Weekend

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.

During a war in an imaginary country, unscrupulous soldiers recruit poor farmers with promises of an easy and happy life. Two of these farmers write to their wives of their exploits.

A man awakes to find himself trapped in a dirty, confined crawlspace. He barely has enough room to move. He also has no memory of why he's there, or why he's bleeding from a stomach wound. Apparently drugged, he occasionally 'zones out' of his surroundings as he tries to edge towards his way to freedom. But the more he explores, the more pain he has to endure, and the more frightening his predicament becomes.

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.

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.

A depressed woman, Barbara, is on the verge of suicide while a man she meets in a church and a married couple try to convince her that life is worth living.

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.

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.

A father says goodbye to his young daughter. In time the daughter grows old, but within her there is always a deep longing for her father.

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

When a suburban couple goes camping for the weekend at a remote beach, they discover that nature isn't in an accommodating mood.