Iconic Breathless helps kick off The Cinematheque's 2024 salute to New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard, starting January 12
The groundbreaking, still effortlessly cool film joins Godard’s final works in opening night for JLG Forever
The Cinematheque presents Breathless on January 12, 13, 20, 27, and 29, and JLG Forever continues through 2024
IT ONLY MAKES SENSE that The Cinematheque would kick off its long-awaited tribute to Jean-Luc Godard (who died in 2022) with a screening of Breathless in a gorgeous 60th-anniversary restoration.
The iconic, still effortlessly cool film is one of the most important work of the 1960s’ French New Wave—not to mention of the 20th century. Godard’s gangster romance follows Jean-Paul Belmondo’s fedora-wearing petty criminal, who steals a car, ends up killing a police officer, and travels to Paris to hide out with a past lover and aspiring journalist named Patricia (the beyond-chic, crop-haired Jean Seberg).
It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking and influential Godard’s approach was, with its handheld cameras, bold jump cuts, and lifelike location shoots that ran in stark contrast to studio-shot works.
Revel in his innovations on the big screen as part of the opening-night kickoff for the series called JLG Forever, beginning January 12 at 6:30 pm with Godard’s final feature, 2018’s The Image Book, a free-associating documentary-meditation on cinema’s failure to capture the horrors of the Holocaust, let alone to witness an Arab world haunted by violence. It airs with Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, Godard’s short, cryptic last work.
At 9 pm, catch Breathless with Godard’s 13-minute, hotel-room-set Charlotte and her Boyfriend, from 1958.
For the rest of the year, The Cinematheque resists moving chronologically through Godard’s output, instead pairing films together in unexpected and illuminating ways.
Says the arthouse cinema in its program for JLG Foreveer: “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.”
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