La Chinoise.

"With each new season, an old Godard film makes it back into circulation," writes Nathan Kosub at Reverse Shot. "La Chinoise should be ubiquitous. It anticipates not just the student riots in 1968 Paris but also the greatest in DVD supplements, the archived audition.... [I]t was Truffaut who spliced [Jean-Pierre] Léaud's tryout for The 400 Blows - an improvised question-and-answer - into the final cut. But where Truffaut courted naturalism through the unrehearsed scene, La Chinoise solicits the fleet-footed mechanics of invention."

"Not just a period film, La Chinoise, blazing in all its glory for nine days this month on the Film Forum screen, is a chunk of the period," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It's also a spectacular accomplishment within a sustained performance unique in movie history. From Breathless (1959) through Weekend (1968), Godard reinvented cinema. There are no analogies - imagine Faulkner's eight-novel run, The Sound and the Fury (1929) through The Wild Palms (1939), as a cultural intervention with the pow of Warhol's 'silver' period or the three Dylan-goes-electric LPs."

Updated through 10/11.

Hoberman debunks the "cineaste myth" Benjamin Strong passes along in his review for L Magazine, namely, that there's any sort of cause-n-effect linkage between La Chinoise and the students' occupation of Columbia University buildings in April 1968. Still, "La Chinoise represents a last idealistic salvo before a disillusioned Godard retreated to the apocalyptic doom of Weekend, One Plus One, and Tout va bien."

The House Next Door runs the first part of what'll be a week-long series in which Kenji Fujishima examines the question: "[I]s Tarantino really a Jean-Luc Godard of the 1990s and today?... If Godard is a reflection of a politically-conflicted, self-aware, industrializing society, Tarantino is perhaps an example of Godard's convictions taken to a perversely logical conclusion."

Update, 10/11: "La Chinoise may be Godard's funniest work (it was part of the one-two punch followed by Week End in 1968)," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "In fact, the subsequent fall of Communism and the triumph of Capitalism make this comedy about the received opinions of political fanatics even funnier - a welcome, thorough-going check on the biases of political filmmaking. This revival may be the most important movie event of the fall."

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 1:34 AM