Word: godards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GODARD said to an interviewer in 1961, "My three films all have, at bottom, the same subject. I take an individual who has an idea, and who tries to go to the end of his idea." His films have always been pieces of criticism, visual essays about ideas and culture in a declining West. He was never interested in making "good art." That notion of finely wrought and finished work was itself the legacy of a moribund sensibility...
...this might be pretentious and boring if Godard were not so inventive and terrifying. Others have explored decadence and the death of the Old World sensibility, but no one has related that death so graphically to the automobile. What better symbol for modern culture? As we calmly drive our cars on the highway, does it occur to us that our own life and death is almost completely out of our hands? That at any moment we might perish because somebody on the other side of the road is watching the sunset, or hits an oil-slick, or is just crazy...
...something always happens to Godard in the middle of his films. He seems to get bored and self-conscious. But even bored and self-conscious Godard is worth seeing- it just becomes that much more difficult to separate the profound from the trivial. In an interesting sequence called "All About Eve" an interviewer harasses a mournful woman (played by Anna Wiazemsky) with questions Godard feels obligated to ask himself in the middle of every film: "Do you think culture is order? Is a man of culture as far from an artist as a historian from a man of action...
...ambiguities, everyone should see Z because it is brilliant cinema and has superb acting and beautiful music. Probably more talent has gone into the making of this film than any other of the past year. The color photography by Raoul Coutard (who directed the photography for almost all of Godard's films as well as Jules and Jim by Truffaut) is exceptional. The camera is not a passive observer of the scene but plays an active role. The shots of the fights in the demonstrations are superb because the camera moves around and sweeps you into the maelstrom and confusion...
...with Godard, Coutard often shoots his scenes with plain white backgrounds and focuses on the individuals and the tensions between them...