Goodbye to Godard

Overview

No director can make movies forever, but it always felt like the one and only Jean-Luc Godard just might. He helped shape an entire film movement that completely changed the face of French cinema back in the 60s. His last release, The Image Book, worked its way around the festival circuit as recently as 2018. That's 58 years from his first big-screen outing to his last.

To the sorrow of cinephiles everywhere, Godard passed away in September 2022 at the age of 91 — and ACMI is processing that news in the only way possible. How do you say farewell to auteur as iconic, iconoclastic and influential as this? By letting his films wash over you in a cinema, naturally.

That's what Goodbye to Godard is all about from Thursday, September 22–Sunday, October 30, with sessions of six masterpieces from the filmmaker's French New Wave period on the bill.

It all starts, as Godard's silver-screen career so famously and wonderfully did, with Breathless — the ultimate crime-gone-wrong movie, and an inspiration to countless others over the past 62 years. It screens multiple times across Goodbye to Godard's run, as does the Brigitte Bardot-starring Contempt.

Also on the bill, showing just once: sci-fi classic Alphaville, crime caper Pierrot le Fou, satirical romantic drama Masculin Féminin (starring French New Wave acting great Jean-Pierre Léaud) and musical rom-com A Woman is a Woman.

Tickets are available per session, or in three-film passes.