Jean-Luc Godard’s biographer Richard Brody calls 1987’s King Lear “the best film of all time”. After its Cannes premiere, the film screened for two weeks in the US, and then disappeared into obscurity for 15 years. A young Quentin Tarantino lied that he acted in the movie, believing that nobody would have watched it to know otherwise.

In the first of our final two episodes of our Godard series, Kevin & Cristian attempt to find meaning within this maddening, fragmented anti-adaptation of Shakespeare. The project began when Godard signed a US$1 million contract on a napkin with Israeli film producer Menahem Golan, whose Cannon Group was known for the Death Wish series, Chuck Norris flicks, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Out of this unlikely partnership, King Lear is born: “A FILM ABOUT NO THING”, which on paper, follows William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth as he searches for his ancestor’s work in a post-Chernobyl cultural wasteland. Is this all one big troll by Godard? Is it an act of artistic self-immolation?

Featuring Norman Mailer, Peter Sellars, Molly Ringwald, Leos Carax, and even Woody Allen, 1987’s King Lear is certainly one of the strangest films ever made.

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Keep Your Right Up! (1987) is perhaps one of Godard's strangest features, and the subject of this week's episode of Down Underground. The second-last feature in Godard's 80s catalogue, Keep Your Right Up! sees Godard attempt a 'comedy' in the style of Keaton, Tati or Lewis, acting as it's star (sort of) alongside his usual role in the director's chair. As idiotic as it is idiosyncratic (and featuring a cameo from Jane Birkin) Keep Your Right Up! gave Kevin and Cristian plenty to talk about.

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On this week's episode of Down Underground, Kevin and Cristian discuss the other film Godard released in 1985, 'Detective'. Made as a means of financing 'Hail Mary', 'Detective' was comissioned by producer Alain Sarde, who had already secured both the script and the film's star, Nathalie Baye, and was likely seeking to cash in on Godard's history with film-noir by offering Godard a simple tale of intrigue and deception. However, Godard, forever dedicated to deconstructing genre and language (or just plain trolling) created a disorienting meta-commentary, no doubt enhanced by the return of familiar faces such as New-Wave darling Jean-Pierre Leaud as well as Claude Brasseur, both of whom had starred in Godard's 60s works.

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On this week's episode of Down Underground, Kevin and Cristian discuss one of Godard's most contentious films, 1985's Hail Mary. Born from Godard's obsession with fatherhood, particularly fathering a daughter, Je vous salue, Marie sees Myriem Roussel finally take centre stage as the titular Mary, who is visited by the angel Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) and, like the biblical tale, immaculately conceives of a baby boy, a concept her boyfriend Joseph (Thierry Rode) must struggle to come to terms with. The film was heavily protested across Europe, Oceania and the USA by Catholic and Christian groups after the Pope denounced it as blasphemous, an infamy Godard, and the film, took in their stride as a powerful symbol of the aging enfant terrible's ongoing ability to shock audiences (and market pictures).

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On this week's episode of Down Underground, Kevin and Cristian discuss one of Jean-Luc Godard's most severely underrated masterpieces, 'First Name: Carmen' (1983). A very loose adaptation of Georges Bizet's classic opera 'Carmen' (1875), Godard returns to the formula he knows best, a 'Bonnie and Clyde' style narrative starring Maruschka Detmers as the titular 'Carmen', and Jacques Bonaffe as 'Joseph', a security guard-turned outlaw. It wouldn't be a Godard 80s film without a parallel narrative, in this instance a string quarter rehearsing for a performance of some late Beethoven works, with Myriem Roussel returning, this time as 'Claire', the youngest and least experienced of the quartet. You won't want to miss this lively discussion of this Golden Lion winning future-classic of not just the 80s, but Godard's entire ouvre!

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After returning to the cinema with Every Man for Himself (1980), Jean Luc Godard was quick at work on his follow up, Passion, often titled Godard's Passion. Isabelle Huppert returns to star alongs Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Hanna Schygulla, who up until that point had worked almost exclusively with German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Godard alumni Michel Piccoli, previously of Contempt (1964), as well as Raoul Coutard, Godard's trusted cinematographer for much of his 60s work, also reunite with the director in this tale of parallel but intertwined narrative threads. Join Kevin and Cristian as they attempt to unpack this dense piece of cinema-obscura, where Godard playfully infuses the worlds of 'low' labour and 'high' art whilst continuing to blow apart the relationship between image and sound.

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Jean Luc Godard's first film of the 1980s, Every Man for Himself, marked his return to the cinematic mainstream by kicking off many of the recurring themes and formal motifs that classify this era in the director's ouvré, and featured a number of stars that Godard would collaborate with in this decade, including Isabelle Huppert and Nathalie Baye. Scenes were slowed to the point that individual frames become apparent, the score would shift between diagetic and non-diegetic, or Godard might suddenly throw us a picturesque scene of the Swiss countryside or cars whizzing down a highway at night, whilst two characters discuss their failed romantic relationship. Join Kevin and Cristian as they begin their journey to reappraise this overlooked period in the working life of one of cinema's most idiosyncratic figures.

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