Anne Wiazemsky

Au Hasard Balthazar

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Godard by Godard

Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.

The Last Train

Two people, a Frenchman and a Jewish German woman, meet on a train while escaping the German army entering France.

Pigsty

Two dramatic stories. In an undetermined past, a young cannibal (who killed his own father) is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts. In the second story, Julian, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships.

Ville étrangère

An Austrian diplomat assigned to Paris wakes up after having a strange nightmare and finds himself emotionally distanced from his world. He feels absolutely nothing as he attends to his daily routine. He gradually begins to behave in an increasingly strange manner. The story is based on Moment of True Feeling, a novel by Peter Handke.

Flesh Color

Anna is a coach and a stripper at night.

George Who?

The film concerns the famed 19th century French writer, proto feminist George Sand, in discussion with the new early 1970s feminist movement and a critique of the limitations of her progressivism.

Theorem

A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.

Au Hasard Balthazar

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Godard by Godard

Godard by Godard is an archival self-portrait of Jean-Luc Godard. It retraces the unique and unheard-of path, made up of sudden detours and dramatic returns, of a filmmaker who never looks back on his past, never makes the same film twice, and tirelessly pursues his research, in a truly inexhaustible diversity of inspiration. Through Godard’s words, his gaze and his work, the film tells the story of a life of cinema; that of a man who will always demand a lot of himself and his art, to the point of merging with it.

The Last Train

Two people, a Frenchman and a Jewish German woman, meet on a train while escaping the German army entering France.

Pigsty

Two dramatic stories. In an undetermined past, a young cannibal (who killed his own father) is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts. In the second story, Julian, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships.

Ville étrangère

An Austrian diplomat assigned to Paris wakes up after having a strange nightmare and finds himself emotionally distanced from his world. He feels absolutely nothing as he attends to his daily routine. He gradually begins to behave in an increasingly strange manner. The story is based on Moment of True Feeling, a novel by Peter Handke.

Flesh Color

Anna is a coach and a stripper at night.

George Who?

The film concerns the famed 19th century French writer, proto feminist George Sand, in discussion with the new early 1970s feminist movement and a critique of the limitations of her progressivism.

Theorem

A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.

Sympathy for the Devil

While The Rolling Stones rehearse "Sympathy for the Devil" in the studio, an alternating narrative reflects on 1968 society, politics and culture through five different vignettes.

La Chinoise

A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

Raphael or the Debauched One

In 1830s France, a virtuous widow falls for a self-destructive debauchee obsessed with death. Initial resistance gives way to a desperate and cynical romance.

Godard Mon Amour

In 1967, during the making of “La Chinoise,” film director Jean-Luc Godard falls in love with 19-year-old actress Anne Wiazemsky and marries her.

Weekend

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

The Big Departure

This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...

Lamiel

Lamiel is a poor orphan girl who climbs to the social elite in this 19th-century costume drama. Sansfin, provincial doctor, lives vicariously through her, as he oversees the progress of his female protégé. Defiant and rebellious, Lamiel goes to Paris to escape boredom and to know love.

The Extradition

Throughout the late 19th century and in the early part of the 20th, Russians of a wide variety of political persuasions contemplated various forms of revolution. Throughout the same period, they often had to seek asylum in other countries. This movie concerns Sergei (Roger Jendly), a revolutionary who kills a student in Russia and flees to Switzerland. Though he has the gifts and abilities to unify various revolutionary groups within Russia, once he has been forced to flee, they have no interest in him. When his presence in Switzerland threatens a trade agreement with the Tsar, he is tracked down and expelled.

Rendez-vous

Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.

Qui trop embrasse...

How couples unite, interact, separate, reunite or find other partners. The links in this chain begin with Christian and Nathalie, who are coworkers and friends. Christian discovers that his lover Francoise is having an affair, and Nathalie advises him to give his feelings some time to heal, about two years. Nathalie is angry that her lover Mark does not want to see her more often, while he is jealous of the men in her past. Meanwhile, Francoise finds out that her new lover is not that interested in her anymore, and after they split, she encounters him with someone else. As romance fluctuates like the lunar tides, the myth of one true love takes a beating.

Return from Africa

A young Swiss couple, Vincent and Françoise, plan to leave Geneva and settle in Africa: a friend of theirs living in Algeria promises to give them a job there.

Vladimir and Rosa

Jean-Luc Godard's and Jean-Pierre Gorin's interpretation of the Chicago Eight / Chicago Seven trial, which followed the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activities. Judge Hoffman becomes the character Judge Himmler (played by Ernest Menzer) and the defendants become a microcosms of the French Revolution.

Les vieilles lunes

Eager to leave for the United States, two boys steal a collector's mask. They are caught by a young woman who decides to follow them. But the police are already hot on the heels of this carefree trio as they embark on a joyful escape...

Frogs

On an island in the middle of the ocean, inhabited by men and women-frogs, Nora, a beautiful Russian spy, wants revenge for the betrayal of her lover, the artist Tibor.

Tout Va Bien

A strike at a French sausage factory contributes to the estrangement of a married filmmaker and his reporter wife.

Godard Cinema

Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.

30 millions d'amis