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The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
AUTHOR: Wheeler Winston Dixon
PUBLISHER: State University of New York Press
YEAR: 1997
SUMMARY: One of the most important, controversial, and prolific filmmakers in history, Jean-Luc Godard has maintained an unbroken string of films in various genres and mediums from the late 1950s onward. Godard has established a reputation as a rebel who can work within and outside the system, producing films that are creative, breathtakingly beautiful, and yet commercial enough to earn back their production costs. In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon offers an overview of all of Godard's work as a filmmaker, including his work for television and his ethnographic work in Africa. Free from the jargon and value judgments that have marred much of what has been written about Godard, this is the only book that covers the entirety of Godard's career, from his early film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema to his most recent video/film work. Illustrated with forty-six rare stills and researched in detail, this is the Godard book for the 1990s.
COMPLETE REVIEW FROM CHOICE, SEPTEMBER 1997:
"The recent films of Jean-Luc Godard (now 67) do not command the center stage held by his revolutionary work of the early 1960s. But he remains a compelling and prolific visual essayist, the 'philosopher renegade,' as he still makes small, personal, moralist films. This comprehensive critical biography should renew interest in the cinema's most inspired modern innovator. Dixon (Univ. of Nebraska) devotes equal space to Godard's early guerrilla assault on genre entertainments, from A Bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) to La Chinoise (1967), and to his later work - both his political-activist partnership with Jean-Pierre Gorin (from Le Week-end, 1967, on) and his autumnal film and video meditations on loss, aging, and the death of cinema, coauthored with Anne-Marie Mieville. For each work the author provides production background, a succinct description and appraisal, and a summary of formal and thematic concerns. Both in their form and polemic Godard's films proved the prototype of postmdernism and postnarrativism. Single-handedly he converted an entertainment medium into a 'cinema of resistance.' The mirror he holds to the viewer exposes the collective and personal selves behind the shields of imagery and language. Godard's unique position is as futurist archivist, anticipating how present society's incipient ruins will be read. A 43-page filmography helps make this the fullest English-language survey to date of Godard's career. All academic collections." -- Maurice Yacowar, University of Calgary.
OTHER CRITICAL COMMENTARY:
"Dixon has written an excellent book, thoroughly researched and documented and distinguished by insightful commentary and wonderful bagatelles. By performing an anatomy on the corpus of Godardian cinema, Dixon discovers not only that Godard has pronounced the death of cinema in his own films but also that the cinematic genre, medium and discipline might well be dead. This is a momentous discovery, even though Dixon seems to concede it is polemical. This book could well be a passport to the (dis)information age, of particular value to Generation X. It is also an important commentary on the wider movement of nouvelle vague, in popular culture as well as cinema." -- Paul Matthew St. Pierre, Simon Fraser University.
"The author has written a lively, accessible book which relates Godard to current problems in film. Dixon has avoided making Godard a museum-piece figure relevant only to the sixties and seventies. He persuasively argues for the relevance of Godard's work to technological developments occuring today in the cinema, television, and interactive media. He also draws on critical theory in an enlightening and accessible manner." -- Tony Williams, author of Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film
"Anyone interested in the history of European films in the last fifty years of the twentieth century needs the kind of comprehensive summing up the book provides. This is a succinct and well-balanced account of a long and distinguished career, with plausible interpretations of Godard as a man, filmmaker, and recorder of our century." -- Edward T. Jones, author of Following Directions: The Cinema of Peter Brook
Wheeler Winston Dixon is Professor of English and Chair of the Film Studies Program at The University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Re-Viewing British Cinema and It Looks at You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema, both published by SUNY Press, and co-producer and co-director of the hour long documentary "Women Who Made The Movies" (1991), in addition to writing over fifty articles for such journals as CinČaste, Interview, Literature/Film Quarterly, Films in Review, Post Script, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, New Orleans Review, Classic Images, Film and Philosophy, and The Journal of Popular Culture. His films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of the Moving Image (London), The Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Cinematheque and elsewhere. His newest book isThe Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema (SUNY UP, 1997); forthcoming isThe Transparency of Spectacle: Meditations on the Moving Image (SUNY UP, 1998).
290 pages. February 1997.
46 Black and White Photographs.
$18.95 paperback: ISBN 0-7914-3286-6
$56.50 hardcover: ISBN 0-7914-3285-8
A volume in the series Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video
from State University of New York Press
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