Event

KING LEAR in 35mm

Wednesday, September 21 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU
KING LEAR
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard 1987
In retrospect, one wonders how an 80s 03 King Lear 300vintage, English-language Jean-Luc Godard Shakespeare interpolation could have turned out to be anything but a gloriously weird and obtuse misbegotten commercial prospect. Certainly the Cannon Group (storied producers of Bloodsport, Kickboxer, and Love Streams) thought they had a viable prestige product on their hands when they signed a much-ballyhooed napkin contract with the New Wave iconoclast, hiring Norman Mailer for a script that would go unused and later adding Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald as Lear and Cordelia. Instead, King Lear turned out to be almost certainly the most experimental major film adaptation of a Shakespeare work. Theater director Peter Sellars (who in his capacity as cowriter also assisted Godard in dismantling the play) plays William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth who has been enlisted by the Queen of England and the Cannon Cultural Group to recover, through a sort of associative mysticism, the works of his great ancestor after they have been wiped from cultural memory following a nuclear disaster. His assignment brings him into constant orbit with the characters from Shakespeares play, as well as a strange group of researchers played by Julie Delpy, director Leos Carax, and Godard himself. A work of spectacular friction, King Lear is ultimately a Godard film through and through, averse to cogent narrative progression, richly beautiful, deeply intelligent, funny and ineffably moving. (CW)
91 min The Cannon Group 35mm from Park Circus
Short: Bottoms Dream (John Canemaker, 1983) 16mm 9 min