JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December (Jean-Luc Godard; France, 1994)

JLG/JLG was made the year the enfant terrible turned sixty-four. Twenty-five years earlier Godard declared, "My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof"; today his guns are turned toward his own status as a "living legend." JLG/JLG has been described as "an inebriating dialectical diary of words, sounds, images, and landscapes . . . (a) galloping reflection on the filmmaker's rapport with art, nature, politics, philosophy, history, and most of all, cinema." (David Rooney, Variety). It's the kind of list that only Godard could attempt to assimilate, and he does so never leaving the seclusion of his Swiss lake area home. Rather, he delves into it, imbuing a photo of himself as a youth with the qualities of Proust's madeleine, youth that has a sad eye toward death.
Written by Godard.
(60 mins, In French, German, English with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Institut Français, permission Gaumont)


Preceded by:
Origins of the 21st Century
Jean-Luc Godard (France, 2000)
With poetic apositeness, these images (from Kubrick, Dreyer, pornography, war reportage, and the nineteenth-century Lumière brothers) act as "rosebud" and Rosetta Stone, as Godard looks at a century vanished but undead in his most concise and heartbreaking film.—Mark McElhatten
(13 mins, Color, Beta SP, BAM/PFA Collection)

Total running time: 73 mins