h. nazan ışık —
Oct 8, 2013—
“A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
Jean-Luc Godard
If you are a Jean-Luc Godard lover GOOD NEWS! NYFF 51 (51st New York Film Festival) has a retrospective of one of the most influential filmmakers, greatest artists at work in any medium. “Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms” series started Oct 9 and continues through the end of October.
Photo; FSLC
Jean-Luc Godarg
Another great filmmaker James Gray (The Immigrant), during the NYFF 51 “HBO On Cinema” talk program “ (…..) your trailer for NYFF 51 is like a movie, and you have the Godard trailer; I see master piece after master piece…Don’t show that before my film!. (Mr. Gray turns to the audience) You thing about Godard as an intellectual director, but his greatest works are unbelievably moving. Have you seen Contempt with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli? This is an incredible movie and a very personal one.”
Before directing, Godard was an ethnology student and a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, between 1955 and today he made 40 features, plus shorts, medium-length films, television series, commercials, and several of his own trailers. His approach to filmmaking shows his interest in social reality and how it intertwines with cinematic form.
In “Jean-Luc Godard: Son+Image 1974-1991” a cataloque , published by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on the occasion of the exhibition in 1992, Colin Myles MacCabe, a guest curator of the retrospective, says “From Hollywood to the Third World, from the mainstream to the avant-garde, Godard’s name is perhaps the only one that occurs wherever cinema is discussed or produced” And, in the same cataloque Mary Lea Bandy says “ In the various “episodes” of his career, as identified in Colin MacCabe’s introductory essay, Godard has focused, intensely and intently, on politics, history, and communication, anxiety, sex, and desire, art, aesthetics, and music, and the history of the movies.” Yes, and “Breathless (A bout de soufflé), Alphaville, Le Petit Soldat, A Married woman (Une femme mariée), Contempt (Le Mépris), First Name Carmen (Prénom Carmen), For Ever Mozart, Film Socialisme, are just few samples of his work.
At the 1995 Montreal Film Festival Press Conference , in Henri Béhar’s report, Godard talks about/answers a question on the future of cinema, at least during its second Centennial “”Cinema is what it will become, what the public or the filmgoers as a whole will want it to be. It could be something else but, you know, man, nature, the nature of man… You can’t spend your life saying, ‘It was better in my younger days.’ But at the beginning, cinema was a tool for study. It should have been a tool for study – for it is visual, and very close to science and medicine. The camera has a lens, like a microscope, to study the infinitely small, or like a telescope, to study the infinitely distant. Having studied that, you could then convey it in a spectacular fashion. (……..) “For me, cinema is a metaphor for the world. It is image, and as such, it was an image of something. Everything is image, in the largest sense of the word. There was a time when you distributed what you produced. Distribution was at the service of production. You produced and then distributed what you had produced. Nowadays, you produce in order to distribute.”
The “Jean-Luc Godard – The Spirit of the Forms” series, co-curated by Kent Jones and Jacob Perlin brings 49 feature and medium-length films, plus shorts and more to the New York movie lovers.
For more information please visit ;
http://www.filmlinc.com/films/series/nyff51-jean-luc-godard-the-spirit-of-the-forms
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GODARD? Superb!