Jean-Luc Godard The Passion Of Cinema / Le Passion De Cinima [Hardcover]

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, Fran?ois 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 M?pris (1963), Bande ? Part (1964), and Une Femme Mari?e (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/ F?minin (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 Mi?ville on many projects: Ici Et Ailll£&