Film Capsule

[Part of VARIABLES, a series of essays on the art and politics of Jean-Luc Godard]

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend represents a turning point in the director’s career. After a flurry of activity in the 1960s, increasingly straying from traditional notions of narrative, Godard made Weekend, declaring it “end of cinema” and “a film found on the scrap-heap.” It’s his angriest and most aggressively Brechtian 1960s film, an anti-materialist screed and a political and artistic rallying cry to the revolutionary spirit of the May ’68 student protests then stirring across Europe. After Weekend, he would abandon solo “fiction” filmmaking—in favor of working in a Marxist collective and experimenting in the new medium of video—until 1980’s Every Man for Himself.

Weekend, then, is at once the culmination of the director’s 60s period and a refutation of the work an older Godard might have deemed “too bourgeois.” Its content is satirical and militant, but the power of Weekend is in Godard politicization of the form of cinema. The film’s editing, title cards and long takes were all designed not to orient the audience, but to distance them, flying in the face of every convention imaginable in order to create a kind of “counter-cinema.” Yet perhaps the most telling example of the counter-cinema of Weekend isn’t within the image, it’s on the soundtrack. Read more…