The Silence of the Sea with Hail, Sarajevo

The principle of ‘remaking’ was central to Godard’s work. As he put it in relation to Breathless: ‘What I wanted was to take a conventional story and remake, but differently, everything the cinema had done.’ It is a concept he revisited almost six decades later in The Image Book, the opening section of which is titled simply ‘Remakes’. In the early 2000s, Godard expressed a desire to make a contemporary version of Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931), planning to cast Maurice Pialat in the role played by Michel Simon in the earlier adaptation.

This special screening explores Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking approach to filmmaking through his innovative ‘audiovisual scripts’ – experimental video notebooks that replace the traditional written screenplay. Focusing on his acclaimed film Passion, the program spans work from 1981 to 2006, bringing together rare test footage, preparatory video scripts, the remarkable video essay he made afterwards, and the short film he eventually made from the test footage. This constellation of material offers a unique insight into how Godard developed ideas through audiovisual collages of image, text and sound, blending cinema, painting, and experimentation.

Contrary to what one might conclude based on how few plays Godard adapted as films, he was deeply interested in the theater and had numerous unrealized theatrical projects over his career. René Allio, whom Godard interviewed for Cahiers, ventured into filmmaking from theater, and his first feature La Vieille dame indigne (The Shameless Old Lady) is a beautifully observed, gently subversive adaptation of a Brecht short story, featuring Sylvie (real name Louise Pauline Mainguené) as a widow determined to enjoy her remaining years to the full. Godard’s wide-ranging exploration of theater in the 1960s culminated in La Chinoise (1967), a film that exemplifies his desire in this period to combine and blend theatrical and cinematic forms. ‘One should make theater in the cinema’, as he put it, ‘mix things up’.

A digital reconstruction by Michael Witt of a remarkable montage film created by Godard at the 1981 Rotterdam Film Festival from his film Sauve qui peut (la vie) and reels from four other films: Old and New (aka The General Line) by Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov (1929), Cops by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton (1922), La Terra Trema by Luchino Visconti (1948), and Man of Marble by Andrzej Wajda (1977). This montage film, which Godard titled Sauve la vie (qui peut), was screened just once and seen by only a handful of people. It constituted an extension of his wide-ranging experimentation with the juxtaposition of film reels during his exploratory lectures on cinema history in Montreal and Rotterdam in 1978 and 1980-1981, respectively, and anticipated his later videographic montage practice, which would culminate in Histoire(s) du cinéma.