All films NOT RATED and in French with English subtitles.

AFI member passes will be accepted at all screenings in the Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s series.

BREATHLESS [À bout de soufflé]

The quintessential French New Wave film, BREATHLESS still seems fresh and innovative even as it nears its 50th anniversary. Jazzy-cool crook Jean-Paul Belmondo, on the run after impulsively shooting a cop, kills time in Paris trying to convince his on-again, off-again American girlfriend Jean Seberg to run away with him to Italy. The deceptively carefree plot, abundant allusiveness to cinema, art and other culture (high and low), and the whimsically unorthodox, energetic editing are all hallmarks that would come to be known as "Godardian"-and all appear here, fully formed, in Godard's debut feature. Combined with Raoul Coutard's dynamic street photography and star turns by Belmondo and Seberg, BREATHLESS fairly bursts with verve and élan-an irresistible, abidingly influential film-and très cool.

DIR/SCR Jean Luc-Godard, based on the story by François Truffaut; PROD Georges de Beauregard. France, 1960, b&w, 90 min.

Thursday, May 22, 9:10; Friday, May 23, 7:00; Saturday, May 24, 7:30; Sunday, May 25, 7:15; Monday, May 26, 9:15

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN [Une femme est une femme]

With BREATHLESS a smash hit and his second film, the Algeria-haunted THE LITTLE SOLDIER, blocked by French censors, Godard did what any protean talent would do: he went and made a widescreen color musical! Stripper Anna Karina longs for a child, and when boyfriend Jean-Claude Brialy balks at the idea, she begins to court his friend Jean-Paul Belmondo for the job. With many a wink and a nudge-often directly to the camera-a handful of in-jokes about Godard and Truffaut's burgeoning careers, a cameo by Jeanne Moreau and music by Michel Legrand, the film glides by on its ample charm and effervescence. "It's not a musical-it's the idea of a musical"-Godard.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard. Italy/France, 1961, color, 84 min.

Saturday, May 24, 5:40; Sunday, May 25, 5:20, Wednesday, May 28, 7:45

PIERROT LE FOU
New 35mm Print!

"Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!" Sam Fuller's definition of the cinema, delivered to existentially conflicted husband and father Jean-Paul Belmondo, inspires the latter to run off with babysitter/former girlfriend/gangster (!) Anna Karina on a road trip to the South of France. But their frolic is shadowed by murder and mayhem. Heavy on improvisation and constantly advertising its own movie-ness, anticipates the director's more abstract works of the end of the 1960s.

DIR/SCR/PROD Jean-Luc Godard. France/Italy, 1965, color, 110 min.

Friday, May 30, 7:15; Saturday, May 31, 7:15; Sunday, June 1, 3:10; Tuesday, June 3, 9:00; Thursday, June 5, 7:00 - Just Added!

BAND OF OUTSIDERS [Bande à part]

Would-be gangsters Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey pick up impressionable student Anna Karina in English class, then put the touch on her to help them rob her aunt's suburban villa. But the burglary plot hangs around in the background while the odd threesome indulge in playtime, fumble with romance, shoot the breeze in cafés, make a mad dash through the Louvre, and most memorably, break into an impromptu dance number at one of their many café haunts. "One of Godard's most appealing and underrated films"-critic Dave Kehr.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard based on the novel Fools' Gold by Dolores Hitchens. France, 1964, color, 95 min.

Saturday, May 31, 3:00; Sunday, June 1, 7:20, Wednesday, June 4, 7:00

LE GAI SAVOIR [Joy of Learning]

"We must start again from zero." "No, we must first go back to zero." The beginning of Godard's farewell to narrative, with Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto meeting after hours in a TV studio to embark on seven dialogues on the relationship between politics and film, with cinema verité street scenes occasionally intercut. "It was not going to be possible to make the new cinema by using the language of the old. Having returned to zero, Godard had to start over again. LE GAI SAVOIR is the first step."-film scholar James Monaco (note courtesy of Film Forum). DIGITAL PROJECTION

DIR/SCR Jean Luc-Godard; SCR Jean-Jacques Rousseau; PROD Georges de Beauregard. France/West Germany, 1969, color, 95 min.

