Godard

Morrey offers a new interpretation of one of the most innovative directors in the history of cinema, covering the whole of Godard's career from the French New Wave to the more recent triumphs of 'Histoire(s) du cinema' and 'Eloge de l'amour'.

"The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech."--Cyril Béghin, back cover.

Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion. Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues–each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career–get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work. As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.

“Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema is an exhilarating and extremely lucid analysis of the way Godard ‘thinks’ in, of, and through cinema. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of French culture, politics and theory, Morgan skillfully illustrates the complex relations between history, aesthetics, and nature in the director’s later works. Defying criticism of Godard’s alleged retreat from politics, this book provides compelling, detailed, and erudite analyses of his later films and illuminates the auteur’s political and aesthetic response to the so-called ‘death of cinema.’”— Mary Ann Doane, author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. “Daniel Morgan charts a sensible route into the impenetrable Jean-Luc Godard. Posing clear yet insistent questions, he burrows to the center of both parts of this book’s formidable title, finding in late Godard an aesthetic fusion that generates the light and heat of a trenchant and powerful political critique. Anyone who feels drawn or licensed to write about Godard should read Morgan before setting out.”—Dudley Andrew, author of What Cinema Is! “Daniel Morgan's Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema signals a major breakthrough in the international study of the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Reconciling the filmmaker's peculiarly Romantic sense of aesthetics —to which the book pays scrupulous, material attention—with the thorny political histories that Godard's cinema has always probed, Morgan gives us new, compelling, synthetic tools with which to understand an artist who is at once the most cryptic and the most sensuous of all living filmmakers.”—Adrian Martin, Monash University, co-editor of lolajournal.com

Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his European contemporaries, came to filmmaking through film criticism. This collection of essays and interviews, ranging from his early efforts for La Gazette du Cinéma to his later writings for Cahiers du Cinéma, reflects his dazzling intelligence, biting wit, maddening judgments, and complete unpredictability. In writing about Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Bresson, and Renoir, Godard is also writing about himself-his own experiments, obsessions, discoveries. This book offers evidence that he may be even more original as a thinker about film than as a director. Covering the period of 1950-1967, the years of Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Alphaville, La Chinoise, and Weekend, this book of writings is an important document and a fascinating study of a vital stage in Godard's career. With commentary by Tom Milne and Richard Roud, and an extensive new foreword by Annette Michelson that reassesses Godard in light of his later films, here is an outrageous self-portrait by a director who, even now, continues to amaze and bedevil, and to chart new directions for cinema and for critical thought about its history.

The artistic impact of Jean-Luc Godard, whose career in cinema has spanned over fifty years and yielded a hundred or more discrete works in different media cannot be overestimated, not only on French and other world cinemas, but on fields as diverse as television, video art, gallery installation, philosophy, music, literature, and dance. The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard marks an initial attempt to map the range and diversity of Godard’s impact across these different fields. It contains reassessments of key films like Vivre sa vie and Passion as well as considerations of Godard’s influence over directors like Christophe Honoré. Contributors look at Godard’s relation to philosophy and influence over film philosophy through reference to Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell, and show how Godard’s work in cinema interacts with other arts, such as painting, music, and dance. They suggest that Godard’s late work makes important contributions to debates in memory and Holocaust Studies. The volume will appeal to a non-specialist audience with its discussions of canonical films and treatment of themes popular within film studies programs such as cinema and ethics. But it will also attract academic specialists on Godard with its chapters on recent works, including Dans le noir du temps (2002) and Voyage(s) en utopie (2006), interventions in long-running academic debates (Godard, the Holocaust, and anti- Semitism), and treatment of rarely discussed areas of Godard’s work (choreographed movement).

Maryel Locke and Charles Warren present twelve original essays by film critics, filmmakers, theologians, and philosophers that examine the 1985 film Hail Mary, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, and its companion film, The Book of Mary, directed by Anne-Marie Miéville. (The films are collectively released under the title Hail Mary.) The interpretative essays offer a rich spectrum of analysis and opinion representing many divergent points of view about critical theory, the status of women, and the value of film as a medium. Locke and Warren also include two important interviews with Godard, brief biographies and complete filmographies of Godard and Miéville, a short breakdown of the two films including the English subtitles, and the script of the French dialogue to complete a remarkably comprehensive treatment of this important film. The only film based on the biblical story of the Virgin Mary, Godard’s Hail Mary is a contemporary Swiss/French representation of Mary’s virgin pregnancy, the birth of her son, and her relationship with Joseph and her young child. Miéville’s companion film is about a young girl named Mary whose parents get a divorce. While neither film is overtly religious, the initial release of Hail Mary brought public protests, court cases, a physical attack on Godard, and condemnation by the Pope.