
Numéro Deux. 1975. France. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Written by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville. With Sandrine Battistella, Pierre Oudrey, Alexandre Rignault, Rachel Stefanopoli, Jean-Luc Godard. DCP courtesy of Contemporary Films. 88 min.
In 1977 the Bleecker Street Cinema’s French-American programmer Jackie Raynal invited film critic Serge Daney, then editor of Cahiers du cinéma, to program and present a weeklong program of films championed by the French magazine. The program included Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s Fortini/Cani, as well as several films by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard, who was politically and artistically radicalized in 1968, experimented with film and video to make Numéro deux, a wide-ranging home movie cum essay film. The title suggests a desire to reinvent his approach to cinema, and referring to its difference from Breathess (À bout de souffle), he said, “It’s another location in my history and in the history of cinema, which is itself a part of my history and my life. The camera is not a pen for writing, a gun for shooting. Numéro deux, it’s thinking a second time about the film made 15 years ago."