Screenings: Jean Luc Godard’s Week End

The Superman Returns unprecedented 7-day opening weekend begins today. To kick off this holiday “week end,” film philes might opt for something really special: An Austin Film Society 20th Anniversary screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End at the Alamo Downtown.

This 1967 classic follows a bourgeois French couple as they make their way to the country to visit the wife’s mother and find themselves in the mother of all traffic jams. What is intended to be an idyllic trip evolves into a nightmarish escapade of burning cars, rape, murder and...cannibalism. It's historical allegory threaded with political analogies and requires reflective afterthought. Punctuating sound and a famous 10-minute tracking shot of the traffic snarl are just a few of this film’s many signature statements.

Perhaps the most copied, envied and quoted film director of our time, Godard may have intended this caustic satire to be his last film as the final credits read: “End of Film. End of Cinema.” Godard once said, “I pity the French Cinema, because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema, because it has no ideas.”

Superman will still be there tomorrow.

Week End
Tonight at 7:00 p.m.
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
(409 Colorado Street)
Free to AFS members / $4 all others
For more information go here