Word: godard
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...Germany's Hans Richter, 79, and his mastery of the motion-picture medium has long been acknowledged by directors from Fellini to Jean-Luc Godard. In recent years, Richter's unmoving pictures have also been gaining new attention, and they are featured in an exhibit of more than 80 Richter drawings, paintings, collages and films at Manhattan's Finch College Museum. Coupled with a smaller display at the Byron Gallery, the show provides a unique opportunity to see how, as the artist puts it, "film and painting overlap with modern art. Modern art gets its ultimate meaning...
...actors were Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, the director was Jean-Luc Godard, and the movie was Breathless, which in the eight years since its release has been generally accepted by critics as a landmark in movie history. It remains a typical example of France's nouvelle vague, with its theme of alienation, its air of improvisation, its lexicon of once-bizarre techniques-fast dissolves, ricocheting cuts, grainy camera work-that are now an accepted part of the moviemakers' craft...
Vermeer or Veneer? The most prolific of modern French directors, Godard has made 14 features since Breathless-a few of them critical successes, many more of them exasperating failures. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is now paying homage to Godard with a retrospective showing of his films, including two recent works hitherto unreleased in the U.S.: Two or Three Things I Know About Her and Made in U.S.A., two disappointing works that nonetheless show flashes of incisive social satire and technical virtuosity...
Whether a Godard deserves a festival is a matter of some critical dispute. To Richard Roud, author of a worshipful new study of his movies (Godard; Seeker & Warburg), the director is "one of the most important artists of our time," worthy of comparison, with Joyce and Vermeer. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker calls Godard "the most exciting director working in movies today." On the other hand, Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic describes him as "a magician who makes elaborate uninspired gestures and then pulls out of the hat precisely nothing...
There is a measure of truth on both sides. Godard may be the most inventive cinema technician since Orson Welles-as well as the most infuriating. And for the same reason: to him, whatever rules exist are made to be broken...