French New Wave followers, rejoice. One among Jean-Luc Godard’s most colourful, joyful, and unapologetically playful masterpieces of the Nineteen Sixties has acquired a brand new 4K restoration. And New Yorkers can have the prospect to catch it on the massive display screen this February.
Godard’s 1961 musical romantic comedy “A Girl Is a Girl” will display screen at Movie Discussion board in New York Metropolis from February 7-20, which is able to mark the U.S. premiere of the restoration.
Launched in 1961, a 12 months after the Cahiers du Cinema veteran secured himself filmmaking immortality with “Breathless,” “A Girl Is a Girl” was Godard’s tribute to Hollywood’s Technicolor musical comedies. That includes the intense coloration scheme that he would return to for movies like “Contempt” and “Pierrot Le Fou,” the movie stars Godard’s then-wife and frequent collaborator Anna Karina as a dancer who, desperate to have a toddler, entertains the romantic pursuits of two males (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Brialy) on the identical time. The movie is each a snapshot of evolving gender relations within the Nineteen Sixties and an instance of Godard’s countless ardour for cinema that also feels recent to today.
The film is crammed with intelligent visible gags as Godard eagerly amuses himself by demonstrating the brand new cinematic language that he and his mates have been creating. Along with the Hollywood references for which Godard was shortly turning into recognized, the movie can also be keen to have interaction with different works of the French New Wave. Every little thing from Bob Fosse and François Truffaut to Godard’s personal “Breathless” is referenced within the movie, turning it right into a doc of the ways in which a brand new era of cinema was actively being formed by the earlier one’s ardour for films.
The whimsical musical filmmaking went on to affect musicals for many years to return, from Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (additionally just lately restored and launched at Movie Discussion board) to Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land.” And to Godard fans who’ve studied the a long time of more and more radical (in each the political and formal senses of the world) filmmaking efforts that adopted, “A Girl Is a Girl” lives on as a reminder that the French grasp was simply as able to crafting escapist leisure.
The 4K restoration of “A Girl Is a Girl” runs February 7-20 at Movie Discussion board. Watch the trailer, an IndieWire unique, beneath. A Rialto Footage launch, the brand new restoration of “A Girl Is a Girl” was overseen by Studiocanal with the help of the CNC. It was scanned in 4K from the unique 35mm negatives by Hiventy.