King Lear is a 1987 American film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play in the avant-garde style of French New Wave cinema.

Only three characters – Lear, Cordelia and Edgar – are common to both, and only Act I, scene 1 is given a conventional cinematic treatment in that two or three people actually engage in relatively meaningful dialogue.

Rather than reproducing a performance of Shakespeare's play, the film is more concerned with the issues raised by the text, and symbolically explores the relationships between power and virtue, between fathers and daughters, words and images.

[a] The film script, mostly written by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy, includes only a few of Shakespeare's lines from King Lear, and these are often fragmentary and generally not heard in the order as they appear in the play.

(Act V, scene 2:5) Apart from lines from Shakespeare's play, extracts from a number of modern literary sources are also heard during the film: some are spoken by an on-screen character, some in voice-over on the deliberately confusing soundtrack.

[s] At the same time, in voice-over, Cordelia reads from sonnet 47: and Lear - foreshadowing the last scene of the play - mourns the death of his daughter.

Seen at a restaurant table with yellow flowers, Will Jr. explains in voice-over that he is on duty for the Cannon Cultural Division:[t] and then there is NO THING (inter-title).

Emerging from a reed bed, he explains (in voice-over) that—by special arrangement with the Cannon Cultural Division and the Royal Library of Her Majesty, the Queen[x] he was engaged to recover what had been lost, starting the works of his famous ancestor.

Godard appears to have disguised one of the central aspects of his film so well that almost every writer who mentions it does so with a sense of bafflement and bewilderment: namely, the shots illuminated by a bare light bulb of toy plastic dinosaurs and other animals in a cardboard box.

"[52] "The image is a pure creation of the soul..." - Pierre Reverdy In this highly compressed and cinematically meaningful sequence[53] (00:49:00), Godard demonstrates the technique of montage, which allows a film-maker to bring two or more opposing realities into a new association.

The images (starting from 00:49:04) are: Cordelia is seen lying on her bed, wearing the nightgown which Virginia was ironing, with the book of Doré pictures.

[bn] Cut to the earlier daytime shots of Will Jr. in the restaurant, reflecting on his inability to control his characters (or actors?

[br] Back again in the hotel bedroom Cordelia, wearing her nightgown, acts the part of The Maid of Orléans in a remake of a scene from Robert Bresson's 1962 film The Trial of Joan of Arc.

[ca] The goblins, yelling and uttering wild cries, pursue Learo who now carries the elephant gun himself, pushing and shoving him as he walks towards Cordelia leading the horse.

Lear's final lines read by Ruth Maleczech and recorded by Peter Sellars (along with David Warrilow) in Philip Glass's studio in New York.

"[76] The sound engineer was François Musy,[77] who worked on most of Godard's major films from Lettre à Freddy Buache to Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro.

In King Lear Godard fills the soundtrack with a barrage of semi-identifiable animal noises: one of the most noticeable is the shrill and raucous call of a crow.

A detail of Wheatfield with Crows, one of Vincent van Gogh's very last paintings, appears towards the end of King Lear.

This is a type of audio-visual collage made up of overlapping or repeated film clips, written or spoken poetry, philosophy, high and low literature, as well as paintings and visual citations, which function as a rebus.

Ever since Godard's 1963 short film Le Nouveau Monde, Beethoven's Große Fuge and final quartet had provided a lasting challenge to the moral compromises and the empty banalities of the moment.

[85] In King Lear, Godard slowed the music down and electronically manipulated it[86] so that the only easily identifiable extract is from the second movement (in 3/4 time, from around bar 120).

The passage only reaches the proper pitch two or three times, with a swift accelerando at crucial moments of NO THING and then collapses again as swiftly: when Cordelia sinks down on the balcony with Learo (wearing red) uncomfortably close behind her (00:30:40),[cg] and when the goblins snatch the empty film can from Edgar's hands beside the river (00:46:50).

The opening chorus of J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion is heard during the reversed stop-motion sequence of "creating" the flowers (01:13:05), and at the death of Professor Pluggy (01:14:20), similarly slowed down.

Judith Wilt prefaced her article on Virginia Woolf's The Waves with this passage from Moments of Being: Although Norman Mailer had written a complete script, Godard didn't use it.

[89] Godard had also accepted a contract to make some short commercial films for Closed, a brand of jeans by Marithé and François Girbaud.

[92][93] Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released a DVD for the Italian market only, with unintelligible subtitles which are often only a vague approximation of some of the lines and names mentioned in the film.

[7] Also from The Washington Post, Hal Hinson classified the film as a "labored, not terribly funny practical joke", "infuriating, baffling, challenging and fascinating" in which Godard "trashes his own talent".

[95] The New York Times review by Vincent Canby in 1988 compared it unfavourably to the rest of Godard's oeuvre as "tired, familiar and out of date", remarking that the few lines of Shakespeare delivered in the play overpower his dialogue, making it "seem much punier than need be".

[96] Canby also called the film "sad and embarrassing" and was quoted by Keith Harrison in the introduction to his Bakhtinian Polyphony in Godard's King Lear.

Harrison cites the critical responses of Peter S. Donaldson,[97] Alan Walworth[98] and Anthony R. Guneratne[99] for their sustained coherence of analysis of King Lear, and discusses the film in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's interrelated concepts of dialogism, the carnivalesque, heteroglossia, the chronotope, co-authoring, polyglossia, inter-illumination,[100] refraction, unfinalizability,[101] and polyphony, to show that "Godard's autobiographical and densely fragmented re-creation of Shakespeare's King Lear is carefully shaped, meaningful, and, ultimately, compelling in its multi-voiced unity.