The Cinematheque

“Bursting with a new wave of anger and vitality, re-tooling once again the visual language of cinema.”

Jason Solomons, The Observer

JLG exploded into a new decade with this gloriously ambitious, densely packed cine-symphony that polarized Cannes, leaving as many scratching their heads as singing Godard’s praises. Four years in the making, the auteur’s first feature produced entirely in digital is a tripart film essay tackling nothing less than the freefall of contemporary European society. Part one, set on a Mediterranean cruise ship, features passengers (musician Patti Smith among them) waxing philosophical in a cacophony of mismatched tongues. Part two sees a brother and sister hold a gas station tribunal for the crimes of their parents’ generation. Part three, a globetrotting montage of locales bearing the traumas of history, brings the carnage of the past into harrowing focus. The glassy HD cinematography is by Fabrice Aragno, a key collaborator in Godard’s twilight years of artmaking.

In multiple languages with irregular English subtitles

Subtitles note: Film Socialisme will be presented with its original ​“Navajo English” subtitles, which deliberately do not translate every line of dialogue and are cryptically rendered. An extension of the film’s experimentation with language, they have been described as both inscrutable and works of art in themselves.

“Godard’s conception of essay cinema, comparable to Chris Marker, is brought yet further into alignment with the new generation of video artists—it could be the nearest thing we’ll see to a kind of installation or installation crossover piece in cinemas … Godard is a distinctive modernist screen poet.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Both timeless and timely.”

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice