The Anti-Narratives of Late Style I

This film program will explore the trilogy made by Jean-Luc Godard over the last decade as an illustration of Said’s observations on Late Style. It will also bring to light hidden associations between the art and thought of Said and Godard, including their shared concern with linguistic and cultural dislocation, imperialism, exile, the dissolution of binary categories, and the representation of the “other.”

Lecture James Quandt
Godard – Said: Late Style and Covert Association

followed by film

Eloge de l’amour
D: Jean-Luc Godard
CH/FR 2001, 97 min, English subtitles

Few films better capture the tenor of our times by looking at the past than does Jean-Luc Godard’s stirring requiem for a time of political solidarity and cultural resistance. The story of Edgar, an artist struggling to produce a work (a film or cantata) about the French Resistance and Simone Weil, takes place in Paris and on the Brittany coast, in the past and the present, in black-and-white and in color.

James Quandt is the Senior Programmer of TIFF Cinematheque and a film critic. His publications include a broadly received monograph on Robert Bresson (new edition 2012). Several of his texts engage with Edward Said’s notion of Late Style.