Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

by Colin MacCabe

Book Overview

An intimate portrait of the turmoil that spawned the New Wave in French Cinema, and the story of its greatest director, Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard's early films revolutionized the language of cinema. Hugely prolific in his first decade--Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and Made in USA are just a handful of the seminal works he directed--Godard introduced filmgoers to the generation of stars associated...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571211054
• ISBN13: 9780571211050
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Godard

I'm a fan of Godard's work and really enjoyed this book. It is part biography and part history and tends to go off on tangents which make the book all the more strange and interesting. Towards the end it becomes more personal because of the experiences MacCabe had with Godard later on in his life. Although the form and construction of the book are not very tight, it does a nice job of weaving through the complex mosaic that is Godard's life. It has some really cool pictures too.

A blow-by-blow account of 70 long years

Once upon a time, Godard was the leading filmmaker in the world, and if he lost some of his stature after a run of didactic, neo-Rossellini and Maoist tracts in the 1970s, he never really wanted to be famous, just influential. MacCabe, who has written interesting books on Warhol and Nicolas Roeg, explicates the progression of a great artist from enfant terrible to a man most think has died. The chapter about Anna Karina is wonderful, and we get the impression that Karina remains for MacCabe one of the icons of femininity, whereas he is cool and respectful towards Anne-Marie (Godard's frequent collaborator) you get the feeling he's not turned on by her the way he is by Karina. Also, we see him being tremendously gallant I think, towards Jane Fonda, with whom Godard made a film TOUT VA BIEN and then after it failed, he turned on her with the vicious "cinema portrait" LETTER TO JANE, castigatig her for her vanity and her foolish liberalism. MacCabe delivers a reproof to Godard and Gorin that says it all. I do agree that Godard has made too many films for any one critic to account for. It is not MacCabe's fault exactly, but he might have written two books, one on Godard's international career as auteur in the 1960s, and the other of the virtually unknown films. He makes you want to see them on the one hand, but on the other hand one realizes with a sinking heart, well, life's too short!