King Lear (1987)

Directed by

Jean-Luc Godard

Genre

drama film

Country

France, United States

Runtime

1h 30m

Rated

PG

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 36 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

In a world recovering from a catastrophe, a man named William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth tries to reconstruct his ancestor's lost plays. The film takes place in Switzerland and loosely involves characters named Lear, Cordelia, and Edgar, but does not follow the original play's story.

fragmentedintellectualexperimentaldisjointedabstractcerebralavant-gardemeditative

What happens

King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and produced by Cannon Films, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play in the avant-garde style of French New Wave cinema. The script was originally assigned to Norman Mailer but Mailer's text was not used. The working script was written by Godard, assisted by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy. It is not a typical cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous tragedy, although some lines from the play are used in the film. Only three characters – Lear, Cordelia and Edgar – are common to both, and only Act I, scene 1, is given a conventional cinematic treatment in that two or three people actually engage in relatively meaningful dialogue. King Lear is set in and around Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland, where Godard went to primary school. While many of Godard's films are concerned with the invisible aspects of cinematography, the outward action of the film is centred on William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth, who is attempting to restore his ancestor's plays in a world where most of human civilization—and more specifically culture—has been lost after the Chernobyl catastrophe. Rather than reproducing a performance of Shakespeare's play, the film is more concerned with the issues raised by the text, and symbolically explores the relationships between power and virtue, between fathers and daughters, words and images. The film deliberately does not use conventional Hollywood filmmaking techniques which make a film 'watchable', but instead seeks to alienate and baffle its audience in the manner of Bertolt Brecht. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Macbeth (1987)
• Sorceress (1987)
• Au revoir les enfants (1987)
• The Distant Land (1987)
• Hamnet (2025)
• Jenatsch (1987)
• Pride & Prejudice (2005)
• Richard III (1986)