Godard Special Selection

Jean-Luc Godard's 3 short films will be screened as a special program. These films, special works of the director, were shot between the years 1993-2002.

 

Je Vous Salue Sarajevo	De L'Origine Du Xxie Siecle	Liberte Et Patrie
The film in question is a short, two-minute rumination on the once volatile situation during the period of the Bosnian War, presented in the form of a photo-montage with accompanying text. In the film, Godard takes a single photograph and shows us a series of close-up segments that conspire to abstract the overall meaning of the picture, turning the individual elements into mere symbols that are there to be deciphered.	Commissioned by the heads of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival to make an opening-night short commemorating cinema as it enters its second full century, Godard instead offers up a 17-minute barrage of re-edited footage of wars and Nazi atrocities, interspersed with clips of Maurice Chevalier in ``Gigi`` and Godard`s own ``À bout de souffle.``	The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, ``Freedom and Fatherland,`` is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, ``Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud,`` by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 (about a local artist who goes to Paris for his education and then returns home) and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard`s own life and work.