The Cinematheque

“Godard is to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot, and Picasso were to theirs: rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same.”

Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

Film culture is still wrestling with the loss of Jean-Luc Godard, the unrelentingly innovative director and radical film thinker whose influence can be felt in every frame of modern cinema. Since the news broke of his assisted suicide in September 2022—news that virtually ground an in-progress TIFF to a halt—we at The Cinematheque have been awaiting an opportune time to commemorate his legacy in a manner befitting its unassailable importance. (We haven’t been oblivious to your Godard appeals, we promise.) While the lion’s share of acclaim is still heaped on his 1960s output—the era of the paradigm-shifting nouvelle vague and his indelible collaborations with first wife Anna Karina—it is the fifty years that follow that contain his most substantial body of art and ideas. To our mind, many of these works, drawn from the many mercurial phases of Godard’s post-Weekend career, rival if not occasionally outshine the brilliance found in his most iconic pictures—even if, for fans nostalgic for the pop-art Godard of New Wave past, on-ramps into this perennial ​“late period” can be, by comparison, trickier to come by.

In 2024, The Cinematheque pays tribute to the singular Franco-Swiss auteur with a yearlong retrospective traversing the gamut of his voluminous, endlessly explorable corpus. Rather than move chronologically through his oeuvre (a standard-issue path taken for our 2014 Godard exhibition), ​“JLG Forever” progresses simultaneously forward and backward, coupling films from the front and back halves of his career as we advance toward the middle as the year marches on. In this more elliptical and, we believe, apropos approach—“a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order”—we hope to arrive at a deeper understanding of the full purview of Godard’s unabated artistic continuum, and gain a deeper appreciation of the imprint he has left on cinema, now as forever. RIP, JLG.

“Still the single most influential artist to take cinema as his medium … No film artist who has ever lived would be more justified than Jean-Luc Godard in thinking: Le cinéma c’est moi.” J. Hoberman, The New York Times

“Cinema’s north star … The French director did more than transform the aesthetic and the practice of filmmaking—he turned the cinema into the central art form of his time.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“The greatest montage artist of all time, his dialectical ability to generate profuse new meanings from the simple juxtaposition of images [is] as intuitive as it is astounding.” James Quandt, Artforum

“There is the cinema before Godard, and the cinema after.” François Truffaut