Jukebox the Ghost's Tommy Siegel discusses his "500 Comics in 500 Days" project, which is now a new book, I Hope This Helps. This is truly the ultimate purpose of the single-shot traffic jam scene: why stop to help those with broken-down cars or to comfort those disturbed by the bodies littering the landscape when those things are bound to happen, anyways? We already have this email. Rather, the true radical criticism provided by Weekend is, as the credits declare, “the death of cinema.” The trajectory Godard had set for himself prior to this work forms the many pieces that constitute the logical syllogism of Weekend; his characters became increasingly abstracted as his filmography grew, reaching their almost purely abstract peak in this movie. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Now, in "Weekend," he has just about got down to the bare bones. 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In “Weekend,” there’s a striking, third kind of figure—a flamboyantly anarchic, sybaritic artist, Paul Gégauff, whom Godard had known since the early nineteen-fifties (through their mutual friend Eric Rohmer, a.k.a. What begins as a basic human need—transportation—morphs into exploitation as companies design cars exclusive to particular clients. In the first, avowedly inspired by a similar passage in Bergman’s Persona,7 Corinne recounts an orgy she participated in, many of the details of which are derived from the first two chapters of Bataille’s Histoire d’un œil, and summarised well with the punning intertitle “ANAL YSE”. “Weekend” is the closest thing to a Chabrol film that Godard ever made. Weekend This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. And yet, considering how emblematic the film has become of … To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Roland and Corinne meet Emily Brontë and Tom Thumb in a forest, and cross paths with Jean-Pierre Léaud dressed as Saint-Just, reciting one of the French revolutionary’s speeches to the camera. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. What remains is pure sclerosis, a film whose characters are odious, and whose scenario seethes with rage. All rights reserved. Find trailers, reviews, synopsis, awards and cast information for Weekend (1967) - Jean-Luc Godard on AllMovie - French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Le Weekend… Witness as a young bourgeois woman and her boyfriend get into a car accident after rounding a corner into a middle-class farmer's tractor, resulting in the death of the boyfriend. PopMatters have been informed by our current technology and hosting provider that we have less than a month, until November 6, to move PopMatters off their service or we will be shut down. Christianity is the refusal of self-knowledge, the death of language. Raoul Coutard served as cinematographer; Weekend … Encounters with historical or fictional characters abound. This is, nonetheless, one of the more “realistic” scenes in the film. To the extent that Weekend has gained critical attention, much of it has centred around three sequences, each of which are essentially composed of a single long-take. Moreover, the traffic jam is characterised by a strange artifice: while the other cars remain trapped behind each other in an infernal cavalcade in one lane, Roland and Corinne serenely drive past them in the other – flouting a seemingly invisible barrier that prevents the other motorists from doing the same. Strand Fantasies of class harmony are, on the evidence of Weekend, as horrific as fantasies of revolution. The screening will be introduced by Roland-Francois Lack, Senior Lecturer at University College London, where he teaches on nineteenth-century French literature and twentieth-century film. Enter your location to see which movie theaters are playing Weekend (1967) near you. The third sequence of note is the “Action Musicale” scene: Paul Gégauff, an important figure in the early nouvelle vague as actor, screenwriter and inspiration for numerous of the movement’s womanising characters (who was also known for his right-wing political sympathies), here plays Mozart’s KV 506 piano sonata in the courtyard of a rustic village to a gaggle of bemused onlookers. Maurice Schérer). It starts as a film noir, with an adulterous couple plotting each other’s murder in anticipation of the wife’s inheritance, for which they need to take a car trip from Paris to the provinces to see her ailing father before he dies. Time Out is a registered trademark of Time Out Digital Limited. Jean-Luc Godard was never a director content to live off of typical narrative structures or the cinematic conventions of his time. Michelle Carey • Daniel Fairfax • Fiona Villella • César Albarrán-Torres. That, in three or four centuries, when the celluloid exhumed by historians and cinephiles from cinémathèques bereft of Langlois will have turned to dust, there will remain ‘signs’. Wednesday, Mar 1st, 2017In Single Event → Screenings: From 8.15pm on Wednesday 1 March at Regent Street CinemaPart of Program → A World to Win: A Century of Revolution on ScreenPAST | PROGRAM. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. A supposedly-idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into an endless nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism, and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations. We will publish a few essays daily while we develop the new site. The emblematic shot of this impasse is the FAUX TOGRAPHIE, the false photograph, showing bourgeois, workers and peasants posing as a group. By her logic, we might consider that she is just as much a "moocher" from the wealthy as she presumes the farmer is; she just happens to get more perks. In turning the camera on himself, even in his most vulnerable moments as a sick and dying man, filmmaker and activist Marlon Riggs demonstrated the futility of divorcing the personal from the political. Written by Michael Brooke Plot Summary | Add Synopsis This is his best film, and his most inventive. A surreal tale of a married couple going on a road trip to visit the wife's parents with the … Despite this fragmentary quality, Weekend has an overarching narrative that can be summarised with relative ease: Roland Durand (Jean Yanne) and his wife Corinne (Mireille Darc) go on a road trip through the Île-de-France to visit Corinne’s mother in Oinville (a small town in the Parisian banlieue), and murder her to acquire her inheritance. There are so many scenes involving combat scattered throughout that it's hard to keep count, but they're underplayed in a darkly comedic way that reflects the inevitable end of capitalism. Daniel Fairfax is assistant professor in Film Studies at the Goethe Universität-Frankfurt, and an editor of Senses of Cinema. The closing titles of Weekend (Godard, 1967). Weekend is subtitled “a film found in a dump” in one of the film’s copious intertitles, but oddly enough this designation is worn as a badge of authenticity, given that the most erudite mouthpieces for Godard’s political stance are arguably the two sandwich-chewing garbage men—sophist trash collectors who spin indignant Marxist litany as though they were trading fours—who Corinne and … Roland and Corinne can afford a nice convertible, but the farmer who killed the bourgeois woman's boyfriend is left with an old tractor. After encountering two people in the woods, including a woman that seems rather like Alice in Wonderland, Corinne sternly tells these philosophizing drifters, “This isn’t a novel, it’s a film.