Throughout January, Hibbleton Gallery is hosting an intense retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard. We are screening 1-3 films twice a week (Mondays and Wednesdays). We at Hibbleton Gallery are convinced that you can never have too much Jean Luc-Gordard in your life. According to film series curator Steve Elkins (who will introduce each film and lead a discussion afterwards), "For the last seven decades, Godard has effectively embarked on an anthropology of the entirety of Western civilization: few filmmakers have probed deeper into who we are, and why. These films are as important to sociology as they are to avant-garde art, to pop culture as they are to philosophy, and few people are aware of these monumental works, fewer still are discussing them."
We invite you to join us for these rare community screenings of films from each of the seven decades Godard has been working, many of which have never been screened publicly in the US. Screenings will take place at Hibbleton Gallery in the Magoski Arts Colony at 7:30pm, and they are FREE! This week, make room for some Godard in your lives, please. You won't regret it. Here are the FIVE Godard films we are screening this week alone:
Monday, January 6th: MASCULIN FéMININ (1966) / “LA CHINOISE” (1967)
Prior to watching “La Chinoise,” we will watch excerpts from “Masculin Féminin,” a film about youth and sex in France in 1965, on the eve of legalizing contraceptives for women which had been banned since 1920. the youth of France wanted "the pill," which prompted Godard to make this sociological study of the new generation he called "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." "The class struggle is no longer the same as we were taught in books," Godard observed, "it's true that Bob Dylan is a link between the yé-yé kids and politics, a way to bring the two together. But, you know, I think it was Baudelaire who said that it was on the toilet walls that you see the human soul: you see graffiti there - politics and sex. Well, that's what my film is."
Here's the trailer for "Masculin/Feminin":
By the mid-'60s, Maoism and left-wing anarchy became the predominant strains of politics amongst the foremost intellectual youth of France. Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise" documents a semi-fictional Maoist cell at Nanterre University working through their first steps toward "changing reality."
The film is widely understood as prophetic: less than a year after it's release, almost a million people marched in Paris to denounce the French government, occupied the universities and police stations, set fire to the Paris stock market, while strikes spread all over France, factories were taken over by their workers, theaters were turned into public forums where people from all walks of life could finally speak, and the flow of gasoline to the capital was stopped, causing Godard to remember Paris that month as "a moment where one heard the sound of pedestrians in the street simply because there was no more gasoline."
Here's the trailer for "La Chinoise":
Wednesday, Jaunary 8th: “WEEKEND” (1967), “SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL” (1968), and “LE GAI SAVOIR” (1968)
In the final years of the ‘60s, Godard made a string of explosive films that attempted to encapsulate the global revolutions taking place in a new language adequate to them.
“Weekend” shows the Apocalypse of Western civilization as an endless traffic jam of crashed cars and planes (filmed as if it were modern sculpture).
Here's the trailer for "Weekend":
“Sympathy For The Devil” contrasts the incommensurable realities of emerging counterculture groups especially The Rolling Stones and the Black Panthers.
Here's the trailer for "Sympathy for the Devil":
“Le Gai Savoir” attempts to entirely deconstruct human language and the blitzkrieg of media signals we’re bombarded with, to rebuild them on stronger foundations.
Here's a scene from "Le Gai Savoir":
Hibbleton Gallery is located inside the Magoski Arts Colony at 223 W. Santa Fe Ave. in lovely Fullerton, California.
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