Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a radical anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece that finds the visionary filmmaker continuing to reinvent the syntax of cinema. In a post-Chernobyl world where culture has been lost, William Shakespeare Jr. V (played by theater director Peter Sellars) attempts to reconstruct his ancestor’s play, abetted by a cast that includes Molly Ringwald, Burgess Meredith, and Godard himself as a crazed avant savant. Through a dense layering of sounds, images, and ideas about everything from language to the economics of filmmaking to the very meaning of art in a ruined world, Godard fashions a puckish and profound metacinematic riddle to be endlessly analyzed, argued over, and savored.
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- Audio recording of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival press conference, featuring director Jean-Luc Godard
- New interviews with Richard Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard; actor Molly Ringwald; and actor and coscreenwriter Peter Sellars
- An essay by Richard Brody