Speaking About Godard

by Silverman, Kaja; Farocki, Harun

• ISBN13: 9780814780657
• ISBN10: 0814780652
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. WithSpeaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, fromContempt to Passion.Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues-each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career-get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work.As it takes us through Godard's films in real time,Speaking about Godardconveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii	(6)
Constance Penley
Acknowledgments	xiii
1. Nana Is an Animal My Life to Live/Vivre sa vie (1962)	1	(30)
2. In Search of Homer Contempt/Le Mepris (1963)	31	(29)
3. Words Like Love Alphaville/Alphaville, une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)	60	(25)
4. Anal Capitalism Weekend/Le Week-End (1967)	85	(29)
5. I Speak, Therefore I'm Not Gay Knowledge/Le Gai Savoir (1968)	114	(29)
6. In Her Place Number Two/Numero deux (1975)	143	(29)
7. Moving Pictures Passion (1981)	172	(27)
8. The Same, Yet Other New Wave/Nouvelle vague (1990)	199	(32)
Notes	231	(15)
About the Authors	246