If you want just one film, which has EVERYTHING, than this is it.
Comedy: hilarious farce. Silly violent slapstick. Satire. Incongruity. Iconoclasm. Our hero beats up a semiological Emily Bronte. Lunch munching dustbin men offer Maoist analyses.
Violence: Quiet French countryside littered with car-crashes. Cannibalistic terrorists. Muggings.
Politics: Godard wants to destroy not just cinema, but Western culture as a whole. Made in the period of unrest just before les evenements of 68. Conventional plot offered and attacked on all sides. Important narrative action elided; irrelevancies privileged.
Aesthetics: Extraordinary beautiful use of colour, music and intertitles - this is the ultimate in Brechtian cinema. Ten-minute traffic jam one of the great sequences in cinema.
WEEK END is a film of two halves. The first part - hilarious and frightening - destroys everything we know and hold dear. The second offers something new. It is noisy, relentless, repetitive, repulsive. It may not be a success, but it is one of the bravest acts in the history of any artform.
After this Godard left the commercial cinema for 13 years. Even today his films are unparalelled in their daring, enquiry and fury. He is too much - we just ignore him. We deserve what we get.
Comedy: hilarious farce. Silly violent slapstick. Satire. Incongruity. Iconoclasm. Our hero beats up a semiological Emily Bronte. Lunch munching dustbin men offer Maoist analyses.
Violence: Quiet French countryside littered with car-crashes. Cannibalistic terrorists. Muggings.
Politics: Godard wants to destroy not just cinema, but Western culture as a whole. Made in the period of unrest just before les evenements of 68. Conventional plot offered and attacked on all sides. Important narrative action elided; irrelevancies privileged.
Aesthetics: Extraordinary beautiful use of colour, music and intertitles - this is the ultimate in Brechtian cinema. Ten-minute traffic jam one of the great sequences in cinema.
WEEK END is a film of two halves. The first part - hilarious and frightening - destroys everything we know and hold dear. The second offers something new. It is noisy, relentless, repetitive, repulsive. It may not be a success, but it is one of the bravest acts in the history of any artform.
After this Godard left the commercial cinema for 13 years. Even today his films are unparalelled in their daring, enquiry and fury. He is too much - we just ignore him. We deserve what we get.