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Word: filming (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
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Usage:

...voice answers. She continues eating with no reaction. The word "fin" appears on the screen, enlarged at once to "fin du conte" and then changed to "fin du cinema." The sequence reveals Godard's awareness that in Weekend he destroyed the only cinema he loves--the American narrative ("conte") film...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

What originally attracted Godard to American movies was their dramatic and visual design. They were narrative dramas of personal experience and development in which the characters expressed whatever the film's makers wanted to say. The physical and spiritual effect of events on the characters was the means of describing their physical and social environments. (An example of a different sort of drama is seen in Eisenstein. He composed masses of people in images whose dynamics directly express his intended meaning without the mediation--reactions--of individual figures...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

Godard's particular fondness for the films of Nicholas Ray indicates a concern for modern settings in which the characters hold an insecure place. As Godard's or Ray's films proceed, their characters discover more and more about their settings, which are colored by their perceptions--yet finally stand as independent entities. The characters, neither controlling nor controlled by their physical setting, have to solve their problems independently--this is no fatalistic cinema--but the meaning of the film is created in the characters' reactions to, and actions within, their setting...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

Godard further made the subject of each film work as its method. Thus Pierrot le Fou is a romance (subject) realized in flowing colors, soaring music, and a hero whose journey through this setting is the motive and organizing force of the drama (method). Individual alienation becomes the method of Breathless through a hero who conducts a very detached investigation of his surroundings. Weekend's subject is general alienation in a capitalist society, and its method is to follow characters through a bourgeois countryside. But these characters, being alienated themselves, have no serious moral responses to the terrible events they...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

...figure reading Rousseau, and interrupt a beautiful rendition of a Mozart sonata--the characters are merely destroying the cultural background of their bourgeois society. The beauty of Godard's compositions and camera motions in these sequences in undermined by their violent, petty responses, which begin to pull the film apart. In Godard's other films such scenes give the characters an opportunity to express and develop their sensibilities; here they attack the historical culture on which such sensibilities depended...

Author: By Mike Prokosch, | Title: The Death Of American Films | 7/3/1969 | See Source »

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