Charles Baudelaire

Godard blends elements of literature, cinema and other artistic medias from different historical periods in order to make a stance on how words can be subverted and manipulated to many different contexts, sometimes bearing a similar significance to the original material or even creating an alternate context.

Commissioned by French television, this is a short documentary on the neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, predominantly on the walls of buildings, holding up windows, roofs etc.

Fiction based on texts by Baudelaire, Sade, Lovecraft and Lautréamont.

A woman enters a nightclub and slowly begins to open herself up.

An attempt to illustrate in animation Baudelaire's poem "A Carcass". A mixture of horror and irony, sacred and profane, life and death.

Charles Baudelaire was one of the giants of 19th-century French poetry, and he earned his position among that nation's luminaries through the poems in one slim volume, entitled Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil). A perfectionist to the extreme, he struggled with every word of those few poems for many years before he consented to see them published. When he did, six of them were condemned by the state censors as obscene. It was surely a powerful blow to him to have such a significant part of his life's work so rudely suppressed. This courtroom drama follows him at the 1857 trial at which he defended his works. The filmmaker has chosen to symbolically re-enact certain poems about the love of a woman as they are being read for the court. It is easy to imagine that, as was certainly the case for the trial of Oscar Wilde in England, this courtroom trial was a form of punishment for his publicly dissolute lifestyle.

Long panoramic shots and tracking shots in the Louvre Museum, the Hôtel de Lauzun or the Petit Palais allow us to discover the works of Delacroix, Horace Vernet, David, Ingres, Courbet, Manet, etc. An actor reads excerpts from Baudelaire's Salons where he expresses admiration or detestation. (source: Canopé)