Oh, Woe Is Me

An interview with Jean-Luc Godard by Dominique Maillet and Pierre-Henri Gibert, filmed on August 10, 2010 at the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris.

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Cinephile slackers Franz and Arthur spend their days mimicking the antiheroes of Hollywood noirs and Westerns while pursuing the lovely Odile. The misfit trio upends convention at every turn, be it through choreographed dances in cafés or frolicsome romps through the Louvre. Eventually, their romantic view of outlaws pushes them to plan their own heist, but their inexperience may send them out in a blaze of glory -- which could be just what they want.

A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he attempts to persuade a girl to run away to Italy with him.

Sheherazade is promised to a powerful Sultan as a gift in exchange for free passage to the Holy Land. When the Sultan's underling saves her from certain death, she falls madly in love with her hero.

Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.

Longing for a baby, a stripper pursues another man in order to make her boyfriend jealous.

Paul, a young idealist trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, takes a job interviewing people for a marketing research firm. He moves in with aspiring pop singer Madeleine. Paul, however, is disillusioned by the growing commercialism in society, while Madeleine just wants to be successful. The story is told in a series of 15 unrelated vignettes.

Art film producer Jeremy Prokosch, unhappy with the work of his director, hires Fritz Lang (as himself) to direct an adaptation of The Odyssey, but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb, he brings in a screenwriter to energise the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.

Série noire is a French crime television series created by Pierre Grimblat in 1984. The series was adapted from crime books by the publishing imprint of the same name. 36 episodes were filmed between 1984 and 1989, and were aired until 1991 on TF1.

In 1988, Figaro magazine asked a few famous directors to direct a series of short movies to celebrate the 10 years of the revue. The movies have been released for the French revolution bicentenary. Includes: Werner Herzog's Les Gaulois, David Lynch's The Cowboy and the Frenchman, Andrzej Wajda's Proust contre la déchéance, Luigi Comencini's Pèlerinage à Agen, Jean-Luc Godard's Le dernier mot.

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.

Despite his lack of political convictions, photojournalist Bruno Forestier is roped into a paramilitary group waging a shadow war in Geneva against the Algerian independence movement.

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.