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Weekend (1967)



This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous centerpiece sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society retreating to savagery, and—according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- New video essay by film critic Kent Jones
- Archival interviews with actors Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and assistant director Claude Miller
- Excerpt from a French television program on director Jean-Luc Godard, featuring on-set footage of Weekend shot by filmmaker Philippe Garrel
- Trailers
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana

Someone has to say it, so: "My Hermès handbag!!"

Very nice extras on there, though I might keep the Artificial Eye disc just for the Mike Figgis introduction.

First time for Garrel's name to enter the Collection somehow I take it. Hopefully we can start seeing some of his early films in the future.

Ahh. I guess Criterion couldn't get the rights to the commentary from the NYer disc.

Yes, the David Sterrit commentary. Haven't heard it. A Kent Jones video essay sounds good though. Wish they included the entire Garrel film.

Features feel a little weak, don't they? Too bad the commentary didn't make it, but I hope a few things get added before the November release date.

In the meantime here's that Mike Figgis interview from the Artificial Eye disc of weekend:
here's that Mike Figgis interview from the Artificial Eye disc of Weekend

I really like his comments about the "correct temperature" of a film enabling it to stand the test of time better, or on the use of text (I still love "A film adrift in the cosmos/found on the rubbish dump" and so on!), and the way that you can only copy 'moments' of Godard rather than follow his style entirely. For me the funniest moment of the whole film is during that fight in the car park outside the apartment where one of the neighbours starts using a tennis racket to bat balls at the couple!

I still remember fondly being freaked out by Weekend when I first saw it. It wasn't the first Godard I saw (that was Contempt, which is still my absolute favourite Godard film) but I, perhaps inadvisedly, watched Weekend on a television screening the night before I went on a school trip to France! (I remember justifying staying up late to watch it for the chance to brush up my language skills, although unfortunately that opening sequence ended up treaching me too many phrases that I couldn't use in polite company! I think it finally drilled "Au secours!" into my head though after watching all of the sequences where the bourgeoise couple are tussling with the various members of the proleteriat or where wife gets dragged off and assaulted while the husband lazily looks on!)

I do remember being very wary as we boarded the ferry that on the other side of the channel there would be lots of cannibals, gun fights and lengthy politicial diatribes to be endured! Or at the very least long traffic jams and incessant drumming! Luckily, or perhaps unfortunately, the real France did not have any of that stuff!

Speaking of French cannibal/political/social anarchy films, is there a good release of Themroc available anywhere?

Mr. Ned wrote:Features feel a little weak, don't they? Too bad the commentary didn't make it, but I hope a few things get added before the November release date.

I agree that the features seem slim. It's obviously too early to tell anything about their quality, but the quantity, at this early stage, is a disappointment. I would have hoped for enough stuff to warrant a two-disc DVD set given that Weekend is kind of filling a gap left in the collection by the absence of the abundantly supplemented OOP Pierrot le fou.

I listened to the David Sterrit commentary recently and while it's pleasant enough he pretty much tells you what you're seeing on the screen, and throws in some stuff about the actors and crew which sheds little light on the movie. When it does something formally or politically daring he says "this shows how political Godard's thinking was" or "this shows how Godard had no respect for the rules of commercial cinema." He seems to expect that you didn't like the movie, can't imagine anybody else liking it, and don't understand how a movie that doesn't try its best to entertain could even be talked about. So in a way he's trying to break you out of the mold in which the only two responses to a movie you can imagine are "it successfully entertained me, so it was good" and "it tried to entertain me, but it failed, so it was bad." I don't think its absence on the CC disc is a bad thing, given that most people who are going to watch it will not be stuck in that mold anyway.

Nothing Sterrit says is dumb or wrong, exactly, it just struck me as a little hand-holdy, and the viewer he seems to anticipate is like an undergraduate intro to film student who has just watched Weekend for the first time and has a paper due on it tomorrow morning. It's as if he thinks part of his job is to convince you that the film was indeed made on purpose, that it's not just a bunch of random footage Godard had lying around, that it's aesthetic choices were conscious and add up to something that can be interpreted and discussed.

Is there no Adrian Martin commentary for Weekend? I know he's recorded a bunch for Australian releases of Godard films, I just don't know which ones. His contributions to Vivre sa vie and 2 or 3 Things... were outstanding, and I think he does a great job balancing the needs of people who have never stepped off the cineplex path before with people who want to hear an actual, substantive, interpretative argument.

The other two Martin did were for Masculin Feminin and La gai savoir

He also did a great visual essay (about 40 minutes or so, if my memory serves) on Histoire(s) du cinema.

On Wikipedia's list of his commentaries: "Histoire(s) du cinéma (Godard, scholarly edition overseen by Martin, 2011)"

What does this mean?

It means he contributed the visual essay I mentioned and prepared a subtitle track that identifies the film clips that you see on screen. I believe he also oversaw the entire dvd release.

I'm not as crazy about Godard as I used to be, watching his films nowadays I feel they should come with little onscreen footnotes to explain Godard's ideas, and obscure references. I remember seeing Two or Three Things... a few years ago and feeling like I was watching the film without English subs...

Having said that, Weekend remains one of my favourite films, and a hugely important film to me as it was my jumping off point into European Art Cinema. I saw the film when I was 16, in 1993 as part of Alex Cox's tenure at BBC2's Moviedrome, and I could scarely believe people made films like this. I was watching mainly Horror films at the time, but this one was so strange, violent, disturbing and weird that I was totally hooked. I'm sure if it had been Shoot the Piano Player I saw that night, I would have been a lot slower discovering the French New Wave... The film reverberates in all sorts of disparate places - the writings of JG Ballard, Michèle Breton turning up in Performance, and David Lynch and Oliver Stone must have had Weekend in mind when making Wild At Heart and Natural Born Killers. I wonder did New Orleans drone-rockers Belong lift the name of their 2006 LP October Language from one of the film's impromtu intertitles ?

I also often wonder whether Godard was referencing back to the end of this film with the final riverside 'Heaven' sequence of Notre Musique.

Blu-ray.com's review. Beautiful.

Wow. I've never seen a film print or a prior video release with such vivid colors. It's like a totally different film.

Considering the NYF DVD looked more like a R1 Chabrol film in terms of soft video mastering, this is gonna be a revelation. Still keeping that disc for the MIA commentary though (and Figgis' bizarre "I only watch movies once" directive)

Is it just me (and perhaps its from watching shitty prints) but do the new blu ray images look a little too...er...dark?

that's funny because Coutard approved the release. maybe it's his intended look?

Coutard is an old man.

Old man, look at this transfer, it's not a lot like it was.

Every new piece of blu-ray news from French cinema is depressing now.

Haven't seen this mentioned in reviews yet: how is the car crash scene handled? Does the frame jump up and down with black space in the middle, as it happens on the AE disc (and seems to be accurate) or does Criterion's disc feature the same frame-stitching attempt as New Yorker's DVD and film prints did?

Kirkinson wrote:Haven't seen this mentioned in reviews yet: how is the car crash scene handled? Does the frame jump up and down with black space in the middle, as it happens on the AE disc (and seems to be accurate) or does Criterion's disc feature the same frame-stitching attempt as New Yorker's DVD and film prints did?

I haven't seen the AE but this one presents the sequence with ther frame jump up and down with a black space inbetween like so: