Jean-Luc Godard's show of shows

If coming through Paris this summer before 15 August, don’t miss the monster Jean-Luc Godards retrospective at the Georges Pompidou Center. The complete retrospective includes 140 films and a wide a range of documents , including 75 films. The musuems description says “This retrospective is the first ever to be devoted to the director, in which all his films will be shown. Also to be shown are his numerous television appearances, where he talked about the subject of images, as well as many films and documents with or about him, in order to retrace the major developments in his work and his thinking. With the publication of a catalogue, Jean-Luc Godard: documents, this retrospective will accompany the major exhibition designed by Jean-Luc Godard for the Centre Pompidou, “Voyages en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946 –2006”.

This morning’s Frankfurter Rundschau discusses the show, as signandsight reports: “First it was to be a film collage, then a large exhibition, and now it’s a “virtual ride through cultural history” and a few other things besides. Martina Meister is delighted at Jean-Luc Godard‘s show “Voyage(s) en utopie” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. “The visitor is presented with an elaborate pile of shards, and may start to feel like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, who wants to put the pieces back together. The show contains nine fragile cardboard boxes, initially models for the exhibition, that Godard is supposed to have constructed together with his companion, Anne-Marie Mieville. They contain artefacts of Western cultural history, a bit of Freud here, a Readymade there. Visitors can wander, or drift, through the three rooms, named ‘Avant-Hier’ (the day before yesterday), ‘Hier’ (yesterday), and ‘Aujourd’hui’ (today). There is no tomorrow: No Future. An electric train runs tirelessly from one room to the next.”

Luckily I’ll be able to check out a few of the movies & the documents and show in early July. Possibly my favorite movie (besides childhood favorite “Rio Bravo” — which I still think of as the greatest Western ever) is Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou.” And maybe some day I’ll have the leisure to reflect on why the two movie makers who have been so essential to me are two such totally different, not to say, opposed artists: Godard and Brakhage. Maybe this is simply due to my own euro-american schizo-culture.

The pix above & below I’ve googled, but the website to which they belong gives a 404 error mesage – so I can’t give credit where credit for the montage plus commentary of these images from “Pierrot le Fou” is due.