“RIP: Small Movies” is the tagline of Jean-Luc Godard’s FIRST NAME: CARMEN, and it sums up the place where Art Cinema found itself in the age of the blockbuster. Godard, after effectively rewriting film grammar with his first fifteen or so films in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, disappeared into a decade of polemical essay films. It seemed to many that he had lost touch with audiences. Then, in the early ‘80s, he began to reach out to cinemagoers again, in a limited way — this is JLG after all. This series presents some of the best films from Godard’s “comeback tour.”
