Jean-Luc Godard's IN PRAISE OF LOVE (2001) - new 4K restoration!
On Valentine’s Day, we present a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s elegiac and beautiful 2001 feature, a lush blend of film and video that remains one of the most emblematic films of the 21st century.
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Feb 14, 2025, 8:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057, USA
In Praise of Love (Éloge de l’amour)
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
2001, France/Switzerland, 97m, DCP
West Coast premiere of a new 4K restoration courtesy of The Film Desk
doors/bar: 7:30
film: 8:00
On Valentine’s Day, we present a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s elegiac and beautiful 2001 feature, a lush blend of film and video that remains one of the finest and most emblematic films of the 21st century.
"Among Godard’s greatest achievements, the magisterial In Praise of Love also ranks as one of the best movies of the 2000s—the best, proclaims The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. The film comprises two parts cleaved by strikingly different, stunningly beautiful visual schemes. In the first, set in Paris and filmed in velvety 35mm black-and-white, artist Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) prepares a project on the nature of love, which reunites him with a former flame (Cécile Camp). The second, shot on the Brittany coast in hyper-saturated digital video, is set two years prior and has Edgar visiting an elderly couple who fought in the French Resistance and are now optioning their life story to “Spielberg, Inc.” An elegy to love and art; a mournful reflection on memory, history, and morality; an anti-American, anti-Hollywood screed; a dazzling display of the expressive possibilities of film and video—this is Godard at his richest, most rewarding, and most inspired." -The Cinematheque, Vancouver
“[The best film of the 2000s.] Lives up to the promise of its title: one of the most unusual, tremulous, and understated of love stories, as well as the story of love itself; a depiction of history in the present tense, as well as a virtual thesis on the filming of history; a work of art, as well as the story of the work at the origin of art; Godard’s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema.” -Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Tactile yet elusive—its tragic grandeur is as graspable as running water and as shifty as smoke … Poetry is really the only word for it.” J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“The most elegant and coherent feature he has made since the mid-1980s … Godard’s artistry—the way his scenes are at once archly stylized and informal, the quick precision of his eye—is unarguable.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Special thanks to Jake Perlin (The Film Desk).