This year Chicagoans have the rare opportunity to discover lost or suppressed works by a number of major filmmakers. In May the Gene Siskel Film Center presented the local premieres of Philippe Garrel’s L’Enfant Secret (1979) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972-’73); in July the Music Box hosted an ultrarare screening of Jean Grémillon’s silent masterpiece The Lighthouse Keepers (1929); and next month the Chicago International Film Festival will screen The Other Side of the Wind, an Orson Welles feature that was begun in the early 1970s and completed only recently.
The unifying message of Godard’s movies from 1985-’87 may be that this collaborative work couldn’t be more urgent. As he explains in the nakedly autobiographical Soft and Hard, Godard felt (and probably still feels) that cinema is a medium that allows filmmakers to project themselves onto viewers, whereas television—which increasingly determines how people see the world—is a medium that projects viewers onto advertisers. Even worse, television obscures the beauty of moving images, which the cinema magnifies and exalts. At the end of Soft and Hard (arguably the Rosetta stone of his late period), Godard tells Miéville that he wants to resist the power of television by fostering relationships between viewers and video images that are not too direct. With Rise and Fall, he shows how he might go about doing that.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. In French with subtitles. 92 min. Fri 9/28-Thu 10/4. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
