Word: godard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...understand the import of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, one should simply read the first three letters of his last name. And this fall, the Brattle Theatre may be the place for reverence with its Forever Godard retrospective...
This fall, the Brattle showcases Godard's visual masterpieces every Thursday night, offering up a feast of his experiments in spastic editing, hand-held shots, and stories about outsiders who pop up in each others' lives like secret figures in video games. The repertoire ranges from gangster spoof to existentialist poem. Breathless, Alphaville, Weekend, Contempt and Pierrot le Fou, among Godard's most famous films, are all featured, in addition to many of his lesser known works...
...Godard has always been a canny guerrilla. He knows that film is an expensive art, that someone must subsidize his midnight raids on the prevailing culture. So he subverts the typical narrative by using all the handsome old tools. Contempt has movie stars, guns, car crashes, wide screen, beautiful color, the cliffs of Capri, the most rapturous music (by Georges Delerue, his violins sawing and soaring like Philip Glass in ecstasy). And, always, pretty women. A Ziegfeld of the Left Bank, Godard reinvented Jean Seberg and discovered Anna Karina, Juliet Berto, Maruschka Detmers, Myriem Roussel, Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy--glories...
...accountant refuses to sign any more checks. At the end of the war, and the end of the century, are we near the end of our rope? One man thinks so. "When I look at the sky," he says, "I only see what has disappeared." This could be Godard, musing on an art form near exhaustion. Yet he gives the lie to this cynicism in scene after scene of dark beauty. Could he be not the Picasso of cinema but its Mozart...
Toward the end of For Ever Mozart, a kid standing in line for the movie we have just seen hears the plot and says, "Let's go see Terminator 4." But Godard's films are worth seeing for his encyclopedic wit, the glamour of his imagery, the doggedness of a man who won't give up on modernism. His crabby films are, in truth, breathlessly romantic--because he keeps searching for first principles in the pettiest human affairs. Godard gazes at the intimate and finds the infinite...