Update: By popular demand, an encore screening’s been added for Wednesday, May 29. See the original story below.
My screening series Amnesiascope will have its next event on Tuesday, May 28 at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. It was only a matter of time until I showed a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and if it’s so early into the programming cycle we can consider the work itself––to my mind his greatest feature (whatever its status as a rare object) and one that well embodies the creative spirit of the theater space that’s given Amnesiascope a home. This will mark its first New York screening since 2017.
Without revealing the film’s title I’ll say it’s a summit of Godard’s ’80s corpus, yet another self-reflecting vision of a director’s rise and fall, and makes for an essential study of Jean-Pierre Léaud as auteurism embodied. Were that, somehow, not enough, playwright (and Center co-founder) Matthew Gasda will once again mix cocktails that come far cheaper than anything in the Greenpoint neighborhood.
You can buy tickets here and find the official event description below:
The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research is proud to present AMNESIASCOPE, a series of rare and remarkable films curated by Nick Newman. Our next screening is a Jean-Luc Godard masterwork in which his ‘80s oeuvre––leagues wilder, more aggressive, and more outlandish than the exhausted 1960s canon––reached its apotheosis. Starring the iconic Jean-Pierre Léaud as a director at wits’ end, this perpetually underseen film (playing in New York for the first time since 2017) shows Godard at his most formally assured and altogether playful, bolstered by needle drops from Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Janis Joplin. (Runtime: 92 minutes)