Synopses & Reviews
JEAN-LUC GODARD
Theres no one else quite like Jean-Luc Godard. You could take a few frames from one of his films and know they were by the maestro and nobody else. Where the flood of movies globally now runs into many thousands, Godards works stand out as original, acerbic, romantic, ironic, humorous and explorative.
EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 2: GODARD BIOGRAPHY
With Bout du Souffle, Godard produced one of the first, great French New Wave movies, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and written by, among others, Franois Truffaut. Bout du Souffle, with its cool Parisian milieu, its filmic and film noir allusions, handheld camera, direct sound, startling editing and stylish, self-conscious performances from Belmondo and Seberg, established Godard as one of the major voices of postwar cinema, a reputation which Godard built on in subsequent early films such as Le Petit Soldat (1960), Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Le Mpris (1963), Bande Part (1964), and Une Femme Marie (1964).
In these films of the early to mid-1960s, Godard established a radical, polemical series of films as film-essays which confronted issues such as late consumer capitalism, prostitution, labour, politics, ideology, gender, marriage, music, popular culture, Hollywood and not forgetting cinema itself.
In the mid-1960s, Godards films became increasingly political - the sci-fi film Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Made in U.S.A (1966), Masculine/ Fminin (1966), 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais (1966) until, by 1967-68, the Marxist and Maoist influences permeated Godards films: Weekend (1967), La Chinoise (1967), La Gai Savoir (1968), and One Plus One (Sympathy For the Devil, 1968). His concern was not to make political films, but to make films politically (my emphasis).
In the 1970s, Godard moved into video and television territory, and worked with Anne-Marie Miville on many projects: Ici Et Ailleurs (1974), Numro Deux (1975), Comment a Va (1976), Six Fois Deux/ Sur Et Sous La Communication (1976), and France/ Tour/ Dtour/ Deux/ Enfants (1977-78).
In the late 1970s, Godard made a return to feature filmmaking, with the sublime trilogy, Sauve Qui Peut (a.k.a. Every Man For Himself and Slow Motion, 1979), Passion (1982), and Prnom: Carmen (1983).
Easily his most controversial film, Je Vous Salue Marie (Hail Mary), appeared in 1985; it was followed by Dtective (1985), made to help finance the completion of Hail Mary, King Lear (1987), which starred Peter Sellars, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen, Nouvelle Vague (1990), Hlas Pour Moi (1993), For Ever Mozart (1997), loge de lAmour (In Praise of Love, 2000) and Notre Musique (2005).
Fully illustrated. Bibliography and notes.
Synopsis
A new study of the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), director of iconic films such as Breathless, Weekend, Pierrot le Fou, Passion and Vivre Sa vie. This book explores 27 of Godard's major films, from Breathless to Notre Musique, and includes a scene by scene analysis of Godard's controversial 1985 film of the Virgin Mary, Je Vous Salue, Marie. Jeremy Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995), Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997) and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (2006). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).