“Taking the opportunity of a commission from MOMA, The Old Place makes the museological purpose of Godard’s life's work explicit. Having recorded the dreams and horrors of the 20th century, cinema has become an "old place" where all those who "refuse time, because they don't want to lose rank", find refuge. It's up to cinema to build its own refuge, and to welcome in images from the past; because "from Botticelli to Barnet, it's the same gaze, the same suffering" – a possible development of the "classic= modern" equation written on a blackboard in Bande à part. And in the role of museographic patron saint, Malraux has been replaced by Walter Benjamin. Godard bestows on cinema the task Benjamin assigned to the historian: that of saving from oblivion images and men who were victims of history. In every image, wrote Benjamin, quoted by Godard and Miéville, "the past sets up a lightning-flash resonance with the present to form a constellation". In The Old Place, the flash through the history of the 20th century, of art and of cinema, becomes a journey to the stars – and the museum becomes a planetarium.” (Cyril Neyrat)

Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art

French spoken

An attempt, according to Godard, to capture the origins of the 21st century, ordered in 2000 for the opening of the Cannes Film Festival: “I have tried to cover the memories of the atrocious explosions and crimes with children’s faces and the tears and smiles of women.” “The attempt was of course bound to fail, as there is no cure against all the horrors of the last century in this retrospective. Godard scans the 20th Century in reverse; its major trends include armies and refugees, cannon shots and prisoners, freight trains and mountains of corpses, conquests and occupation, humiliations and torture. And when a scene starts a quest for a lost Century, the aim is not to find again the sweetness of remembrance, but an era lost because it was devastated by violence and wars.” (Michael Althen)

French spoken

“The title of this twenty-minute video by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, ‘Freedom and Fatherland,’ is the official slogan of the Canton de Vaud, in Switzerland, where the filmmakers live and grew up. To fulfill their commission from a Swiss cultural festival, they adapted a great Swiss novel, Aimé Pache, Painter from the Vaud, by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, from 1911 and extruded its autobiographical analogies to Godard’s own life and work. Using a choice set of clips from Godard’s films to coincide with events from the painter’s life, verbal references to modern times and to Godard’s own—Sartre, the late nineteen-sixties, the cinema—and images of the Swiss terrain, which plays a decisive role in the work of Pache, Godard and Miéville produce the effect of mirrors within mirrors.” (Richard Brody)

French spoken