Godard stars as an eccentric filmmaker in this fragmentary love poem from his 1980s period. Loosely based on Bizet’s opera, First Name: Carmen reinvents cinema into elliptical broken rhythms and passages of poetry to renew one of the oldest of tales: that of two lovers on the run.
A film from Godard’s 1980s period of reinvention, Détective has images as beautiful as paintings and cleverly fragments shards of movie conventions to forge new critiques. Promising his producers a genre film, they instead got a caustically funny remix of all possible hotel movie mysteries.
Here’s another post-New Wave favorite, and one of Godard’s most philosophically inspired works. Marking his only collaboration with Gérard Depardieu, Oh, Woe Is Me fractures Greek myth and the detective tale to question love and spirit in a fallen world. Legends clash and a strange new film is born.