filmbriefs
Producer · Actor · 1952

Alain Sarde

4
briefs
13:00
average
52 min
in total
On film.briefs4
13:00

Every Man for Himself

Jean-Luc Godard · 1980

Every Man for Himself (1980) is Jean-Luc Godard’s rigorously structured drama, composed in four parts like a musical work. Following three protagonists — a filmmaker, a journalist, and a sex worker — across intersecting lives in Switzerland, it examines alienation, commodification, and the erosion of time and intimacy under capitalism. Shot by Renato Berta and William Lubtchansky, edited by Godard himself, and scored by Gabriel Yared, it employs deliberate decelerations, sparse dialogue, and the recurring aria Suicidio! as structural motif. Nathalie Baye won the César Award for Best Supporting Actress.

13:00

Round Midnight

Bertrand Tavernier · 1986

Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film follows American saxophonist Dale Turner (Dexter Gordon) as he seeks refuge from addiction in 1950s Paris, aided by a devoted French graphic designer (François Cluzet). Built around live jazz performances and anchored by Gordon’s restrained, deeply embodied performance, the film avoids biopic clichés to explore endurance, care, and the untranslatable language of music. Shot in Paris and New York, with a score by Herbie Hancock, it won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and was named one of the year’s top ten films by the National Board of Review.

13:00

Notre musique

Jean-Luc Godard · 2004

Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 essay-film Notre musique uses Dante’s tripartite structure — Hell, Purgatory, Heaven — to examine how violence, language, and image condition moral perception. Set around a Sarajevo arts conference, it stages encounters between Israeli and Palestinian voices, philosophers and poets, while critiquing cinematic conventions like shot/reverse shot. Julien Hirsch’s restrained cinematography and Godard’s elliptical editing foreground ethics over exposition. Though formally demanding and emotionally austere, it rewards sustained attention with a rare rigour in thinking through representation itself.

13:00

Mulholland Drive

David Lynch · 2001

Rejected by ABC as a television pilot, Mulholland Drive was rebuilt by David Lynch into a feature with new financing, new footage, and an ending that recontextualises everything before it. Naomi Watts's performance carries the film from bright optimism to something far darker, across a Los Angeles built out of borrowed names and unresolved threads.