A short film that endeavors to capture & portray the love between iconic couples Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg, & Anna Karina & Jean-Luc Godard.
In French, "scénario" is cinema's name for how it tells stories. This is the title Jean-Luc Godard chose for his final film, which was literally completed the day before his self-death. The two segments of this film open with a series of identical sequences. The second segment then diverges and ends on a self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard -his last images- sitting on his bed, bare-chested, he hides none of the wear on his body in the manner of Pigalle's sculpted portrait of Voltaire. "Scénarios" ends as it began, with a repetition, the figure of eternal return, the moment where time, which has been the great -if not unique- question of cinema, will have ceased to flow.
How do you craft the portrait of Jean-Luc Godard, or better yet a portrait of his methodology, his universe, his way of constructing or deconstructing cinema, that is equal to his own cinematic audacity and genius? How could it be anything other than by taking risks, and trying out equally radical methods, never straying from to his example. The two filmmakers immerse us into the storage warehouse where, in 2010, all the archives kept by Godard in Switzerland were transferred, and they create a doppelganger (or a duplicate) of the director, who takes up the role of our guide into his world. Excerpts from his writings, his images, his perspective in cinema give us a glimpse into his mythology, his techniques, his singular gaze, and therefore also in his worldview.
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.
Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time.
Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.
Take a musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with brothers Ron & Russell Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of Sparks: your favorite band’s favorite band.
Major actress of the New Wave, Anna Karina is bound to the great renewal of cinema in the 1960s. Her companion in life, Dennis Berry revisits the story of her memories with Jean-Luc Godard and the great directors she knew, her memorable meeting with Serge Gainsbourg, and also, more recently, her career as a singer. With a gaze halfway between mischief and severity, the New Wave's Danish muse embodied a new feminity – deeply linked with women's liberation.
Jean-Luc Godard (December 3, 1930 – September 13, 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.