Made in U.S.A. @ the Charles Theatre this week

Jean-Luc Godard’s MADE IN USA has rarely been seen in this country and never released in a 35mm print. A just-released new 35mm ‘scope print plays three times this week at the Charles.


Showtimes:
Saturday, Febrauray 28 at Noon
Monday, March 2 at 7 PM
Thursday, Marhc 5 at 9 PM

1966 Jean-Luc Godard. Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó, Marianne Faithfull, Yves Afonso. In French with English subtitles. 90m. Color. 'Scope. New Print.

Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. is not the celluloid holy grail, but it's close enough. Four decades after its...premiere at the 1967 New York Film Festival, the least-seen, most quintessential movie of Godard's great period gets an American distributor and even a limited run. (J. Hoberman)
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“In 1966, Jean-Luc Godard threw together, in mere weeks, this hectic, self-flagellating political fantasy, based loosely on a novel by Donald Westlake as well as on the widely reported kidnapping of the Moroccan left-wing activist Mehdi Ben Barka. The slapdash spontaneity of the production helped Godard unleash a host of frenzies—political, cinematic, and personal. He cast his ex-wife, Anna Karina, as a journalist in search of her former lover, a political activist who, like Ben Barka, disappeared (and whose tape-recorded voice is Godard’s own). The patchy plot of cartoonish Cold War skulduggery involves a couple of secret agents with the Hollywood monickers of Siegel and Widmark (played by the French New Wave icons Jean-Pierre Léaud and László Szabó), a novelist named after the noir writer David Goodis (Yves Afonso, a Jean-Paul Belmondo look-alike), and two young Cahiers du Cinéma critics playing Richard Nixon and Robert McNamara. With a color scheme of agitprop Mondrian, a background of blankly suffocating spaces, a barroom lesson in semiology featuring the young Marianne Faithfull’s a-cappella rendition of “As Tears Go By,” and a deluge of political rhetoric, Godard evokes a chaotic new world of deadly abstractions, artistic impasses, and insoluble conflicts. His luminous, longing closeups of Karina show who really was desperately seeking whom. In French.” (Richard Brody The New Yorker)


“Whether or not it completely works isn't that important. The movie begins with Paula waking up and ends with her falling asleep; in between is a bizarre dream world, one French artist's love/hate response to the cultural hegemony America exported via its wars, pop culture, and entertainments in the 1960s.” (Bret McCabe, Citypaper)

“Beautiful, goofy, and explosive! Anna Karina was never lovelier in dazzling color and scope and Godard’s ultimate statement about his love/hate for the aesthetics/ politics of American movies/ life is an event to be savored and celebrated...has all the electric thrill of a Rauschenberg painting in motion.!”
(Jonathan Rosenbaum)

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Pierrot le Fou @ the Charles Theatre this week

Showtimes:
Saturday, February 21 at Noon
Monday, February 23 at 7 PM
Thursday, February 26 at 9 PM

1965 Jean-Luc Godard. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani. In French with English subtitles. Color. 'Scope. 110m.


“’I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple,’ Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful 'Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard's misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the romanticism in much of his 60s work--and perhaps never more so than here--but Karina's charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the time. The movie's frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo's character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) In French with subtitles. 110 min.



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A Woman is a Woman @ the Charles Theatre this week

SHOWTIMES:
Saturday, February 7 at Noon.
Monday, February 9 at 7 PM.
Thursday, February 12 at 9 PM.

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961 Jean-Luc Godard) Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy. In French with English subtitles. 84m. Color. 'Scope.

"One of Godard's most accessible early films, a sly tribute to the great American musicals of the 1940s. Anna Karina stars as the stripper who decides she wants a baby and goes about finding a man who'll give her one
This genre-defying production by one of the great figures of the French New Wave is Godard at his lightest and most playful, layering jokes and deliberate misunderstandings and tossing in references to his own earlier work.

Karina (who married Godard the same year and was to star in six more of his films) is Angela, a nightclub dancer who hopes a baby might give meaning to her life. Her boyfriend Emile (Brialy) won't oblige and jokingly sends her to his best friend Alfred (Belmondo) who'd secretly be very happy to oblige.


The awkwardness of this love triangle is explored with comedy and tenderness. Belmondo exhibits the same inscrutable melancholy that he brought to A Bout De Souffle, while Brialy's character, who rides around indoors on a bike and hides - literally -behind his books, cowers in the face of his own feelings and his partner's.

This was Godard's first colour film and though he uses all the jump cuts and sudden edits associated with the New Wave, the camera clearly has the hots for Karina, and it's largely down to her vivacious presence that this story remains so effortlessly buoyant." (Jon Fortgang, Channel 4)

Bande a part @ the Charles Theatre this week

Jean-Luc Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS



Showtimes:
Saturday, January 31 at Noon.
Monday, February 2 at 7 PM.
Thursday, February 5 at9 PM.

1964. Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur. In French with English subtitles. 95m. bw.

