Weekend

Wednesday, February 1 at 7:30 PM — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door

WEEKEND
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967
In French with English subtitles
A dapper pseudointellectual with counterculture ties inclined to making cryptic, self-contradictory pronouncements, Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s was the closest any film director had come at that point to being a genuine rock star, a Bob Dylan for the arthouse set. While there are no shortage of masterpieces to be found across the entirety of his nearly 70-year career, it’s the run of 15 features he directed between 1960 and 1967 that forever cemented Godard’s legacy as one of cinema’s major practitioners and an artist capable of reinventing the medium with every new film. This string ended with Weekend, the last narrative feature Godard directed ahead of more than ten years spent in obscurity, futzing with video experiments and collectively authored works. A self-consciously terminal provocation, Weekend found Godard leagues away from the movie-mad whimsy of his earliest work, beginning with the title card “A FILM FOUND IN A GARBAGE DUMP” and concluding with another that simply reads “END OF CINEMA.” While the social and metaphysical fabric of France slowly unravels around them, a bourgeois couple make their way through a countryside dotted with apocalyptic carnage, encountering a cross section of imagined literary creations, 20th century wizards, Marxist cannibals, and even-shriller members of their own class, all of whom they’ll belligerently insult and sometimes attempt to murder with varying effectiveness. Underrated as a director of comedy, Godard laces these narrative confrontations with humor that ranges from astringent to scatalogical, an assurance that every laugh he can elicit will sting as much as possible. (CW)
104 min • Les Films Copernic • 35mm from Janus Films
Preceded by: “Faces in Crashes”  (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 1982) – 10 min – 35mm