Jean-Luc Godard Tribute: Sauve qui peut (la vie)
’22
Art Cinema OFFoff couldn’t let the death of one of the foremost experimental filmmakers pass just like that. Together with Sphinx Cinema, we bid ‘au revoir’ to Jean-Luc Godard (1930−2022) with the restored version of Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), the film with which he reinvented himself once again.
“My second first film,” Godard called this return to feature filmmaking after a decade of video experiments and militant films. Though exactly 20 years after his Nouvelle Vague debut À bout de souffle (1960), it turns out to be not a new beginning, but a reworking of earlier themes and techniques.
The film has a musical structure in four parts – ‘The Imaginary,’ ‘Fear,’ ‘Commerce’ and ‘Music’ – in which the lives of three main characters intersect. Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye) quits her job in television because she wants to return to the simpler life in the mountains. Television director Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc in a barely disguised self-portrait of the director) left wife and child for Denise, but resents leaving the city and is afraid of losing her. Isabelle Rivière (a young Isabelle Huppert), then again, wants to leave the countryside for the city to work as a prostitute. She rents the apartment that Denise has just vacated. Paul stands between the two women: he has two options, stay or leave.
Followed by Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979), a short video that Godard made instead of a written screenplay to obtain state funding for the film and in which he sets out his method and ideas in his own way.
Introduction: Isolde Vanhee
