Anthology Film Archives

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METAPHYSICS OF THE PRATFALL: JERRY LEWIS AND JEAN-LUC GODARD

March 19 – March 31

March 19-31, 2026

In his 1957 review of Frank Tashlin’s HOLLYWOOD OR BUST, Jean-Luc Godard described Jerry Lewis’s face as one in which “the height of artifice blends at times with the nobility of true documentary.” Godard was, in a sense, prophesying the films he would later make, where the same dialectic can be found: an oft-overlooked strain of improvisation, bald-faced artifice, and pure antics coexisting with unvarnished reality. To pay tribute to these two contemporaries and their deep entanglements, we present a series that places films by Lewis and Godard in dialogue with each other. Both turned comedy into a form of modernist experimentation: Lewis through his elastic body, elaborate gags, and self-reflexive use of technology; Godard through his deconstruction of genre and his playful, anarchic sense of form. Each viewed cinema as a laboratory for testing the boundaries between art and entertainment, sincerity and absurdity, self and persona. Seen together, their films reveal a shared commitment to invention and a profound suspicion of the very illusions they so brilliantly created. We hope the encounter activates their respective work in new and explosive ways – and perhaps, as Lewis once dreamed, offers the chance to “say something on emulsion that will stop a soldier from firing into nine children somewhere, sometime. Now; next year; five years from now.”

Guest-programmed by Edward McCarry and Ethan Spigland, who wrote the introduction and individual film descriptions.

Special thanks to Julian Antos & Kyle Westphal (Chicago Film Society); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Eric Di Bernardo (Rialto Pictures); Jack Durwood & Emiah Washington (Paramount); David Jennings, Richard Ashton, and Finley Padgett (Sony Pictures); Edda Manriquez (Academy Film Archive); Louise Paraut (Gaumont); and Amy Rynne (Park Circus).

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