The 51st New York Film Festival which started September 27 and runs through October 13, 2013 has scheduled an additional screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 masterpiece VIVRE SA VIE on 35MM. The film was previously announced as part of the Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms three-week retrospective taking place from October 9 to October 30, 2013. The additional screening will take place on Friday, October 4, 2013, at 9PM at Alice Tully Hall.
Between 1955 and today, Godard has made 45 shorts, 11 medium-length films, 40 features, three television series, a handful of commercials, and several of his own trailers. Throughout every “period” of his working life—his early heyday with the French New Wave, his explicitly political films made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the aftermath of May ’68 in France, his collaborative television and video work in Switzerland during the 70s with Anne-Marie Miéville, his movement between film and video from the 80s onward—he has always continually ventured into new territory. Godard has never once retreated or backtracked. It’s been almost six decades since his first short, and he’s given us a body of work that is like a multiverse.
Here is Manny Farber’s description of one of Godard’s greatest films, Vivre sa vie, made with, and for, his wife Anna Karina: “The fall, brief rise, and death of a Joan of Sartre, a prostitute determined to be her own woman. The format is a condensed Dreiserian novel: Twelve near-uniform segments with chapter headings, the visual matter used to illustrate the captions and narrator’s comments. This is an extreme documentary, the most biting of his films, with sharp and drastic breaks in the continuity, grim but highly sensitive newsreel photography, a soundtrack taped in real bars and hotels as the film was shot and then left untouched. The unobtrusive acting inches along in little, scuttling steps, always in one direction, achieving a parched, memory-ridden beauty. A film of extraordinary purity.” Print courtesy of Janus Films.
