Word: godard
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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...
Nevertheless, none of the new film movements really makes documentaries. The films of the Neo-Realists were the action of social reality on a particular sensibility: Open city (Rossellini), far from being objective, details at every moment Rossellini's outrage at the Nazi occupation of Rome. Godard's films similarly document the meeting or reality and sensibility, instead of documenting reality in a direct, objective manner. Thus fiction and fantasy abound in his works. The same is true of newer Eastern and Western European films, which delight in twisting old dramatic old dramatic forms and inventing new and yet more...
...LEAST a third of the Orson Welles' series is the work of New Wave directors (Godard, Varda) or people close to them. Perhaps a third more comes from younger Europeans whose dramatic and visual experiments are still more drastic. In all of them the director designed his film form the beginning to end, which makes watching them a grand revelation. To figure out films designed as a unity gives you a new ability to look for meaning in their dramatic construction and visual style, instead of relying entirely on the dialogue and actors' expressions. The variety of dramatic forms...
...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...