The Cannes Film Festival will pay tribute to iconic late director Jean-Luc Godard, following his death last September, with a trio of works in its Cannes Classic cinema heritage line-up.
A highlight of the homage to Godard, who died last year at 91, will be the world premiere of the 20-minute trailer he created for a film that will never get made: ‘Drôles de Guerres (Phoney Wars).
The 20-minute work is billed as A Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and Vixens production, in coproduction with L’Atelier.
“Jean-Luc Godard often transformed his synopses into aesthetic programs. Phoney Wars follows in this tradition and will remain as the ultimate gesture of cinema,” said the festival.
It quoted the text that accompanies the short work to give an indication of the director’s intention. It reads: “To no longer trust the billions of diktats of the alphabet to give back freedom to the incessant metamorphoses and metaphors of a true language by returning to the places of past shoots while taking into account the present stories.”
The film will be screened in the presence of Godard’s longtime collaborator, the filmmaker Fabrice Aragno, who worked with the late director on Notre musique (2004), Film Socialisme (2010), Les Trois Désastres (2013) and Goodbye to Language (2014).
The tribute will also feature a screening of a 4K restoration of Godard’s 1963 classic Contempt and the documentary Godard by Godard.
Written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, the one-hour documentary is described as an archival self-portrait of Godard, retracing his life and filmography through his own words, gaze and work.
Other Cannes Classic highlights include Lubna Playoust’s documentary Room 999, which revisits Wim Wenders’s 1982 work Room 666 in which he put the question, “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” to 16 directors in room 666 of the Hotel Martinez.
Exactly 40 years later, during the 2022 edition of Cannes, Playoust put the same question to Wenders and filmmakers including James Gray, Rebecca Zlotowski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Nadav Lapid, Asghar Farhadi and Alice Rohrwacher.
The section will screen a newly restored version of Man Ray’s 1923 improvised first film Return to Reason, featuring a new score by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, created under the banner of their rock band group Sqürl. They will both be in attendance.
Cannes Classics will also pay tribute to iconic actor, writer, director, author and activist Liv Ullmann with a screening of the bio-doc Liv Ullmann – A Road Less Travelled, featuring contributions from close friends including Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain, Lena Endre, Pernilla August and Jeremy Irons. Ullman will attend the screening with director Dheeraj Akolkar.
The line-up also includes a celebration of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, to mark the 120th anniversary of his birth in 1903 and the 70th anniversary of his death in 1963, which will unveil new restorations of Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and The Munekata Sisters (1950).
