Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century

Description

Translated by John Howe Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career in the industry. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after the century of Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Against this backdrop, Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. As the conversation develops, Godard expounds on his central concerns - how film can "resurrect the past", the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an "art that thinks". Cinema: the archaeology of film and the memory of a century is a dialogue between Godard and the celebrated cinphile Youssef Ishaghpour. Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history.

Jean Luc Godard started making films in the late 1950s and is still making them. From his first feature, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Godard changed the way movies were made. Godard has always taken film-making seriously, treating it - from his days on the famous review, Cahiers du Cinema, to the extraordinary collage of his Histoires du Cinema - as an art form worthy of analysis. Today, his influence extends across such key contemporary film-makers as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. Jean Luc Godard started making films in the late 1950s and is still making them. From his first feature, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Godard changed the way movies were made. Godard has always taken film-making seriously, treating it - from his days on the famous review, Cahiers du Cinema, to the extraordinary collage of his Histoires du Cinema - as an art form worthy of analysis. Today, his influence extends across such key contemporary film-makers as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. Youssef Ishaghpour is Professor at the University Rene Descartes, Paris V. His writings on cinema, painting, philosophy and literature have been widely translated. Translated by John Howe John Howe, is a translator, journalist and writer. His many translations include Godard's voiceover for the complete soundtrack edition of Histoire(s) du cinema.

' ...the greatest living cinematic artist, the wisest, most transformative, most original agent provocateur at work in the fields of cinema? The short answer: sans doute. Godard is to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot, and Picasso were to theirs: rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same.' The Village Voice 'It's possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does - or find it incomprehensible - and still be shattered by his brilliance.' Pauline Kael Godard on Godard 'I'm trying to change the world.' 'Photography is truth and cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.' 'I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.' 'All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.' '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.' 'Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.' 'Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.'