- Vivre Sa Vie
Starting this week and running all the way through March, the Gene Siskel Film Center is hosting a partial retrospective of Jean-Luc Godard films. Titled “Godard: The First Wave,” it includes most of the films from his seminal New Wave period, plus a small collection of later-period stuff, including Hail Mary and Every Man for Himself. The series runs concurrently with the master director’s latest film, Goodbye to Language 3-D, making its long-awaited Chicago debut with a monthlong run at the Film Center.
- Contempt (1963) Having not yet seen Goodbye to Language 3-D, I find this to be Godard’s most nostalgic film, even more than In Praise of Love. Similar to that 2001 feature, it isn’t sentimentally or wistfully nostalgic as much as it is, well, contemptuously nostalgic, yet another uniquely Godardian paradox that lands somewhere between pessimism and optimism. Because, yeah, Contempt is about the “death” of cinema, but when has “death” been the final word on anything?
