Word: godard
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...over two hundred young directors had made their first feature films, and the total number of films shot in France each year had nearly doubled. Many of these films justification ended their director's careers, but several brilliant film-makers also emerged, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol, Chris Marker, and Jacques Demy. In the space of seven years, an unprecedented number of masterpieces were produced, among them Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and The Soft Skin, Godard's Contempt and The Married Woman, and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, all of which will...
...films set the style for the New Wave: Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows and Godard's Breathless, both shot in 1959. Both were the first feature films of established film critics, and both provided their directors with the opportunity of realizing ideas about film which for years had been confined to expression on paper...
Breathless also featured an alienated hero treated without sentimentality. But unlike Truffaut, Godard created an entire revolution in technique. Godard and his superb cameraman, Raoul Coutard, used a hand-held camera for the entire film, giving the director an unheard-of flexibility. Instead of planning the shooting meticulously as convention dictated, Godard created the film through the viewfinder and often used candid shots. Most of all, through both the camera-work and the editing, Godard insisted upon a constant impression of energy which was to infuse the enthusiasms of an entire generation of film-makers...
...Godard made Breathless on a budget of only $100,000, but soon producers were willing to gamble much larger sums on nascent directors. By 1961, Georges de Beauregard, who had produced Breathless, endowed Godard with a cinemascope camera and with color film for A Woman is a Woman. Godard, contemptuous as ever of artifice, created a film with no meaning, a huge in-joke designed for dedicated cinema buffs. The director constantly used his worst shots to insure that slickness would not prevail over the natural effect he sought. The result at once delighted his friend Truffaut and antagonized Stanley...
...Joseph E. Levine approached Godard with an offer of one million dollars on the condition that the again shoot in cinemascope and color and that he include Brigitte Bardot. Godard accepted the offer and made Contempt, probably the most important artistic statement of our time, by turning all the devices and conventions of the modern cinema upon themselves in a devastating critique of social decay...