Anne-Marie Miéville Movies

Eight master directors of world cinema combine forces for this omnibus film that focuses cumulatively on the subject of time. Bookended by cello interludes, Ten Minutes Older: The Cello presents just one parameter to each of its filmmakers: no final entry can be more or less than ten minutes long. The resulting films run the gamut of styles and moods, beginning with Bernardo Bertolucci's Histoire d'Eaux, which presents an Indian fable about a mentor's impatience. In Mike Figgis' entry About Time 2, the director continues with the experimental structure he pioneered in Timecode; similarly, Jean-Luc Godard uses his time allotment to present a fractured series of clips on youth, death, and love. Another non-narrative entry, Volker Schlöndorff's The Enlightenment presents a series of images on racism. Claire Denis' effort Vers Nancy chronicles a philosophical discussion on time between a teacher and student on a train ride; in Jirí Menzel's Ten Minutes After, the effects of time on aging Czech actor Rudolf Hrusinsky are documented. In perhaps the film's most narrative-oriented segment, director Michael Radford offers up a sci-fi vision of an astronaut returning to earth to find that his son has aged faster than he has. Ten Minutes Older: The Cello is a companion piece to 2002's Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet, which aired in the U.S. on the Showtime cable network. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

Internationally renowned French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard offers this documentary for his entry in the British Film Institute commissioned series, "Century of Cinema," designed to be a collection of the personal opinions of renowned international filmmakers concerning the cinema of their native countries. Godard spends much of his documentary questioning the validity of the centennial celebration as can be seen, even in the title of the film which patently avoids the number "100." Godard begins with having his old friend, the actor Michel Piccoli, coming to visit the Swiss lakeside hotel where the director is staying. Piccoli is the representative of the French national centennial committee and is not prepared for the rigorous intellectual interrogation Godard has in store for him. The questions are hard to answer and are designed to point out Godard's feeling that the timing of the celebration is off, and that the French filmmakers, who invented cinema, have become complacent in allowing American films to dominate the minds of international audiences so that the average French citizen will know the names of Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but will know nothing of Annabella, Dita Parlo, or Jacques Becker. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Nouvelle Vague marks the beginning of a period in Jean-Luc Godard's career in which he made films that looked back on his previous work. In these retrospective films, Godard asked himself whether it is possible to continue as a film director under the conditions imposed by international commercial cinema. Appropriately enough, Nouvelle Vague concerns the return of a man (Roger Lennox / Richard Lennox, played by Alain Delon, superstar of 60s and 70s international cinema) who may or may not have returned from the dead. The film's narrative is extremely disjointed and might be better understood as an essay on the idea of returning. The theme of a return from the dead gives Godard the opportunity to come back to the religious imagery and theological considerations that interested him from 1983's Hail Mary. The film's dialogue is a patchwork of unattributed quotations from works of literature, philosophy, and economics, a technique that Godard adopted in most of his films after this one. Even if the film's "story" is not easy to understand, the beauty of its images and sounds, along with the sublime rhythms of the editing, may be enough to ravish some audiences. ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

Je vous salue Marie is Jean-Luc Godard's first sustained examination of modern spiritual life. This complex episodic film parallels the story of a contemporary Joseph (Theirry Rode) and Mary (Myriem Roussel) with that of a science class studying the origins of life on earth. Joseph is a cab driver and Mary plays on a woman's basketball team. A thuggish angel (Philippe Lacoste) tells Mary that she is with child. When she tells Joseph that she is pregnant, he accuses Mary of having cheated on him. The professor of the science class (Johan Leysen), who is having an affair with one of his students (Anne Gauthier), presents the theory that life came to earth from somewhere else in the universe. Godard organizes scenes from these two narratives into an essay about the relationship between the spirit and the body, and how being is born from nothingness. The film is filled with images of light cascading over the Swiss countryside. Godard often has his cinematographers Jean-Bernard Menoud and Jacques Firmann shoot directly into the sun and capture ravishing shots of pure luminosity. Je vous salue Marie is introduced by a short film by Godard's frequent directing partner Anne-Marie Miéville entitled Le Livre de Maire (The Book Of Mary), the story of a young girl named Marie whose parents separate. Miéville's film continues the philosophical reflection on children that she and Godard started in Numéro deux(Number Two). ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

