Synopses & Reviews
Some thirty years ago filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard told critic Gene Youngblood, I am trying to change the world. He has pursued his revolution in works ranging from the explosive
Breathless to the eloquent
Contempt to the controversial
Hail Mary and the postmodern
Histoire(s) du cinéma, shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative ap-proaches to every aspect of cinema and video-including film criticism via provocative essays in
Cahiers du Cinéma and interviews dating to the early years of his career.
This book presents a varied selection of his conversations with critics, scholars, and journalists, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and illuminating key facets of his life, work, and ideas.
Topics include the seductiveness of cinema (Films are the only things by which to look inside of people, and that's why people are so fond of movies and why they'll never die); film as a blend of truth and beauty (I mix images and sounds like a scientist, I hope. The mystery of the scientific is the same as the mystery of the artist. So is the misery); and the personal realities of aging (Maybe it's that when you get old, in one way you feel younger and younger but still being old-young oldness, if I may say so, which is very. . .comforting).
As challenging and evocative as they are quirky and unpredictable, these interviews cast light on Godard's lifelong position as a proudly unclassifiable thinker who feels, as he said in 1980, that a language is obviously made to cross borders. I'm someone whose real country is language, and whose territory is movies.
David Sterritt is an associate professor of film at Long Island University and film critic of The Christian Science Monitor.
Synopsis
Collected interviews with the French director of Breathless and Hail Mary
Table of Contents
Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre sa vie /Tom Milne --Jean-Luc Godard : no difference between life and cinema /Gene Youngblood --Godard and the revolution /Andrew Sarris --Angle and reality : Godard and Gorin in America /Robert Phillip Kolker --Urgent whisper /Penelope Gilliatt --New direction for the new wave's Jean-Luc Godard /Annette Insdorf --Godard : born-again filmmaker /Jonathan Cott --Bringing Godard back home /Jonathan Rosenbaum --Economics of film criticism : a debate /Jean-Luc Godard and Pauline Kael --Carrots are cooked : conversation with Jean-Luc Godard /Gideon Bachmann --Genesis of a camera /Jean-Pierre Beauviala and Jean-Luc Godard --Godard in his fifth period /Katherine Dieckmann --Ideas, not plots, inspire Jean-Luc Godard /David Sterritt --Jean-Luc Godard /Gavin Smith.