PERFECTION helmer Karen Lin with editor Rachel Tejada sitting with a full house waiting for David Wenham at last night's acting seminar at the Doris Duke Theatre!

Describing and structuring his new work as a film in three parts, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise,Jean-Luc Godard uses Dante's "Inferno" as a point of departure to muse on one of the director's primary obsessions: the vagaries of the contemporary world. This brilliant visual artist still has the uncanny ability to tear the veil away from everything that surrounds us, reimagining the world in stark new ways. Notre Musique is a mixture of essay, voice-over, autobiographical asides, documentary footage and fiction arrayed in incomparable fashion. Godard carefully orchestrates the film to follow a symphonic structure, each segment synonymous with one of the traditional three movements, to create what becomes literally "our music," a visual and aural snapshot of the times.

The film follows the structure of Dante's masterwork, beginning in Hell. In Godard's hands, hell becomes a devastating but beautifully collected montage of war images. War, be it World War II, Algeria, Vietnam, Israel or Bosnia, is a constant in his films, but never has he pieced together an assemblage of such poetic power. Purgatory finds Godard himself in Sarajevo, where he has been invited to attend a European literary conference with other artists and writers. Here we are introduced to a young French- Jewish journalist based in Israel who has come to Sarajevo to see a place "where reconciliation is possible." Paradise is the most enigmatic section of the film, where the journalist finds peace by the water on a small beach guarded by American Marines. Godard's work has always functioned as a provocation. The darting brilliance of his mind raises questions and provides unique juxtapositions, often breathtaking in their conceptual power. Over the years he has never lost this singular ability to examine constantly and rigorously what it means to live in today's world. Notre Musique is his wrenching and often wearied look at the madness he sees descending on our world as it stumbles through conflict and crisis. There is no more powerful documentor of this process than one of cinema's greatest artists.

Screening at the Dole Cannery tonight, Friday, October 29 at 10:00 p.m.

The film traces Kerry’s early life as a young man who chooses to enlist in the Navy and to go to Vietnam. The film reveals intimate, first person accounts of Kerry’s war service through his own private letters, his eloquent journal, and the vivid memories of the men who served at his side. When Kerry came home disillusioned by the war, he and his fellow Vietnam Veterans challenged Congress and the Nixon administration. As Kerry became a nationally known anti-war activist, the Nixon White House plotted to discredit his leadership, but significantly could find “nothing on him,” as Colson reveals via Watergate tapes. Despite Nixon’s attempt to undermine John Kerry’s political career during his 1972 unsuccessful run for US Congress, Kerry persevered, eventually winning election to the Senate in 1984 and receiving the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.

Going Upriver director George Butler (best known for his highly acclaimed films Pumping Iron, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition) first realized Kerry’s importance to his generation and began documenting his journey in photographs in 1969, covering Kerry's leadership of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), his early political campaigns, as well as intimate moments of his personal life. The film weaves together Butler’s extraordinary photographs with archival film, interviews with Kerry’s closest associates, and more contemporary images of the Senator at home and abroad.

As a Vietnam War hero and anti-war activist, Kerry’s story is at the center of a defining era in American history. More than a biography of John Kerry, Going Upriver is the story of an American generation that came of age in the tumultuous sixties and that has now come to national leadership at the beginning of a new century -- when issues of war and morality once again hold center stage.

Screening at the Dole Cannery this Sunday, October 31 at 10:00 p.m.