First Name: Carmen tells the parallel stories of a quartet rehearsing Beethoven and a group of young people robbing a bank, supposedly to get the funds to make a film. Director Jean-Luc Godard attempts to make a film that resembles a string quartet, each of whose parts serves an abstract whole. The film is a meditation on the difficulties of youth in the 1980s, the relations between cinema and capital, and how to film the human body. Godard fills the film with carefully composed shots of bodies playing music, making love, and acting violently. His attention to bodies in First Name: Carmen makes the film's images very close to sculptures, particularly those of Rodin. The film's engagement with painting and sculpture continues Godard's ongoing investigation of the relationships between cinema and other arts ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie), a pessimistic but visually stunning film, marks Jean-Luc Godard's return to cinema after having spent the 70s working in video. The film presents a few days in the lives of three people: Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc ), a television producer; Denise Rimbaud (Nathalie Baye), his co-worker and ex-girlfriend; and Isabelle Riviera (Isabelle Huppert), a prostitute whom Paul has used. Denise wants to break up with Paul and move to the country. Isabelle wants to work for herself instead of her pimp. Paul just wants to survive. Their stories intersect when Paul brings Denise to the country cottage he is trying to rent and Isabelle comes to see it without knowing that the landlord has been her client. The film is broken into segments entitled "The Imaginary," "Commerce," "Life," and "Music." Each of the first three sections focuses on one character and the last section brings all three characters together. This complex film is often closer to an essay than a story; it uses slow motion and experimental techniques to explore questions of love, work, and the nature of cinema. Sauve Qui Peut (la Vie) was Godard's first film with his frequent collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who edited and co-wrote the film. ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

Comment ça va is a troubling examination of the politics of representation by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. The film, framed as a letter from a communist newspaper editor (M. Marot) to his son, is about the editor's attempt to collaborate with his typist (Anne-Marie Miéville) on a video about their newspaper and printing press. Their disagreements about how to edit the tape lead to an extended conversation about how images are chosen by the media, and the differences between words and pictures. Over the course of that conversation, the film considers images of the struggle against dictatorship in Portugal, a French strike, and the death of Francisco Franco. This formally difficult film investigates the way newspapers make meaning and in whose interests they do so. Comment ça va was the third collaboration between long-term film making partners Godard and Miéville. As in their first two films, Ici et ailleurs (Here And Elsewhere) and Numéro deux (Number Two), the use of text and video images in the film foreshadows Godard's work in his television series Histoire(s) du cinema ~ Louis Schwartz, All Movie Guide

Initially begun as a documentary about Palestinian revolutionaries, Ici et Ailleurs (in English, Here and Elsewhere) was ultimately transformed into an hour-long filmed essay addressing the relationship between politics and image, the problems of documentary filmmaking, and the danger of media saturation. Collaborators Jean-Pierre Gorin and Anne-Marie Melville began the film with funding from Palestinian forces, under the title Victory, intending to create a sympathetic portrait of the revolutionaries as a true people's movement. Not long after the filmmakers' return to France, however, most of their subjects were killed in warfare, and the issues behind the film no longer seemed so simple. At this point Jean-Luc Godard joined the production, helping create a series of scenes focusing on the life of a middle-class French family; this is the "Here" portion of the film, with Palestine as "Elsewhere." By editing together documentary and fictional footage, and commenting on these images through photo collages, title screens, and other reflexive techniques, the film questions the association between political thought and the structures of fiction. Ultimately, Ici et Ailleurs seems suspicious of all images, even its own; the suggestion is that all films, especially documentaries, present a false, constructed vision of reality. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide