Criterion Collection: King Lear 1987 DVD

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.

DVD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 2K digital restoration

Audio recording of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival press conference, featuring director Jean-Luc Godard

New interviews with Richard Brody, author of Everything Is Cinema: The

Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard;

actor Molly Ringwald; and actor and coscreenwriter Peter Sellars

English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: An essay by Brody