Press Contact: Jenny Jediny (212) 966-0730 or jenny@filmforum.org |
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Made in U.S.A. and Two or Three Things I Know About Her…, two major films by Jean-Luc Godard, shot side-by-side in 1966, return to Film Forum by popular demand, from Wednesday, February 11 through Tuesday, February 24. Made In U.S.A. will be shown at 2:45, 6:15, & 9:45, with Two or Three Things I Know About Her at 1:00, 4:30, & 8:00 (separate admissions). Godard shot both films almost simultaneously, shooting both on some days, Made In U.S.A. in the morning and Two or Three Things in the afternoon. In his 1968 book on the director, Richard Roud wrote that Jean Luc-Godard "would have liked [Made in U.S.A. and Two or Three Things] to be shown together on the same night in the same cinema. This was not possible, as each has a different producer; nor has it yet been possible for him to try out another idea, one modeled on Faulkner's The Wild Palms; that is, to play both films simultaneously, as it were, with a reel of Made in U.S.A. alternating with a reel of Two or Three Things… and so forth..." Made in U.S.A., Godard’s Pop Art take on American potboilers, stars Anna Karina (as a character who’d be played by Lee Marvin in the following year’s Point Blank!), finding herself caught up in murder and a Cold War conspiracy. Made as a favor to his cash-strapped producer Georges de Beauregard, this ostensible adaptation of a novel by the late American crime master Donald Westlake was Godard’s farewell to his muse and recently divorced wife Karina, never filmed more glamorously, as she changes from one colorful Mod ensemble to another, posed against starkly colored backgrounds and shot (by New Wave legend Raoul Coutard) in a succession of giant, haunting close-ups. But it’s simultaneously an extremely metaphorical and narratively disjunctive treatment of the notorious disappearance/murder — still unsolved — of exiled Moroccan leftist Mehdi Ben Barka, and Godard’s own way of suggesting a vast Cold War conspiracy. Although shown once at the 1967 New York Film Festival, Made in U.S.A. hasn’t been properly distributed in the U.S. until now. For the very first time in the U.S., new 35mm Scope prints were struck for its official U.S. premiere at Film Forum in January. Is her hair dark chestnut or light brown? Is she Marina Vlady or Juliette Janson? asks the narrator (Godard himself) in Two or Three Things I Know About Her… She’s both: an actress in a film and a housewife from the Paris suburbs who turns tricks in the city once a month to make ends meet — and to pay for the latest just-right new outfit, as seen in omnipresent fashion mags. As we follow her on a typical day, Godard regularly cuts away to the building cranes that loom above the Paris region transforming the city (the “Her” of the title), the sound arbitrarily alternating from silence to grinding construction noises; to characters who casually address the camera in the midst of the action; to a long conversation between complete strangers in a bistro, the whole underscored by the relentless thuddings of a pinball machine; and to, most famously, the camera’s unblinking gaze at the cosmic whirls of foam in a coffee cup. Two or Three Things… has been seen as a summing up of Godard’s concerns and techniques from the decade in which he single-handedly redefined the avant-garde. MADE IN U.S.A.
TWO OR THREE THINGS Godard’s color and ‘scope Pop Art quasi-documentary essay could be the single greatest work in the master’s entire career. "
Repertory calendar programmed by Bruce Goldstein |
