Weekend (1967)

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

The film tells a story of Mariana, a nurse who leaves Lisbon to accompany an immigrant worker in a comatose sleep on his trip home to Cape Verde. The devoted Portuguese nurse took a journey only to find herself lost in abstract drama.

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.

A Faustian tale about an old woman who makes a pact with Mephisto to regain her youth, but in return she must stay away from love. After making the deal, she meets two brothers who fall in love with her.

Rio de Janeiro, in the period in which the Police Pacification Units (PPUs) were beginning to be deployed in the city. Edna (Lilia Cabral) is the mother of Julio (Pedro Nercessian) and Silvio (Fiuk). One day she wakes up desperate to see that Julio just disappeared!

Barbara, a young woman consumed by despair, contemplates suicide, while a man she meets in a church and a married couple struggle to persuade her that life is still worth living. Mekas’s film weaves this intimate drama into a larger reflection on alienation, politics, and the turbulence of early 1960s America.

Daniel needs some money to buy a duffle coat that is in fashion, so he agrees to work for a photographer by dressing up as Santa Claus. He discovers that it is much easier to meet girls when he is in his costume.

When his wife dies, Carl offers his only son, Janeau, 12, a fresh start. They move to Mont Saint-Hilaire, where Janeau makes friends with Julie, a talented Pee-Wee hockey goalie determined to compete in the annual World Tournament held in Quebec. She convinces Janeau to join the team, but he has a hard time being accepted by the rest of the players, including Joey, the star player who has to endure constant pressure from his father.

The quasi-fictional story of transgender sex workers living in Rio de Janeiro's swampy red light district, who are joined by a group of hippies and a runaway stockbroker, "Mangue-Bangue" is the paradigmatic expression of the post-1968 spirit of desbunde, the Brazilian slang catchword for "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll".

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.