Michel Hazanavicius won an Oscar for THE ARTIST, a big-screen valentine to the silent era, and takes another look at the moviemaking process in GODARD MON AMOUR. That film is also a period piece, but set during the tumultuous late 1960s in the director’s native France. Adaptated from Anne Wiazemsky’s (AU HASARD, BALTHAZAR) autobiography, the film focuses on the actress’s marriage to iconoclastic filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard’s life is certainly worthy of a biopic. Born in Paris in 1930, the still-active French New Wave pioneer was the movement’s most radical director in form, with each new work seemingly rewriting the grammar of film. Jump cuts, asynchronous soundtracks, self-narration, cinema as essay, cinema as collage, self-referential cinema, cinema of anarchy - you name it, Godard’s oeuvre redefined cutting-edge.

In addition to a free advance screening of GODARD MON AMOUR with director Michel Hazanavicius in person, we’re revisiting some of Godard’s earlier work, beginning with LA CHINOISE, which was shot during the timeframe covered in the new film. In Godard’s revolutionary feature debut, BREATHLESS, the impossibly cool team of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg tries to stay a step ahead of the law. VIVRE SA VIE and BAND OF OUTSIDERS both drop the lovely Anna Karina into the French underworld. WEEKEND channels the upheavals of the 1960s into an apocalyptic look at society on the brink of collapse. More recently, Cannes Jury Prize winner GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE offers a dazzling visual essay that playfully subverts the 3-D process in which it was shot.

Series programmed by Gwen Deglise. Program notes by John Hagelston.