The above clip from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend has got to be one of the greatest opening shots ever. Actually, it reminds me of trying to get to the Indy 500…
-
-
Categories
-
Top Posts
- Angelina Jolie's Geocaching Tattoo
- World City Illustrations by Fernando Volken Togni
- Map Art by Shannon Rankin
- Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in LEGO
- LA Poster by eboy
- Building Drawings by Nigel Peake
- Charley Harper Mural in the Federal Building Downtown
- City Illustrations by Lotta Nieminen
- About VisuaLingual
- Map Illustrations by Anne Smith
Tags
Thanks for allowing me to revisit this classic moment. I’ll have to watch the whole thing again one of these days.
Mais oui!
One detail, though: it’s not the opening shot — it occurs around 25 or 30 minutes into the film.
Five years later in their film ‘Tout va bien,’ Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin would invoke this scene in another nearly ten-minute tracking shot that proceeds all the way along the length of a French supermarket from a position just behind the check-out counters… then back again in the other direction… then back one more time, and maybe once more (I can’t remember). The orchestration of events is virtuosic.
Thanks to YouTube, you can see it… dubbed into Italian? Weird. —
Anyway, the film is out on DVD from Criterion. I highly recommend ‘checking it out’. On the same disc is the companion-film, Godard and Gorin’s once-rare and breathtakingly brilliant ‘Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still.’
ck.
Okay, I haven’t actually seen this film in, I don’t know, a decade or something. It’s probably time to watch it again, and I’ll have to check out your suggestion as well.
[...] A Film Studies/Urban Planning class whose screenings could include classics such as Metropolis and Weekend, and also little gems like 8 Mile, The Warriors and, of course, Over the Edge. A bit of trivia: [...]