Saturday, June 7, 12:30; Sunday, June 8, 9:45

LES CARABINIERS [The Carabineers, aka The Soldiers]

An antiwar parable à la Godard: peasant brothers Ulysses and Michelangelo, promised the spoils of war if they join the king's army, leave their wives and homes and go abroad to fight. Their long campaign is illustrated and narrated by a series of postcards home, and when they finally return, their "spoils" are in postcard form, too-"The Parthenon ... the Taj Mahal ... the Technicolor works of Hollywood." But now that there's peace, the brothers are punished for their overzealousness during the war.

DIR/SCR Jean Luc-Godard; SCR Jean Gruault, Roberto Rossellini and Beniamino Joppolo, based on his play. France/Italy, 1963, b&w, 80 min.

Saturday, June 7, 3:00; Tuesday, June 10, 9:00

ALPHAVILLE [Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution]

Godard lifts Eddie Constantine's pulp detective "Lemmy Caution" is plucked out of his regular series of low-budget action films and rocketed into comic book science fiction. The private eye travels from "the Outlands" to the futuristic city of Alphaville, whose brainwashed population is ruled by techno-fascist Prof. von Braun and his super computer, Alpha-60. With zero concession to the need for sci-fi special effects or settings, beyond choosing the coldest modern architecture for locations, Godard's sci-fi provocation scores its existential and allegorical points with wit and style.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard. France/Italy, 1965, b&w, 99 min.

Saturday, June 7, 4:45; Sunday, June 8, 3:10; Wednesday, June 11, 7:00

MASCULINE FEMININE [Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis]

Godard captures "the children of Marx and Coca Cola" in this frisky portrait of youth and sex-and the shadow of politics-in 1960s Paris. Serious young man Jean-Pierre Léaud pursues budding pop star Chantal Goya, but her friend Marlène Jobert keeps coming between them. The friends' love triangle and their progressively different pursuits of happiness play out over the course of 15 "acts," each announced by gun reports and bold intertitles, plus manifold digressions into bits of documentary, musical and political theater. "Graceful, intuitive... Godard gets at the differences in the way girls are with each other and with boys"-critic Pauline Kael.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard, based on the stories "La Femme de Paul" and "Le Signe" by Guy de Maupassant; PROD Anatole Dauman. France/Sweden, 1966, b&w, 103 min.

Friday, June 13, 9:30; Saturday, June 14, 9:30

MADE IN U.S.A.

"It's like being in a Disney film starring Humphrey Bogart. A film with a political message" muses journalist Anna Karina, back home in "Atlantic-Cité" to see her former fiancé László Szabó after covering the war in Morocco. But when he turns up dead, both the cops and the underworld take an interest in her. Boldly cartoonish, from its color schemes to its quotation-marked characters to its treatment of screen violence, dedicated both to American crime movies (and specifically, Sam Fuller and Nick Ray) and a politically-fueled deconstruction thereof. With Jean-Pierre Léaud as Don Siegel, and Marianne Faithfull as herself, periodically walking on to sing As Tears Go By.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard, based on The Jugger by Donald E. Westlake; PROD Georges de Beauregard. France, 1966, color, 90 min. NOT RATED

Saturday, June 14, 12:30; Sunday, June 15, 12:30
This film has been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Look for a re-release of MADE IN USA in 2009!

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER [Deux ou trios choses que je sais d'elle]

"In order to live in Paris today, on no matter what social level, one is forced to prostitute oneself," said Jean-Luc Godard in 1966, as the narrator addressing the audience of this film in a conspiratorial whisper. In this film inspired by a newspaper article on housewives dabbling in prostitution, Raoul Coutard's camera follows Marina Vlady on a typical day as she lunches, shops and goes off with johns-also picking up conversations in the cafés, or following a news crew interviewing a man on the street. The stunning Cinemascope photography juxtaposes elegant Parisian landmarks against the jumble of cranes, scaffolding and concrete slabs going up at the city's outskirts, while narrator Godard delivers essays on architecture and modernity over images of both the city's streetscapes and Vlady's streetwalking. One of Godard's most experimental films-thought-provoking, gorgeous to look at and occasionally quite funny (not least when the film, and Godard, poke fun at themselves).

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard; SCR Catherine Vimenet; PROD Anatole Dauman and Raoul Lévy. France, 1967, color, 90 min.

Saturday, June 14, 5:00; Sunday, June 15, 3:15

LA CHINOISE
New 35mm Print!

Philosophy student Anne Wiazemsky (fresh from her debut in Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR) and actor Jean-Pierre Léaud fall in with a group of Maoist students, who use a haute-bourgeois Paris apartment lent to them for the summer as the base of operations for their radical-chic demonstrating. Godard mixes pop nd protest sloganeering, disarmingly funny political skits, and eye-popping red-color schemes into both a "call to action" and a spoof of such things, carried along by Léaud's charm and Wiazemsky's cool. "An integral part of the '68 juggernaut...guerrilla-theater agitprop disrupts the action like the Busby Berkeley numbers in an old Warner Brothers musical"-J. Hoberman, Village Voice.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard; PROD Raoul Coutard. France, 1967, color, 96 min.

Tuesday, June 24 through Thursday, June 26* - check calendar for daily showtimes

*SPECIAL APPEARANCE: Author Richard Brody at the Thursday, June 26 screenings of LA CHINOISE and MY LIFE TO LIVE, signing copies of his new book Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (available May 13).

MY LIFE TO LIVE [Vivre Sa Vie: Filme en Deux Tableau]
New 35mm Print!

Record-store clerk Anna Karina wants to be an actress, but falls into prostitution to make ends meet. Giving a commanding, moving performance, Karina goes from awkward first-timer to resigned professional, retaining an ambivalence about both her life and "the life," but her independence proves tougher to hold on to after she acquires a pimp. "Starts out as a documentary on prostitution, ending as a Monogram B movie...[its] true subject [is] the enigmatic beauty and troubling presence of Karina, and the mystery of Godard's own passionate involvement with her"-Tom Milne, Time Out London.

DIR Jean-Luc Godard; SCR Marcel Sacotte, based on his book Où en est la prostitution; PROD Pierre Braunberger. France, 1962, b&w, 85 min.

Tuesday, June 24, 9:35; Wednesday, June 25, 9:35; Thursday, June 26, 9:35*; Friday, June 27, 6:30; Saturday, June 28, 5:20; Sunday, June 29, 3:05; Monday, June 30, 9:30;

WEEKEND

Venomous bourgeois couple Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne hatch a plan to rob Darc's mother of the family fortune, with Yanne secretly planning to double-cross his wife and run off with his mistress. But once they leave Paris for the country, it's a steady descent into anarchic, psychotic hell, beginning with Raoul Coutard's tour-de-force tracking shot of an artfully arranged traffic jam, and ending with the couple's kidnapping by hippie Marxist cannibals. Funnier than it sounds-really!-but easily Godard's most acidic work.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard. UK, 1968, color, 100 min.

Thursday, June 26, 9:30; Saturday, June 28, 9:45; Sunday, June 29, 7:30; Monday, June 30, 9:30; Wednesday, July 2, 7:00; Thursday, July 3, 9:20

Due to circumstances beyond our control, all screenings of WEEKEND have been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Check the calendar for added replacement shows of MY LIFE TO LIVE and VERTIGO!

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Given access to film the Rolling Stones during the recording sessions for the album Beggar's Banquet, the newly politicized Godard alternates long takes of the band jamming, rehearsing and recording Sympathy for the Devil with staged tableaux demonstrating America's rising Black Power movement. Provocative in its juxtapositions, the film is endlessly open to interpretation, and a unique time capsule of both the Stones and Godard, in his incipient radicalism and turning away from narrative cinema.

DIR/SCR Jean-Luc Godard; PROD Eleni Collard, Michael Pearson and Iain Quarrier. UK, 1968, color, 100 min.

Friday, June 27, 10:45 p.m.; Saturday, June 28, 12:00 midnight; Sunday, June 29, 9:40; Tuesday, July 1, 9:30