JEAN-LUC GODARD

In the entire history of cinema, few figures have been as striking, provocative and influential as Jean-Luc Godard. This retrospective proposes a review of the director’s filmography in dialog with his visual work, the focus of the exhibition Keeping Tale of Current Times. While the exhibition brings together a very significant set of never-before-shown objects, which open up new perspectives on the director’s creative processes and the genesis of many of the formal strategies that distinguish his work, the retrospective investigates the consequences of these plastic experiments on his filmic output after the Histoire(s) du Cinéma series (1988-1998), with a particular focus on lesser-known films, many of which have never before been shown in Portugal. This is particularly the case with Scénarios, Godard’s last film, and Exposé du Film annonce du film Scénario, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, or Rolle: Inventaire, a filmic survey of the filmmaker’s workspace, directed by two of his closest collaborators, Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battaggia, which will have its world premiere here.

This film programme will also be an opportunity to recall the dialogue between Jean-Luc Godard and Manoel de Oliveira, not only because Godard’s Film Socialism (2010) can be seen as a response to Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (2003), but also because it was Oliveira who, in a conversation between the two in 1993 for the newspaper Libération, uttered a famous phrase that would never cease to inhabit the Godard’s films thereafter: “That’s what I like about cinema in general: a saturation of magnificent signs bathed in the light of their lack of explanation.