Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of A Century (Talking Images) - Softcover

Godard, Jean-Luc; Ishaghpour, Youssef

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9781845201975: Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of A Century (Talking Images)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845201973 ISBN 13: 9781845201975

Publisher: Berg Publishers, 2005

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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.

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About the Author:

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.

From Publishers Weekly:

The most prolific and relentlessly experimental of the French New Wave directors, Godard (b. 1930) broke decidedly with the Hollywood narrative tradition (while simultaneously absorbing its entire history), seeking out a "thinking" form that would speak to and cultivate a critical audience able to join in exposing life's socially and ideologically constructed conventions, including those in the cinema form itself. This quest achieved a sublime end in Godard's Histoire(s) du cin�ma, a provocative four-part made-for-television collage of overlaid and treated images, film clips, texts and sound that excavates both the history of cinema and the role of cinema as an inextricable part of modern history. Ironically, the film, said by some to be his masterpiece, is difficult to come by. But even without seeing it, a reader appreciates how its layered, self-referential character makes an ideal basis for the wide-ranging discussion between Godard and French art scholar Ishaghpour that is collected in this volume. Of all the interviews with Godard out there, this is one of the few that reads like an intellectual coffee klatch. Sharp and suggestive points come amid Ishaghpour's ponderous historical-philosophical formulations, as do teasingly half-formed ideas or insights. Cin�astes happy in this rarefied discourse, however, may be frustrated by how little text is actually devoted to Godard's words. Much of the book's material, including its chapter headings, derives from ideas introduced by Ishaghpour, whose accompanying essay expands on what he's brought out in the "interview."
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