The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Diverting and substantial … Léaud’s performance is a marvel, both manic and meticulously controlled.”

Glenn Kenny, New York Times

An overlooked Godard? Ce n’est pas possible! ​“Appearing not long after his return to commercial filmmaking, Jean-Luc Godard’s Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company is a unique work even within his astonishingly experimental and ever-morphing career. Commissioned by the French TV series Série Noire to direct a made-for-TV film noir, Godard in fact delivered a typically dense, philosophical, and formally freewheeling meditation on the cinema, acting, and the paradoxical relationship between truth and deception in art. Jean-Pierre Léaud is Gaspard Bazin, an ambitious, volatile, and womanizing director; filmmaker Jean-Pierre Mocky is Jean Almereyda, a down-on-his-luck producer attempting to finance Bazin’s adaptation of a James Hadley Chase novel. Rise and Fall is one of Godard’s most playful and frankly funny films (thanks in large part to Léaud’s flair for comedy), as well as a profoundly thought-provoking and at times deeply moving work” (Anthology Film Archives, New York).

“An extraordinarily personal, painful, and revealing work … A film noir, of sorts, about the making of a film.”

Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

“A movie about making a movie, but Rise and Fall goes further into that territory than anyone (including Godard) has gone before.”

Rupert Smith, Time Out