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Word: godards (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
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Usage:

There is no continuity to Godard's parable. There is no consistency in his plot. The characters are blackboard stick figures; they provoke no sympathies; the climax offers no resolution. There is not the slightest degree of realism. There is stylization and fragmentation and polemic...

Author: By Michael Levenson, | Title: Before the Revolution | 4/19/1973 | See Source »

...traditional aesthetic criteria, Tout Va Bien probably fails. But indicting Godard on traditional grounds is rather like accusing Lenin of disturbing the peace. If traditional criteria are the only ones, then of course he fails, he intends to fail. There is nothing more to be said. But Godard and Gorin have lavished much ingenuity in puzzling out a new set of criteria, and here the presiding figure is neither Marx nor Mao but Bertolt Brecht...

Author: By Michael Levenson, | Title: Before the Revolution | 4/19/1973 | See Source »

...story works by a series of comic revolutionary skits, some more clever than others. Perhaps the best is a workers' musical number which Godard presents in a two-tiered factory set in cutaway, complete with ascending staircase a la Bye Bye Birdie, around which are draped the singing strikers. Later, the captive plant manager is forbidden to urinate, until he is so tormented that, irony of ironies, he breaks the factory window and lets fly on the street below...

Author: By Michael Levenson, | Title: Before the Revolution | 4/19/1973 | See Source »

...GODARD'S PREMISE is simple. He is a militant filmmaker in service of the revolution, and the meaning of his films derives entirely from their participation in the class struggle. But here the Dziga-Vertov group sees a problem where conventional filmmakers see none, and that problem is in the very nature of political art. The method of conventional political films--Costa-Gavras' Z and The Confession, Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers -- is to assume that the way to political commitment is through faithful depiction of political reality. So they select an important event and recreate it on screen...

Author: By Michael Levenson, | Title: Before the Revolution | 4/19/1973 | See Source »

...Godard and the Dziga-Vertovians, that is not permitted. Realism, they insist, is a surrender to reality. It makes criticism impossible; it actually defuses political emotion. It enforces passivity on the spectator who becomes a witness to the class struggle instead of a participant...

Author: By Michael Levenson, | Title: Before the Revolution | 4/19/1973 | See Source »

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