Jean-Luc Godard filmography
Related: filmography - Jean-Luc Godard
Titles: Contempt (1963)
In the 'revolutionary' 1969 Le Gai Savoir Jean-Luc Godard liberates himself from all narrative requirements, and emerges as a pure cinematic essayist. Godard writes essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, he films it.
Le Gai savoir (Eng:The Joy of Knowledge) is a film by Jean-Luc Godard, started before the events of May 68 and finished shortly afterwards. Coproduced by the O.R.T.F., the film was upon completion rejected by French national television, then released in the cinema where it was subsequently banned by the French government. The title references Nietzsche's The Gay Science. [1]
Alphaville (1965) - Jean-Luc Godard
image sourced here. [Jul 2005]
Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville
image sourced here.
Expatriate American actor/singer Eddie Constantine made a career in the 1950s playing the quick-fisted FBI agent Lemmy Caution in the adaptations of British author Peter Cheyney: La Mome vert-de-gris / Poison Ivy (1952), Cet homme est dangereux / This Man is Dangerous (1953), Les femmes s'en balancent (1954), etc. Those films were self-consciously tongue-in-cheek and increasingly verged on parody. --http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384/noirfilmsfr2.html [Jul 2005]
Eddie Constantine (born Los Angeles, California, October 29, 1917 - died Wiesbaden, Germany, February 25, 1993) was an expatriate American actor and singer who spent his career working in Europe. His most significant film was Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), in which he reprised (to a more radical end) the role of the hard-boiled detective/secret agent he had played in a series of French B-pictures, including Cet homme est dangereux (1953), Lemmy pour les dames (1961) and À toi de faire ... mignonne (1963). He took up the part of Lemmy for a last time in 1991, in Godard's Allemagne 90 neuf zéro. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Constantine [Jul 2005]
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution is a 99-minute 1965 science fiction film (dystopia) directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. Several scenes incorporate concepts from La Capitale de la Douleur (The Capital of Pain), a book of poems by Paul Éluard. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville%2C_une_%C3%A9trange_aventure_de_Lemmy_Caution [Jul 2005]
Caution
Caution (Constantine) is a parody of an American private eye: wearing a trench-coat and photographing people carelessly he is defiantly erratic in the logical city, dominated by the Alpha 60 computer which he has sworn to destroy. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville%2C_une_%C3%A9trange_aventure_de_Lemmy_Caution [Jul 2005]
Neo-noir
Certainly neo-noir – which many consider to be the same as film noir, only applied to films made after the 1958 barrier – has not been limited to the United States. The popularity and influence of film noir has expanded all over the world, and neo-noir films have been made in most countries with a prominent film industry. These include High and Low (Japan), Insomnia (Norway), Alphaville (France), The American Friend (Germany), and Blind Shaft (China). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir#Film_noir_outside_the_U.S. [Jul 2005]
see also: 1965 - French cinema - crime fiction - film noir
Pierrot le Fou (1965) - Jean-Luc Godard
Pierrot le Fou (English: Crazy Pete or Pete Goes Wild) is a 1965 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Pierrot (Belmondo) tries to spice up his boring life, traveling from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne (Karina), a girl who is being chased by Algerian gangsters. They lead a unorthodox life, always on the run. Godard confronts his doubts about the possibilities of cinema in this startling dissection of cinema, politics, Marxism, literature, music and pop culture. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_le_fou [Apr 2005]Sympathy for the Devil (1968) - Jean Luc Godard
Sympathy for the Devil (1968) - Jean Luc GodardGodard's documentation of late 1960's western counter-culture, examining the Black Panthers, referring to works by LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver. Other notable subjects are the role of the media, the mediated image, A growing technocratic society, Womens Liberation, the May revolt in France and the power of language. Cutting between 3 major scenes, including the Rolling Stones in the studio, the film is visually intercut with Eve Democracy (Wiazemsky) using graffiti which amalgamates organisations, corporations and ideologies. Godard also examines the role of the revolutionary within western culture. Although he believes western culture needs to be destroyed, it can only be done so by the rejection of intellectualisation. "There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual" --gary.elshaw via imdb.com
Le Gai Savoir (1969) - Jean-Luc Godard
Le Gai Savoir (1969) - Jean-Luc Godard
Le Gai Savoir est un film de Jean-Luc Godard, commencé avant mai 68 et terminé après. Co-produit par l'O.R.T.F., le film, une fois terminé, est refusé par la télévision française, puis sa sortie en salles est interdite par la censure. --http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Gai_Savoir_%28film%29 [Aug 2005]
See also: 1969 - Jean-Luc Godard - Freud - Marx
Pravda (1969) - Jean-Luc Godard and Dziga Vertov group
With this film, clandestinely shot in Czechoslavakia after the Russian occupation, Godard moves yet another step towards realizing his concept of "Revolutionary Cinema". Aesthetically, the distance between this film and Weekend is as great as that between Weekend and Breathless, yet the same radical impulse motivates all three. Godard is moving towards a visually minimal cinema, with the soundtrack assuming ever greater importance. Pravda consists of an imaginary discussion between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary; clearly influenced by Maoist ideology, it simultaneously attacks the "revisionist" Russians for invading Czechoslavakia and the "revisionist" Czechs for opening the doors to Western imperialism via Pan-Am, CBS, Hertz, American-owned hotels, and Playboy. This bitter and dogmatic work reveals once again the restless originality of its creator; but as it is designed to advance the cause of revolution, it must be judged in terms of ideological relevance, efficacy, and truth. Here its indictment of the Czech reform movement seems particularly untenable, while the visuals have lost all resonance and no longer display the sophistication of early Godard. --Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel
Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored, apathetic heart of the bourgeoisie is never far from acting out its most homicidal fantasies. --Alan E. Rapp for Amazon.com
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