Blu-ray, DVD Release: Weekend

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Nov. 13, 2012
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Weekend, the scathing 1967 comedy-satire film by France’s legendary Jean-Luc Godard (Histoires du Cinema), remains one of modern cinema’s great anarchic works.

Weekend movie scene

Western civilization crashes and burns in Godard's Weekend.

Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. After their own car is destroyed, the pair wanders through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, revealing a world that is at once humorous and beautiful, and senseless and frightening

Featuring a justly famous centerpiece sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam (the single shot runs for some eight minutes), Weekend is a surreal, funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society retreating to savagery, and—according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.

Weekend was previously issued on DVD in the U.S. in 2005 by the now-defunct New Yorker Films, but has long been out-of-print. Criterion’s release represents the film’s return to DVD, as well as its Blu-ray debut.

Presented in French with English subtitles, the DVD and Blu-ray contain the following features:

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New video essay by film critic Kent Jones
• Archival interviews with actors Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne and assistant director Claude Miller
• Excerpt from a French television program on director Jean-Luc Godard, featuring on-set footage of Weekend shot by filmmaker Philippe Garrel
• Trailers
• A booklet featuring an essay by critic and novelist Gary Indiana

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.