Word: godard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Seeing the same qualities in Italian, French, Czech, and American directors may appear sweeping and uncritical, but there are good historical reasons for it. American audiences which go one night to see Antonioni and the next Godard, and like them for the same things, are implicitly recognizing a clear line of aesthetic influence. A healthy chunk of the French New Wave's conception of film comes from Neo-Realism (Antonioni, visconti, Rossellini, de Sica, Fellini). Neo Realism's original choice of social reality for subject-matter and its tendency to documentary as method had a tremendous influence in France, giving...
...Overseas, the director is becoming the star. There may always be the Catherine Deneuves and Marcello Mastroiannis who are billed above the titles of their films. But increasingly the actor in Europe has become less important than the man who calls the shots. When France's Jean-Luc Godard makes a film, the title is virtually irrelevant. Satyricon is the official name of a forthcoming fantasy about the sexual excesses of ancient Rome, but the knowing audience may be attracted more by the movie's unofficial title: "The New Fellini." Such Italian directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti...
...Well," replies his date for the evening, "there's the Godard, an old Fellini, the new Truffau'-"How about something without subtitles for a change? 2001. Or The Midnight Cowboy. Or the Alan Arkin picture...
Bourgeois society, having destroyed their sensibilities, must also be blamed for destroying a cinema whose method and meaning depended on those sensibilities. The violent attacks on the audience through presenting raw events, the meaninglessness of characters' actions, the blatant anti-capitalist propoganda of Weekend do not show Godard committing cinematic suicide. His integration of subject matter and approach demand this treatment. To critics who see Weekend as the end of the line, one must mention Les Carabiniers, a film that uses moral imbeciles in just the same way to attack war. Its events are as senseless and brutal; its plot...
...turtleneck (a cop?) and sports car, he is played for a sexy and rich youth-figure who is persecuted by Vaughan, an evil representative of the Rotten Police Structure. Whatever McQueen does, the picture condones. His bumbling unfortunately amounts to virtual murder--to which his reaction are entirely visceral. Godard at least criticizes his terrorists; this one is rewarded, and the audience is expected to love him for his incompetence as much as the film. At its end, after he has managed to kill off the last man connected with his case, the film has the effrontery to play...