Word: godard
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...ones from the Rolls-Royce?" she asks. "There must be some of your husband too," the 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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...unburden his spirit on the subject of "A Wesley an Education." This was a student-requested innovation. The only student to speak at any length was a dark, angular boy in a plaid lumberjack shirt. He identified himself as a political radical and film maker, quoting a Jean-Luc Godard epigram: "We are the children of Marx and Coca-Cola...