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Jean-Luc Godard |
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Director / Screenwriter /
Actor / Editor / Producer |
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1930 - |
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Born December 3,
Paris, France |
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Key
Production Countries: France, Switzerland, Italy
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Key Genres: Drama,
Essay Film,
Avant-garde/Experimental, Psychological Drama,
Urban Drama, Short Film, Documentary, Satire, Romantic Drama, Showbiz Drama |
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Key
Collaborators: Raoul
Coutard (Cinematographer), Agnes Guillemot (Editor), Georges de
Beauregard (Producer), Anna Karina (Leading
Player), Jean-Pierre Leaud (Leading Character Player), Laszlo Szabo
(Leading Character Player), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Leading Player), Alain Sarde (Producer), Juliet Berto (Leading Character Player), Francoise Collin (Editor) |
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Highly Recommended: Breathless (1959)*, Une Femme est une femme (1961)*, Contempt
(1963)*, Bande à part (1964)*, A Married Woman (1964),
Pierrot le fou (1965)*, Masculin Feminin (1966)* |
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Recommended: Made in U.S.A. (1966), La Chinoise (1967), Sauve
qui peut (la vie) (1980)*, Je vous salue, Sarajevo [TV] (1993), Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)* |
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Worth
a Look: Charlotte and Veronique, or All the Boys Are Called
Patrick (1957), Charlotte et Son Jules (1959)**, Le Petit Soldat
(1960), Les Carabiniers (1963), Alphaville
(1965)*, Week-End (1967)*, Le Gai Savoir (1968),
British Sounds (1970), Lotte in Italia (1971) [co-directed by
Jean-Pierre Gorin], Tout va bien (1972)
[co-directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin], Numero Deux (1975), Ici et ailleurs
(1976) [co-directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin & Anne-Marie Miéville], Passion (1982)*, Scenario du Film Passion (1982), Prénom Carmen (1983), Hail Mary (1985),
Nouvelle Vague (1990), Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), Oh, Woe is Me
(1993), JLG/JLG (1995), Origin of the 21st Century (2000), In Praise
of Love (2001)*^, Notre musique (2004)^ |
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Approach with Caution:
Vivre sa vie (1963)*, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966)*,
Le Vent d'est (1969), King Lear (1987), Puissance de la parole (1988) |
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Duds: Un Film comme
les autres (1968), Pravda (1970) [co-directed by Paul Burron &
Jean-Henri Roger], France/tour/detour/deux/enfants [TV] (1977)
[co-directed by Anne-Marie Miéville] |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section; ^
Listed in TSPDT's
21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films
section;
**
Listed in TSPDT's
Ain't Nobody's Blues But My Own
section. |
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Links: [
Amazon
] [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Film Reference ]
[
Films de France Biography ] [
BFI's
Godard Page ] [
The
Godard Experience ] [
Guardian
Article (2003) ] [
1997
Interview - Cigar Aficionado Magazine ] [
Gerald
Peary Essay ] [
Wikipedia
] [
Guardian Article (2011)
] [
New York Times Article (2008)
] [
Madman Biography
] [
Pop Matters Article (2011)
] [
The Criterion Collection ] |
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Books: [
Breathless: Jean-Luc Godard, Director ] [
Jean-Luc Godard (French Film Directors)
]
[
Jean-Luc Godard: The Passion of Cinema/Le Passion
de Cinéma
]
[
Godard
on Godard ] [
The
Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible ] [
The
Films of Jean-Luc Godard ] [
Godard:
A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy ] [
For
Ever Godard ] [
Everything
is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard ] [
Cinema:
The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century ] [
Jean-Luc
Godard: The Future(s) of Film, Three Interviews, 2000-01 ] [
Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Interviews With Filmmakers Series) ] |
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"Godard is the first
filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous
cinema and to make cinema itself his subject. He emerged from
the darkness of the Cinémathèque rather than from any
plausible biographical background...Filmmaking for Godard is
neither occupation nor vocation, it is existence itself. His
inescapable dialectic is in terms of cinema and his politics
have arisen - disastrously, I think - from cinema theory." -
David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
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"Whether
he delights or irritates you, Godard sits securely in the front
rank of screen originals, and it is good that he succeeded in
rejoining the mainstream of French cinema in 1980 after more
than ten years' self-exile to its fringes...Nonetheless the
quality of his films has been much more variable in recent times
compared to his heyday of the 1960s, including a disastrous
modernised sideshoot of King Lear." -
David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) |
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"If
influence on the development of world cinema is the criterion,
then Jean-Luc Godard is certainly the most important filmmaker
of the past thirty years; he is also one of the most problematic...As
ex-Cahiers du Cinema critic and New Wave filmmaker,
Godard was initially linked with
Truffaut
and
Chabrol in a kind of
revolutionary triumvirate; it is easy, in retrospect, to see
that Godard was from the start the truly radical figure, the
"revolution" of his colleagues operating purely on the
aesthetic level and easily assimilable to the mainstream." -
Robin
Wood and Rob Edelman (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998) |
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"Godard is one of the most important filmmakers in cinema
history. He has made audiences think about how films are made in
a series of dramatic essays on subjects ranging from the
Hollywood gangster film to the musical, the Marxist struggle,
and films, filming, and filmmakers themselves." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"For me, discovering cinema
was directly connected to his films. I was living in Paris at
the time. When Made in USA opened, I went to the first
show - it was around noon - and I sat there until midnight. I
saw it six times in a row." -
Wim Wenders
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"The
cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something
between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema
both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this
concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art
from the very start; the cinema doesn't." -
Jean-Luc Godard |
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"To me
style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of
style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both
go together, they can't be separated." -
Jean-Luc Godard |
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Please
note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based
only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director
that we haven't seen include Sympathy for the Devil (1968),
Detective
(1985), and Film socialisme (2010). |
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8+ |
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"Godard
's work poses fundamental questions about narrative. While
his first films, such as Breathless and A Woman Is
a Woman, have fairly straightforward plots, he gradually
moved toward a more fragmentary, collage structure. A story
is still apparent, but it is deflected into unpredictable
paths. Godard juxtaposes staged scenes with documentary
material (advertisements, comic strips, crowds passing in
the street), often with little connection to the narrative.
Far more than his New Wave contemporaries, Godard mixes
conventions drawn from popular culture, such as detective
novels or Hollywood movies, with references to philosophy or
avant-garde art. The inconsistencies, digressions, and
disunities of Godard's work make most New Wave films seem
quite traditional by comparison."
-
Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell,
Film History: An Introduction |
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Influential Director of All Time (2002 MovieMaker
Poll) |
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Survey of Filmmakers:
Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal) |
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One of the twelve
greatest living narrative filmmakers - Jonathan Rosenbaum
(Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Critics, 1993) |
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David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors |
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501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers |
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See Also |
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Chantal
Akerman |
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Michelangelo
Antonioni |
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Bernardo
Bertolucci |
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Jacques
Demy |
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
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Hal
Hartley |
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Louis
Malle |
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Chris
Marker |
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Alain
Resnais |
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Nicolas
Roeg |
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Eric
Rohmer |
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François
Truffaut |
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