1987 | United States, France | Fiction

King Lear (1987)

  • English English 90 mins
  • Director | Jean-Luc Godard
  • Writer | Jean-Luc Godard, Geoffrey of Monmouth, William Shakespeare, Richard Debuisne
  • Producer | Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus

STATUS: Released

This film is currently not available.   

Jean-Luc Godard’s first English-language narrative feature is a radical anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece that finds the visionary filmmaker continuing to reinvent the syntax of cinema. In a post-Chernobyl world where culture has been lost, William Shakespeare Jr. V (played by theater director Peter Sellars) attempts to reconstruct his ancestor’s play, abetted by a cast that includes Molly Ringwald, Burgess Meredith, and Godard himself as a crazed avant savant. Through a dense layering of sounds, images, and ideas about everything from language to the economics of filmmaking to the very meaning of art in a ruined world, Godard fashions a puckish and profound metacinematic riddle to be endlessly analyzed, argued over, and savored.

Post-Apocalyptic Avant-Garde Tragedy Reconstruction Surrealism
Film Organizations
The Criterion Collection
DISTRIBUTION