Histoire(s) du Cinéma: The Coin of the Absolute

Jean-Luc Godard addresses two filmic letters to young Israeli soldiers who were sentenced after refusing to intervene in the occupied territories.

TV commercial (commissioned by Swiss tobacco company F.J. Burrus S.A.) for Parisienne cigarettes.

Director Jean-Luc Godard reflects in this movie about his place in film history, the interaction of film industry and film as art, as well as the act of creating art.

The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, “Freedom and Fatherland,” is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, “Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,” by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard, and Miéville (an important filmmaker in her own right), they produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.

Jean-Luc Godard's poetic meditation on war, violence and defeat. The film is structured in three parts. The three segments are "Hell", "Purgatory", and "Heaven". The first segment is a montage of war images from documentary and fictional sources. The second concerns two young Jewish women attending a European arts conference in Sarajevo. The final segment concerns the after life.

For Ever Mozart is an episodic film that follows a theater troupe from France attempting to put on a play in Sarajevo. Along their journey they are captured and held in a POW camp, and they call for help from their friends and relations in France. Director Jean-Luc Godard presents stories about this troop to ask how one can make art while slaughters like the one in Bosnia are taking place, and he throws in a strong critique of the European Union. For Ever Mozart is one of Godard's most disjointed and difficult films. Its stories sometimes seem to form a whole and at other times the links among them are unclear. One gets the impression that in each episode Godard attempts to start a film only to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to continue. It features some of the most beautiful shots of tanks in the cinema.

A reworking of extracts from Andre Malraux, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, and GK Chesterton.

Nothing but silence. Nothing but a revolutionary song. A story in five chapters like the five fingers of a hand.

Jean-Luc Godard, and Anne-Marie Miéville Four Short Films

The official spot of 22nd Jihlava international documentary film festival, directed by Jean-Luc Godard