Bozon and his circle, Emily Gould on Badmaash Company, a Bollywood movie that screams out to be compared and contrasted with The Social Network, Jennifer Krasinski on the rise of the polymath, Ben Maraniss on Mel Gibson,...

Chicago – The notoriously confounding new film from Jean-Luc Godard baffled many critics during its 2010 premiere at Cannes. The legendary director was conspicuously absent from the festival, leading some to believe that his refusal to give interviews was reflected in the film’s final title card, “No Comment.” Yet after a careful analysis of “Film Socialisme,” it’s clear that Godard has plenty to say.

This is the sort of picture that functions more as a two-hour museum projection than a feature film. It’s bound to transfix some onlookers, while quickly repelling others into the next room. As a call for unity in the Mediterranean, Godard runs the risk of alienating the very people he intends to reach with his message. Only film buffs and Godard experts will be able to piece together this fragmented collage after an initial viewing. Everyone else will have to do their homework, but I...

As Xan Brooks notes in The Guardian, the shipwrecked cruise liner Costa Concordia played an eerie starring role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Socialism. He writes:

Anyone who sat through Film Socialisme may have suspected that the Costa Concordia was heading for trouble. The cruise liner was the setting for the first “movement” of Jean-Luc Godard’s ambitious, infuriating 2010 picture, serving as a self-conscious metaphor for western capital ploughing through choppy waters. In Godard’s film, the Concordia plays the role of a decadent limbo where the tourists drift listlessly amid the ritzy interiors. The passengers include a Un official and an elderly war criminal. The onboard entertainment comes courtesy of an unsmiling Patti Smith.

(Hat tip: Dangerous Minds.)

… Read the rest...

Cruise liner served as a self-conscious metaphor for western capital ploughing through choppy waters in Film Socialisme

Anyone who sat through Film Socialisme may have suspected that the Costa Concordia was heading for trouble. The cruise liner was the setting for the first "movement" of Jean-Luc Godard's ambitious, infuriating 2010 picture, serving as a self-conscious metaphor for western capital ploughing through choppy waters. In Godard's film, the Concordia plays the role of a decadent limbo where the tourists drift listlessly amid the ritzy interiors. The passengers include a Un official and an elderly war criminal. The onboard entertainment comes courtesy of an unsmiling Patti Smith.

Film Socialisme divided audiences when it was first unveiled at the Cannes film festival. What some saw as an eccentric masterpiece, others dismissed as an eccentric mess – a wilfully obscure meditation on the nature of globalisation from a cantankerous old genius who took a perverse delight in bamboozling his audience.

If the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the west coast of Italy last night, looks familiar to you, it's likely that it's because it's the cruise ship that's the setting for the first movement of Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme ("It's less a tourist cruise than an international summit of bastards," wrote David Phelps in June). The accident, which cost the lives of three people and injured many more (and around 40 of the 4000 passengers are still missing), occurred on the same evening that a rogue vigilante group going by the name of Standard and Poor's downgraded the credit ratings of nine eurozone countries.

Which brings us to our first set of DVDs. A Forum topic on Artificial Eye's release of its Theo Angelopoulos Collection has been rumbling along for half a year now and, with the third volume coming out next month, David Jenkins has a good long...

Zhang Ziyi in Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmasters

For about a week now, Ioncinema has been counting down its "Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2012" — and they're almost there. As of this writing, after 99 individual entries filling us in on all that Eric Lavallee knows about the films he's looking forward to, the title that'll land in the #1 spot remains a mystery. I'll update when it appears, but for now, click the titles to see the files on the top 20 so far:

Update, 1/12: And we have a #1:

Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux. Michael Haneke's Love. Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. Terrence Malick's The Burial (that title's likely to change). Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air. Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmasters. Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love. Antonio Campos's Simon Killer. Derek Cianfrance's Place Beyond the Plains. Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone.