After his first early stint writing film criticism in Paris for Cahiers du cinema among other periodicals, Godard returned to Switzerland where he found work on the construction of the colossal Grande Dixence dam. Parlaying his wages as a laborer into financing for his first film, Godard made the short documentary OPERATION BETON in 1954. A modest but compelling account of the heroic building project, Godard's directorial debut boasts some thrilling outdoor views, an optimistic respect for industrial progress, and an evocative score combining music by Handel and Bach.

Producer: Jean-Luc Godard. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Adrien Porchet. Editor: Jean-Luc Godard. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 17 min.

Shortly before their respective breakthrough first features, Godard and Truffaut collaborated on this amusing short bagatelle. Caroline Dim stars as a young woman trying to get to Paris despite widespread flooding; future nouvelle vague regular Jean-Claude Brialy (his voice dubbed by Godard himself) plays the young man who accompanies her on the journey. Shot quickly on location with the support of veteran producer Pierre Braunberger, and explicitly billed as an homage to Mack Sennett, UNE HISTOIRE D'EAU anticipates the freewheeling films that both its talented young directors would go on to make.

Producer: Pierre Braunberger. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Michel Latouche. Editor: Jean-Luc Godard. Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Caroline Dim. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 18 min.

Godard's groundbreaking feature-length debut, a stylistically audacious riff on the B-grade gangster genre, was famously shot on real-life locations around Paris by the inventive cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Jean-Paul Belmondo became a star for his turn as a fast-talking Bogart-wannabe on the run from the law; freshly exiled from her career as a Hollywood ingenue, Jean Seberg plays his fetching American love interest. A key film in the cresting of the "nouvelle vague", widely beloved for its brazen cinephilia, manic jump cuts and ingrained romantic fatalism, BREATHLESS was a watershed in modern French cinema and remains equally as vital and inspiring nearly fifty years after it premiered.

Based on an idea by François Truffaut. Producer: Georges de Beauregard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Cécile Decugis, Lila Herman. Cast: Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henri-Jacques Huet, Daniel Boulanger. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, Black and White, 90 min.

A melancholy self-portrait and cultural lament tempered by strokes of self-deprecating humor, JLG BY JLG is Godard working in his austere, associative, cagily aphoristic essay mode. Beginning with a photograph of the director as a solemn youth, the film gradually drags present-day Godard into view through a collage of fragmentary scenes shot in and around his wintry Swiss redoubt. Lyrical landscapes and snippets of plangent classical music are interlaced with countless aural and visual references, anti-American jabs and philosophical pensees. Godard's petty complaints and penchant for misanthropic crankiness are offset by the film's frequent bursts of breathtaking beauty, its unconsolable sense of loss and ultimately humble humanism.

Producer: Jean-Luc Godard. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Christian Jacquenod, Yves Pouliquen, Jean-Luc Godard. Editor: Catherine Cormon, Jean-Luc Godard. Cast: Jean-Luc Godard, Denis Jadót, Elisabeth Kasa. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 55 min.

Godard's second feature--and first starring his soon-to-be wife Anna Karina--was banned in France for its pointed commentary on the colonialist quagmire then roiling Algeria. Michel Subor plays an ambivalent secret agent carrying out contract hits on Arab terrorists based in Geneva. Dazzlingly photographed by Raoul Coutard, Karina is the leftist sympathizer he falls for but ultimately fails to protect. A political thriller larded with cerebral Godardian asides (e.g., "Cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.") but not devoid of visceral effects--a horrifyingly matter-of-fact torture sequence couldn't feel more topical today--LE PETIT SOLDAT, despite its original suppression, has since earned its standing as an early nouvelle vague classic.

Producer: Georges de Beauregard. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot, Nadine Marquand, Lila Herman. Cast: Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet, Paul Beauvais. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 88 min.

Godard goes to war in this savage satire, apparently suggested by Roberto Rossellini, about two amoral rubes who, conscripted into the army, proceed to loot and murder their way around the world without conscience or compunction. The tone is absurdist farce, the style unvarnished verite punctuated by disjunctive sound, handwritten intertitles, and genuine newsreel combat footage. Godard follows his moronic protagonists as they wreak havoc across generic modern-day backdrops both urban and rural: the war is both everywhere and nowhere, in line with Godard's stated intention, articulated in defending the film from its myriad detractors, to show "what all wars are and have been, from the barbarian invasion, up to Korea or Algeria, with Fontenoy, Trafalgar, Gettysburg, etc."

Based on the play by Benjamino Joppolo. Producer: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Gruault. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan. Cast: Marino Mase, Albert Juross, Geneviève Galéa, Catherine Ribiero. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, Black and White, 80 min.

Godard continues his systematic assault on narrative grammar and standard sound-image relations in this soberly detached yet still emotionally devastating portrait of a young Parisienne's slide into prostitution. Anna Karina stars as the impassive, enigmatic subject of Godard's study, a single girl forced to fend for herself in the brutal modern big city. Presented in a dozen discrete episodes, each chapter preceded by a putative plot summary, VIVRE SA VIE flirts with literary coherence but in fact encompasses many competing discursive strategies and multifarious modes of cinematic expression. Serene and poetic yet formally daring, the film moved Susan Sontag to call it "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of."

Based on on documentation from 'Où en est la prostitution' by Marcel Sacotte. Producer: Pierre Braunberger. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan. Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André S. Labarthe, Peter Kassovitz. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, Black and White, 85 min.

Deemed scandalous for its casual treatment of infidelity and condemned by French authorities on its original release, UNE FEMME MARIEE describes a day in the life of a lovely young wife (Macha Meril) torn between her pilot husband (Philippe Leroy) and her journalist lover (Bernard Noel). Godard characteristically disrupts this conventional tale with his arsenal of distanciation techniques and sociological digressions. The subtitle, "fragments of a film shot in 1964," suggests the episodic method: a narrative broken up by talking-head interviews, camera tricks, and random graphic inserts pulled from newspapers, magazines, advertisements, posters and billboards--the image-saturated modern mediascape that envelops characters, audience and auteur alike.

Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnes Guillemot, Françoise Collin. Cast: Macha Méril, Bernard Noël, Philippe Leroy, Roger Leenhardt. Presented in English dialogue. 16mm, 98 min.

Crag-faced American expat Eddie Constantine stars as hard-boiled secret agent Lemmy Caution in Godard’s parodic but often moving foray into noir-inflected, low-budget science fiction. The futuristic, techno-totalitarian city of Alphaville is actually mid-’60s Paris viewed by night, its most alienating modern architectural behemoths emblematic of a nightmarish society that has outlawed art, free inquiry and human emotion—hence Anna Karina as the utterly benumbed, robotic object of Lemmy’s desire. The tongue-in-cheek comic-book story line counts for less than the film’s satirical bite and nocturnal mood, its mélange of sampled genre tropes and expressionistic Wellesian touches. But despite Godard’s gloomy dystopian scenario and blanket cultural pessimism, ALPHAVILLE boasts an undeniable affirmative streak and ultimately becomes a paean to the power of love.

Producer: André Michelin. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Adaptation: Akim Tamiroff. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot. Cast: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, Black and White, 98 min.

Inspired by THE BIG SLEEP and based (just barely) on a Donald Westlake crime novel, MADE IN U.S.A. yokes hard-boiled tropes to topical commentary on events ranging from the Ben Barka affair in France to the assassination of JFK. In her last feature for Godard, Anna Karina stars as a detective investigating her lover’s murder by descending into the underworld of a bizarre French simulacrum of Atlantic City (photographed, with full-color splashiness, in the Paris suburbs!). Godard set out to make what he called “a real story film,” but wound up with a typically fractured, ambiguous narrative packed with high-art references, pulp citations, and trenchant political asides.

Based on the novel 'The Jugger' by Donald Westlake. Producer: Georges de Beauregard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot. Cast: Anna Karina, Laszlo Szabo, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Yves Afonso. Presented in French and English dialogue. 16mm, 90 min.

Belmondo ditches his stultifying bourgeois life for ex-flame Karina and the outlaw couple hits the road flying high on true love and the promise of liberation. The ’Scope visuals, courtesy of redoubtable cinematographer Coutard, are pure Pop poetry, especially in the sun-kissed South of France passages. Godard said he “wanted to do a kind of YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, a story of the last romantic couple.” PIERROT LE FOU accordingly combines noirish amour fou with freewheeling farce, gangster-movie violence and high-spirited adventure. Frenetic and broadly satirical yet tinged with bittersweet pathos, the film also exults in characteristically dizzying allusiveness—don’t miss the indelible Sam Fuller cameo!—and off-the-cuff cultural commentary.

Based on the novel 'Obsession' by Lionel White. Producer: Georges de Beauregard. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Françoise Collin. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Dirk Sanders, Raymond Devos. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 110 min.

Godard’s attempt at a big-budget, star-fueled international co-production, CONTEMPT combines oblique domestic melodrama with an acidic insider’s take on the corruptive moviemaking milieu. Michel Piccoli is a beleaguered scriptwriter toiling on an adaptation of the Odyssey for Fritz Lang—director of the-film-within-the-film and overall embodiment of cultivated integrity—and philistine American mogul Jack Palance. Brigitte Bardot plays Piccoli’s beauteous wife, her famous body parts dutifully foregrounded in a semi-nude sequence supposedly inserted on the orders of producer Joseph E. Levine. Photographed by Coutard in sumptuous CinemaScope, the film moves through a series of iconic locales, from the Cinecittà studios to a breathtaking Mediterranean villa, as Godard transforms Moravia’s pulpy source novel into a mercilessly self-conscious study of artistic compromise and marital meltdown.

Based on the novel 'Il Disprezzo' by Alberto Moravia. Producer: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti, Joseph E. Levine. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan. Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Michel Piccoli. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 105 min.

An affecting hymn to youthful folly and playful homage to American pulp fiction, BAND OF OUTSIDERS tracks a trio of hapless classmates hatching a small-time heist one poetically bleak Paris winter. The radiant, ingenuous Anna Karina stars, along with aspiring toughs Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, in this desultory caper film, famously graced with unforgettable set pieces—the mad dash through the Louvre; the spontaneously choreographed Madison line dance—and shot by Raoul Coutard in shades of Atget-esque gray. Godard called his nostalgic, heartbreaking gloss on Fool’s Gold, the Série Noire source novel, “Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka.” Pauline Kael said “this lyrical tragicomedy is perhaps Godard's most delicately charming film.”

Based on the novel 'Fool’s Gold' by Dolores Hitchens. Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematographer: Raoul Coutard. Editor: Agnès Guillemot, Françoise Collin. Cast: Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Louisa Colpeyn. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 95 min.

Godard reinvents himself yet again as a video-savvy artist with “one of the most ambitious and innovative films in his career” (Jonathan Rosenbaum). Layering and superimposing video imagery within a widescreen film frame, Godard achieves multisensorial and polyphonic effects in this quasi-narrative essay that lays bare the systemic conditions deforming one working-class family’s everyday life. Ever reflexive, but also newly sensitive to women’s issues (co-scenarist Miéville’s influence here is decisive), Godard brilliantly synthesizes his aesthetic and political analyses in NUMÉRO DEUX. “A masterpiece...among the most visually compelling films Godard has ever made” (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice).

Screenwriter: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Cinematographer: William Lubtchansky. Cast: Sandrine Battistella, Pierre Oudry, Alexandre Rignault, Rachel Stefanopoli. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 88 min.

Godard’s search for new, politicized forms of filmmaking led him to this documentary-fiction hybrid which also became his first effort in English. ONE PLUS ONE dispenses with story altogether and alternates staged scenes of various characters spouting revolutionary rhetoric—e.g. Anne Wiazemsky as the grafitti-tagger “Eve Democracy”—with live segments, captured by a hypnotically roving camera, featuring the Rolling Stones as they compose their haunting rock anthem “Sympathy for the Devil.” “A movie experience of major importance…beautifully and carefully composed, a kind of testament to Godard’s very original, creative impulse” (Vincent Canby, New York Times).

Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Iain Quarrier, Danny Daniels, the Rolling Stones . Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 99 min.

A punchy, prophetic collage of political slogans and media imagery, LA CHINOISE stars Anne Wiazemsky (married to Godard at the time) and Jean-Pierre Léaud as members of a student cell cloistered in a Paris apartment where they read Marx, mouth Maoist maxims, and plot terrorist violence. Godard uncorks a fusillade of signifiers around his youthful ideologues and mixes skepticism with sympathy in what amounts to an ambivalent portrait of the new generation of radicals poised on the brink of May ‘68. Pauline Kael praised the film as a “fast, clever political comedy (and elegy) about the late ‘60s incorporation of revolutionary heroes and ideas into Pop.”

Cast: Anne Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Michel Semeniako. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 96 min.

Godard spent ten years constructing this sustained montage of film clips, music fragments, sound effects, on-screen text and voice-over, not so much a history of the cinema as a critique of it. Returning repeatedly to images of war and the Holocaust, Godard moves between documentary and fictional modes to question the cinema’s failure to recognize the urgent, ugly truths of the century it helped to shape.

Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. Beta-SP, 148 min.

Please see description for 4:00pm show. One admission for both parts.

Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. Beta-SP, 117 min.

Godard’s early, exuberant period comes to an unofficial end with this apocalyptically satirical road movie, a coruscating summa of his accumulated thematic concerns and formal transgressions. Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne star as a loathsome bourgeois couple on a chaotic picaresque through the modern wastelands. Chock-full of the auteur’s signature allusions and stylistic disjunctions, WEEKEND also boasts one of the most famous set pieces in film history: a bravura long-take tracking shot that depicts late ‘60s French consumerist society as a neverending car wreck-cum-traffic jam. Fin de cinéma indeed. “This film has more depth than any of Godard's earlier work. It's his vision of Hell and it ranks with the greatest” (Pauline Kael).

Cast: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Jean-Pierre Kalfon. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 95 min.

Commissioned by (but never aired on) French television as an adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational treatise Émile, LE GAI SAVOIR was Godard’s first attempt at a “zero degree” approach after his outright rejection of narrative on strict political grounds. Extending the omnivorous essayistic tendencies of his pre-’68 films, Godard uses a bevy of didactic Brechtian devices to round out a spare account of young militants Jean-Pierre Léaud (“Émile Rousseau”) and Juliet Berto (“Patricia Lumumba”) meeting in a darkened TV studio to discuss, and ultimately deconstruct, the oppressive connection between language and capitalism.

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 16mm, 95 min.

Godard returns to celluloid and storytelling, after a decade of non-narrative video experiments, in this low-key comic drama he described as his “second first film.” EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF focuses on recognizable urban types grappling with midlife crises and existential ennui: Jacques Dutronc (as “Paul Godard”!) and Nathalie Baye play TV producers stuck in a dissatisfying affair; while Isabelle Huppert also stars as a practical, no-nonsense prostitute (shades of VIVRE SA VIE). Sexually frank, emotionally wistful and visually refined, the film effectively inaugurates Godard’s mature period of Swiss-centric pastoralism. “A stunning, original work…breathtakingly beautiful and often very funny” (Vincent Canby, New York Times).

Screenwriter: Anne-Marie Mieville, Jean-Claude Carriere. Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cecile Tanner. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 87 min.

Godard’s first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville and first major work on video, ICI ET AILLEURS links the Palestinian struggle in the Middle East to larger historical forces as well as the domestic concerns facing an average French family. Using material originally shot with Jean-Pierre Gorin in 1970 for a polemical documentary to be called JUSQU’À LA VICTOIRE (UNTIL VICTORY), Godard and Miéville re-edited footage of PLO militants into a thoughtful autocritique that reconsiders the ideological stance and formal methods of the Dziga Vertov Group in a less dogmatic, more exploratory light. Advocating dialectics over strident agitprop, Godard and Miéville achieve "a rare form of lucidity and purity" (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Screenwriter: J.L. Goddard, Anne-Marie Mieville. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. DV, 60 min.

Godard reunites with Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer behind his seminal ’60s films, and enlists the aid of some heavyweight Euro-stars (Huppert, Schygulla, Piccoli) for this seriocomic take on the filmmaking process. A high-minded Polish director stages elaborate tableaux vivants based on famous paintings (Goya, Ingres, Rembrandt, Delacroix, etc.), but can’t come up with a coherent plot line to please his financial backers.

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, Jerzy Radziwilowicz. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 87 min.

Godard repurposes Mérimée’s Carmen—and replaces Bizet with Beethoven, plus a dash of Tom Waits—in this shaggy-dog tale about a gorgeous aspiring terrorist conducting a torrid affair with the cop investigating her. In a continuation of his early ’80s semi-autobiographical tendency, Godard himself appears as “Uncle Jean,” a once-great film director dreaming of a comeback from the confines of a lunatic asylum.

Screenwriter: Anne-Marie Miéville. Cast: Maruschka Detmers, Jacques Bonnaffé, Myriem Roussel, Christophe Odent. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 85 min.

An allusive, elegant meditation on natural beauty and anguished critique of corporate capitalism, Nouvelle Vague stars Alain Delon as a careworn drifter lured by an attractive businesswoman (Domiziana Giordano) into a fraught pas de deux complicated by sexual desire, class antagonism and gender difference.

Cast: Alain Delon, Domiziana Giordano, Laurence Cote. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 89 min.

Godard salutes the classic crime genre and explicitly dedicates the film to a trio of fellow auteurs: Cassavetes, Eastwood, Ulmer. In this comical noir pastiche, surfeited with literary and cinematic quotations, a superb ensemble cast inhabits a once-grand but now crumbling Paris hotel.

Screenwriter: Alain Sarde, Philippe Setbon, Anne-Marie Miéville. Cast: Nathalie Baye, Stéphane Ferrara, Johnny Hallyday, Jean-Pierre Léaud. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 95 min.

A trip by Godard to a literary conference in Sarajevo provides the backdrop for this elegiac reflection on war and its relation to cinema, memory and language. The film mixes fiction and documentary, with Godard and authors Mahmoud Darwish and Juan Goytisolo playing themselves.

Cast: Sarah Adler, Nade Dieu, J.L. Goddard. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 80 min.

Godard’s musings on life, death and art coalesce around the plight of Sarajevo in this bifurcated narrative that first follows a group of literati on a doomed mission to stage de Musset in a war zone; and then tracks the equally quixotic efforts of an aging, Godardesque director to launch a political art film called Fatal Bolero.

Cast: Madeleine Assas, Ghalia Lacroix, Berangere Allaux, Vicky Messica. Presented in French dialogue with English subtitles. 35mm, 84 min.