Marker’s sole fiction film is constructed (with one crucial, brief exception) from still photographs that are combined in serial fashion with voiceover narration and music. The result is one of cinema’s most compelling works, a love story set in a bleak future and involving time travel and memory. After the destruction of civilization by war, a member of the underground survivor community, haunted by glimpses of a barely recalled face, is sent by scientists back to the past to look for a key to humanity’s salvation. There he finds a lover, love of the world when it was still alive, and traces of his earlier self. This ecstatic, lyrical film conveys the pain and weight of modern history and the intense power of images.

After numerous experiments with video in the 1970s, Godard returned to filmmaking his postmodern autobiography. Dutronc stars as Paul Godard, a struggling filmmaker who fails to maintain meaningful connection with both is ex-wife (Bay) and a prostitue (Huppert). Godard was compelled to come back to filmmaking after many of his funding sources began to dry up in the late 1970s. The result is one of his most personal works in years.