Jean-Luc Godard: The Passion of Cinema / Le Passion de Cinema

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INFO ON JEAN-LUC GODARD There’s 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, Godard’s works stand out as original, acerbic, romantic, ironic, humorous and explorative. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 2: “GODARD BIOGRAPHY” With À 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, François Truffaut. À 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 , Une Femme Est Une Femme , Vivre Sa Vie , Le Mépris , Bande à Part , and Une Femme Mariée . In the mid-1960s, Godard’s films became increasingly the sci-fi film Alphaville , Pierrot le Fou , Made in U.S. , Masculine/ Féminin , 2 ou 3 Choses Que Je Sais – until, by 1967-68, the Marxist and Maoist influences permeated Godard’s films: Weekend , La Chinoise , La Gai Savoir , and One Plus One . Godard shifted into what appeared to be wholly political, ideological filmmaking, forming the Dziga-Vertov Group with Jean-Henri Roger and Jean-Pierre Gorin, which made the following films between 1968 and 1972: British Sounds , Pravda , Vent d’Est , Luttes en Italie , 1 P.M. , Vladimir et Rosa , Letter to Jane , and Tout Va Bien , with Jane Fonda and Yves Montand. In the late 1970s, Godard made a ‘return’ to feature filmmaking, with the ‘sublime trilogy’, Sauve Qui Peut , Passion , and Prénom: Carmen . Easily his most controversial film, Je Vous Salue Marie , appeared in 1985; it was followed by Détective , made to help finance the completion of Hail Mary, King Lear , which starred Peter Sellars, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen, Soigne Ta Droite , Nouvelle Vague , Allemagne Année 90 Neuf Zéro , Hélas Pour Moi , For Ever Mozart , Éloge de l’Amour and Notre Musique . Fully illustrated. Bibliography and notes. Jeremy Robinson has written many critical studies, including Steven Spielberg, Arthur Rimbaud, and The Sacred Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, plus literary monographs on: J.R.R. Tolkien; Samuel Beckett; Thomas Hardy; André Gide; Robert Graves; and Lawrence Durrell.