Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself). 1980. France/Austria/West Germany/Switzerland. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Godard, Jean-Claude Carrière, Anne-Marie Miéville. With Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye. In French; English subtitles. 87 min.
“Godard returned to the mainstream industry with a film called Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), which had a producer, stars (including Isabelle Huppert), a story that the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière helped him assemble, and a new sense of form, which he attributed to a rediscovery of the ‘visual grammar’ of silent films. The story concerns the romantic and artistic crises of an idle filmmaker, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), as he attempts to return to the cinema, and Godard filmed it with an extraordinary, quasi-musical sense of balance and proportion. He had figured out how to make use of his lifelong cinematic obsession without merely imitating Hitchcock. The film was a great international success, and Godard was back” (Richard Brody).
35mm print