Godard in Berlin and Senses of Cinema

Curated by Fabrice Aragno in collaboration with the man himself, the HKW exhibition—on view through April 24—is a forty-screen elaboration on Godard’s The Image Book (2018), “further fragmenting” each of the film’s five chapters. The Berlinale, in the meantime, will screen Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980) as part of its homage to Isabelle Huppert; Our Music (2004) as a Berlinale Classics Special; and See You Friday, Robinson, in which director Mitra Farahani arranges to have Godard correspond with Iranian director Ebrahim Golestan, who will turn 100 in October. Ehsan Khoshbakht, who recently worked with Golestan on the restoration of The Crown Jewels of Iran (1965), assures us that Farahani’s film is “brilliant.”

The centerpiece of the new issue of Senses of Cinema is Forms That Think: Jean-Luc Godard, a dossier edited by Daniel Fairfax. This is the hundredth issue, the “Centennial Edition,” as the editors are calling it as they sketch a brief history of the online magazine cofounded in 1999 by Bill Mousoulis, a Melbourne-based independent filmmaker, and Fiona Villella. Issue 100 offers feature articles on Frank Capra, Jia Zhangke, Billy Wilder, Peter Watkins, Monte Hellman, Pedro Costa, color in Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), and Ida Lupino’s Petey Brown in Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love (1946). There are fresh festival reports, book reviews, interviews, program notes for screenings at the Melbourne Cinémathèque, and the results of this year’s sprawling world poll in which cinephiles from all over list, rank, and/or write about their favorite films of 2021.

Again, though, the heart of the matter here is the dossier. Godard’s “post-New Wave work, from the Groupe Dziga Vertov era, through to the video work of the 1970s, the spiritualist turn of the 1980s, the mammoth Histoire(s) du cinéma project of the 1990s, and the digital essays of the twenty-first century, arguably constitutes the greatest artistic oeuvre of the last half-century, in any medium,” writes Fairfax. “These films, whose amplitude now dwarfs the quinze glorieuses from À bout souffle to Weekend, do not detract from or besmirch the splendor of the early films; rather, they enrich our understanding of them, and take our appreciation of Godard in a multiplicity of new directions. Godard’s cinema, taken in its totality, from the 1955 short film Opération Béton and his youthful criticism right up to his latest release Le livre d’image (The Image Book), has done more than that of any other filmmaker to open up the possibilities of the cinema, and expand our perceptual horizons as spectators and as inhabitants of the world.”