Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...printing plant once each fortnight. There they seize and confiscate every issue of La Cause they can find. But the sly old iconoclast long ago found a secret printing press to publish about 5,000 copies. On publication day, Sartre and a few friends (including Film Directors Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle, and his longtime companion, Simone de Beauvoir) pick up the papers, transport them to a side street near St.-Germain-des-Prés, and begin to peddle them. Then the police arrest everyone giving away, selling or reading the paper. Everyone, that is, except prominent people...
...WIND FROM THE EAST is an incredibly rich and suggestive work, both for those enamored of Godard's explorations and those generally hostile to his films, and I can only hope to touch on one or two ideas here. Stylistically the most striking features of East are its few shots and long disembodied ******narrations. These narrations seem to me the key to Godard's assault on bourgeois notions of realistic representation...
From this, one can see why the recent films of the Dziga Vertoy Group are so dependent on text, text unexplained (hence unconstrained) by the visuals-unseen narrators. Images alone, or images whose sound source is identified (synchronous sound) are potentially, or in Godard's eyes, invariably, reactionary. They are more understandable, "easier" images, in the sense that information issues freely from them-we are accustomed to such images. But the sign system by which we read these images is an ideology of the class in power. Whenever a conscious formal design does not structure our reading of an image...
...shows us a green field, and the narrator screams, "Red! Red! Red!" Earlier, a four-minute shot of a nineteenth-century couple obscured by tall grass is described in eight different periods, and peopled by eight different historical figures. These are not empty exercises. They are instead statements of Godard's belief that any image can denote virtually anything; and more importantly, that our inability to recognize this fact of perceptual life is testament to an imaginative enshacklement attendant upon an economic...
...aesthetics too ashamed to show its face in discussions of the novel has long held sway in theories of the cinema. Writers like Kracauer and Bazin have elaborated value systems whose central equation comes whole from the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel tradition. Godard fights alone the arts' last battle against realistic representation...