Jean-Luc Godard - Four Short Films
A release dedicated to the work of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville, this edition brings together four short films made between 1993 and 2002. Four short films, as writer Michael Althen notes, "that encompass everything: art and freedom, presence and memory, violence and passion. Four symphonies composed of images, tones, quotes, and soundtracks. Four essays in which the cinema itself seems to speak to us, in friendly dialogue with painting, literature and music - as a brother to all the arts."

The information spills and bleeds through these four films, independent pictures that are also interconnected, with themes and sub-themes carried from one work to the next.

DVD9 | NTSC 4:3 | 01:25:03 | 4.26 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Francais
Subtitles: English, Deutsch
Genre: Short, Documentary


De l'origine du XXIe siecle (Origins of the 21st Century) - This compact but powerful work is Godard's condensation of world history, from 1900 to 1990, into a stream of images from both cinema and newsreels (the latter mostly of war, which is for Godard the defining characteristic of our common history). Everywhere in Godard's oeuvre he has been concerned with history and war and the place of film in both, but nowhere else has he so concisely and poignantly summed up these concerns.
The film is a masterpiece of montage, both visually and in terms of audio.

Like its predecessor, The Old Place examines the role of art in history, only this time in still rather than moving images. Says Michael Althen of this piece, commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1999, “[T]he aim is not to give an overview of art history but to cut a path through the forest by asking how art relates to reality and its horrors.”

Liberte et Patrie (Freedom and Fatherland) is formally quite similar to The Old Place, its overriding tone is more strangely whimsical than any other of Godard's essay films, which perhaps derives from its odd multitude of sources, including an early 20th-century Swiss novel about a painter...which is here adapted into a kind of mini-Godard-autobiography.

Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Hail Sarajevo) is a morsel of history in and of itself. Made in 1993, when the Bosnian War was at its apex, it compresses untold hours of action into two minutes.
The whole of the film consists of a single photographic image from Sarajevo, which Godard at first presents only in segments, only showing the full photo at the very end of the short. The voiceover advances the idea of an opposition between art and culture.

Download Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Mieville - Four Short Films: De l'origine du XXIe siecle / Origins of the 21st Century (2000), The Old Place (2000), Liberte et patrie / Liberty and Homeland / Freedom and Fatherland (2002), Je vous salue, Sarajevo / Hail Sarajevo (1993) DVD5:

Godard.Mieville.Short.Films.rar