Jean-Luc Godard’s malevolent road movie Week End opened at Film Forum last Friday, which inaugurated a touring re-release of the ’60s title. The auteur’s torrid tale of auto-geddon — concerning a married couple who secretly plot to kill each other — is being presented in a new 35mm print from Janus Films. Journeying to the countryside — where they plan on reaping the inheritance of Madame’s dying father — the homicidal duo’s marital malaise spirals out of control. Of course, this is a very simplistic way to summarize Godard’s scathing satire, which elevates his characteristic cynicism and critique of bourgeois excess to delirious new heights. His intertitles even suggest the film was “found in a dump.”
Spitefully compelling, we have Week End’s original trailer to share with you — which will hopefully inspire you to get your body in a theater seat for this careering New Wave ride. Even if you’re not a Godard fan, its incredible 10-minute tracking shot should make this worthwhile — that is, if you care about filmmaking in the slightest. One footnote of forewarning for viewers of a sensitive disposition: please don’t hold us responsible if you never want to step foot in a vehicle, ever again, after watching this. Click on and hit the official website for release details.
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Vision, Margarethe von Trotta’s film about 12th-century Benedictine nun Hildegard von Bingen, presents the life of a powerful woman in an age ruled by men.
Featuring a brilliant lead performance by Barbara Sukowa, along with a fine supporting cast, and beautifully shot in an original medieval cloister, von Trotta’s latest feature constructs a painterly picture of a Christian mystic, composer, poet, and playwright who possessed an incredible thirst for knowledge and an intense desire to share it.
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Nati Baratz went to Tibet to find a movie; five and a half years later, after obtaining permission from a Lama, living outdoors, climbing in the Himalayas, getting altitude sickness, and rigging a solar charger onto a horse’s saddle to power the equipment, he got one. His documentary, Unmistaken Child, follows Tenzin Zopa on the four-year long search for the reincarnation of his master, Lama Konchog. The film opens tonight in New York at the Film Forum; we met with Baratz earlier this week to discuss the challenges of translating an epic, centuries-old ritual onto the big screen. Read More »
Early in Jean-Luc Godard’s tensile girl-and-gun caper, Made in U.S.A. (which plays NYC’s Film Forum from January 9 through January 22), Anna Karina — the Gallic auteur’s early-career muse and ex-spouse — declares: “Now fiction overtakes reality.” But this said-and-done partition by a director who was only beginning to brazenly hoist his political banderoles is analogous to questing for El Dorado: it is nowhere to be found.
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