January 12–December 15, 2024

JLG Forever

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

Presented with the support of the Consulate General of France in Vancouver and the Consulate General of Switzerland in Vancouver
JLG logo Lockup

Upcoming Screenings

  • Histoires Du Cinema 1
  • Histoire(s) du cinéma
  • France1998
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • 266 DVD
  • NR
  • JLG Forever
  • 2 Or3 Things 1
  • 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
  • 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle
  • France1967
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • 87 DCP
  • G
  • JLG Forever
  • First Name Carmen 1
  • First Name: Carmen
  • Prénom Carmen
  • France1983
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • 84 BluRay
  • 18A
  • JLG Forever

List of Programmed Films

Date Film Title Director(s) Year Country
2024-Jan The Image Book Jean-Luc Godard
2024-Jan Breathless Jean-Luc Godard 1960 France
2024-Feb Le petit soldat Jean-Luc Godard 1963 France
2024-Feb Goodbye to Language Jean-Luc Godard 2014 Switzerland . . .
2024-Mar Film Socialisme Jean-Luc Godard 2010 Switzerland . . .
2024-Mar A Woman Is a Woman Jean-Luc Godard 1961 France
2024-Apr Notre musique Jean-Luc Godard 2004 Switzerland . . .
2024-Apr Vivre sa vie Jean-Luc Godard 1962 France
2024-May Band of Outsiders Jean-Luc Godard 1964 France
2024-May In Praise of Love Jean-Luc Godard 2001 Switzerland . . .
2024-Jun For Ever Mozart Jean-Luc Godard 1996 Switzerland . . .
2024-Jun A Married Woman Jean-Luc Godard 1964 France
2024-Jul Hélas pour moi Jean-Luc Godard 1993 France . . .
2024-Jul Pierrot le fou Jean-Luc Godard 1965 France
2024-Aug Alphaville Jean-Luc Godard 1965 France . . .
2024-Aug Détective Jean-Luc Godard 1985 France . . .
2024-Sep Masculin féminin Jean-Luc Godard 1966 France
2024-Sep Hail Mary Jean-Luc Godard 1985 France . . .
2024-Sep Histoire(s) du cinéma Jean-Luc Godard 1998 France
2024-Oct 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her Jean-Luc Godard 1967 France
2024-Oct First Name: Carmen Jean-Luc Godard 1983 France
Note

With the support of Swiss Films and the Consulate General of Switzerland in Vancouver, The Cinematheque is honoured to welcome Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Luc Godard’s principal collaborator in his final era of artmaking, for a two-night engagement on October 10 & 11. This program, which serves as the culmination (though not yet conclusion) to our year-spanning “JLG Forever” series, will open with the Vancouver premiere of Godard’s latest “last” film Scénarios, alongside its making-of companion Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario.” The following evening will be devoted to Godard and Aragno’s medium-expanding 3D innovations, with a screening of Goodbye to Language preceded by its proof-of-concept short Les trois désastres.