Jean-Luc Godard is undeniably the contemporary filmmaker whose thought and film work were the most influential on modern cinema and other artistic domains, arousing extensive and valuable theoretical and critical analysis to this day,
His work spans several movements - from the principles defended during his time as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma and put into action in the New Wave aesthetics, of which he was a leading figure (with his seminal Breathless preceding a series of equally remarkable titles such as My Life to Live, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Made in U.S.A. or the caustic Week End, where the end of cinema itself is declared), to the more recent, experimental film-essays (Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language), not to mention his most radical period (of the Dziga Vertov Group). Both aesthetically and politically, Godard created an immense and challenging body of work.
His work is profoundly reflexive, full of citations, references and allusions of several origins (cinematographic, literary, musical, philosophical, scientific, political), capable of merging “high” and “low” culture, working in an innovative way with archive footage, video (the whole SonImage production, a company he established with Anne-Marie Miéville in 1972, is a small world to be discovered) and 3D. Always with an absolutely unmistakable signature, Godard’s work challenges History (and the history of cinema, with a small climax in the monumental Histoire(s) du Cinéma), the traumas of our time and the language (and its limits) with which we (do not) communicate.
It is to this indispensable author that the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival pays homage in its 10th edition, presenting a complete retrospective of his films and an International Symposium, Godard vu par....
