1955 Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Agnès, a bourgeois young woman from Geneva, writes a letter to a friend, telling how she ended up cheating on her husband. Fascinated by the attitudes and gestures adopted by a prostitute to attract clients, Agnès decides to imitate her and seduces the first man she sees, sitting on a garden bench.
Godard was always an asshole. Edit: How the fuck did he ever convince anyone to act in this besides himself? Blah.
I can understand why Godard worked so hard to keep this hidden for 60+ years
Fine apprentice work with some good location shooting. This Hans Lucas fella has a future.
Ah, so Godard's love of making people talk and talk and never stop talking was present from Day 1.
You can watch JLG's first ever film here.
Godard's first film was made in Geneva when he was twenty-four years old. Thought to have been lost, it resurfaced in 2017, showing up on YouTube without warning nor fanfare. Technically, it's as you'd expect. It looks like a long-lost short film by a debutant director and amateur actors, though there are a few nice shots here and there. We see Godard's interest in representing the written word on screen and his obsession with language.
It's based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, entitled The Signal. In that story, a married woman observes a prostitute attratcting potential clients by using subtle signs. She decides to intimate those signs and gestures and attempts to do the same, and is…
A bourgeois woman's fascination with a prostitute accidentally causes her to cheat on her husband. Here's the thing: if you judge this by the standards of a world-famous auteur, then yeah, it's pretty basic and too-wordy and kind of gross because of its very outdated gender politics (it's based on a Guy de Maupassant story which Godard made almost no effort to adapt to 50s Paris, so it's outdated even by the standards of Godard in 1955). That said, if you judge it as a first film made with no money and a single crew member, well, let me put it this way: I went to film school, and have thus seen a decent handful of amateur short films that…
Godard's second short film isn't anything particularly great or endearing but offers a carte blanche look at promiscuity in 50s france which is a theme he'd return to for the remainder of his 60+ year long career (although casting himself as the object of a woman's affection is a bit sly, and on reflection this probing isn't exactly a good thing).
I can't believe a copy of this finally exists.
I don't really care for this but I don't get why people seem offended by it. The top reviews are just people calling Godard an asshole without even giving reasoning. I really don't have much to say about the short itself, I just wanted to say that I'll probably be doing a Godard binge once I'm done going through Rivette's filmography.
it is so interesting for me to watch a director's first movies and to compare it with his/her mature work and how he/she turned out to be