“A kind of cockeyed caper movie about love and crime fueled by the unmistakable air of fatalistic French romanticism, “Band of Outsiders” begins with a pair of very small-time crooks, the sensitive Franz (Sami Frey) and the cocky, toothpick-chewing Arthur (Claude Brasseur). They drive to the outskirts of Paris in their battered Simca to case a house where they believe a large sum of crime syndicate money is theirs for the taking....



No matter how many bouquets you throw in its direction, however, the truth about “Band of Outsiders” is that words are not up to capturing its elfin charm, not even up to hinting how beautiful Paris looks in Raoul Coutard’s unconsciously romantic photography. Although Godard talked a lot about his theories and his methods, if he had a secret, it was a gift for creating irresistible images. “Band of Outsiders” shows him at his most amusing, and that is no small thing.” (Kenneth Turan, LA Times)

Contempt@ the Charles Theatre this week

This week’s revival:
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963)
In Color and ‘Scope.



Showtimes:
Saturday, January 24 at Noon
Monday, January 26 at 7PM
Thursday, January 29 at 9PM


“...Contempt focuses on the relationship between playwright Paul Javel (Piccoli) and his wife Camille (Bardot), a former typist. While in Rome, Paul gets hired by American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Palance) to doctor the script for an international blockbuster, based on Homer's Odyssey, being directed by Fritz Lang (Lang himself). Shortly after Paul is hired, in the ruins of a once bustling Italian studio (Cinecitta) that has just been sold, the writer insists that Camille ride in Prokosch's red Alfa-Romeo to the producer's villa outside Rome while he follows in a taxi; this flip gesture sparks the protracted on-again, off-again quarrel between Camille and Paul in their flat... The action shifts to Capri, where the film of the Odyssey is being shot and the remainder of Contempt unfolds, charting the growing estrangement between the couple and Prokosch's interest in an affair with Camille...." Click for extended examination of CONTEMPT by Jonathan Rosenbaum


CONTEMPT website and Trailer


“One of the defining moments of modernist filmmaking, a movie that takes place amid the smoldering ruins of the studio system, creating much of the language and spirit of the new cinema even as it deeply, solemnly mourns the loss of the old. A film that teeters between filial loyalty and Oedipal revolt, between allegiance to a unified, classical system and an angry impatience to get on with the new, Contempt is one of those works in which you can feel the aesthetic ground shifting beneath your feet. Like a Cezanne still life or a Sullivan skyscraper, it yields a low rumble—the sound of rules changing…With its widescreen image restored, its multilingual soundtrack returned, and its dazzling, pop-art colors refurbished, Contempt is now ready to retake its place in film history as the richest film of Godard’s first period, and perhaps the most complete and satisfying career of his entire career."
– Dave Kehr, Film Comment

"One of the masterworks of modern cinema that has influenced a generation of filmmakers… What makes Contempt so unique a viewing experience, even more than in 1963, is the way it stimulates an audience's attention as well as its senses… Godardians regard Contempt as an anomaly, the master's most 'orthodox' movie. The paradox is that it may also be his finest...with Contempt Godard was able to strike his deepest human chords."
– Phillip Lopate, The New York Times

“Brilliant, romantic and genuinely tragic.
It's also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of moviemaking."
– Martin Scorsese

"the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe," - Colin MacCabe, Sight and Sound

MASCULINE FEMININE @ the Charles Theatre this week!

A new print of Jean-Luc Godard’s MASCULINE FEMININE screens three times this week at the Charles:

Showtimes:
Saturday, January 3rd at Noon.
Monday,January 5th at 7 PM.
Thursday, January 8th at 9 PM.

(1966 Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert, Michel Debord. In French with English subtitles. 110m. bw.


Masculine Feminine is that rare movie achievement: a work of grace and beauty in a contemporary setting. Using neither crime nor the romance of crime but a simple romance for a kind of interwoven story line, Godard has, at last, created the form he needed... essay, journalistic sketches, portraiture, love lyric and satire.
The boy, a pop revolutionary (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is full of doubts and questions. The girl (Chantal Goya) is a (French pop music) singer with a thin, reedy little voice; her face is haunting just because it's so empty — she seems alive only when she's looking in the mirror toying with her hair.
Godard asks questions of youth and sketches a portrait in a series of question-answer episodes that are the dramatic substance of the movie... There are informal boy-to-boy conversations about women and politics; there is a phenomenal six-minute single-take parody-interview with a “Miss Nineteen,” who might be talking while posing for the cover of Glamour; and there are two boy-girl sessions which define the contemporary meaning of masculine and feminine.... Godard captures the awkwardnesses that reveal the pauses, the pretensions, the mannerisms – the rhythms of the dance – as no one has before... He gets the little things that people who have to follow scripts can’t get: the differences in the way girls are with each other and with boys, and boys with each other and with girls. Not just what they do, but how they smile and look away. There’s life in Masculine Feminine, which shows the most dazzlingly inventive and audacious artist in movies today at a new peak. (Pauline Kael The New Republic 1966)


“A masterpiece! Who wouldn’t want to live in the supercool, girl-pop world of Godard’s freshest comedy? Nobody makes films like MASCULINE FEMININE anymore.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

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