Colin MacCabe

All narrative summaries of Godard's films are misleading because the films proceed by montage rather than story.



JLG and partner/collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville

This is a brilliant intellectual history of Godard and his milieu. This is less a cinematic/textual analysis of JLG's oeuvre than the Brody biography. I would thus recommend everyone read both. Here Godard's work is delineated alongside the major theoretical currents of the time the homage to Hitchcock/Hawks, the wary treading on Algeria, the dip to the Maoist left, the experiments with video, the rural turn, back to Switzerland. . I felt this work to be as equally moving as the Brody, though the focus is more on connective tissue rather the emperor-ly warts or nudity. It is difficult to articulate the bliss I have found in this project of reading four books on the auteur and spending dozens of hours watching and rewatching his films. This strikes me todays a necessary passage. I honestly can't imagine extending such effort to any other filmmaker. At least, not just yet.… (meer)

Humane people don't start revolutions, they start libraries. And cemeteries.

The above quote isn't from this stirring work but rather a film Notre Musique -- which I happen to love and find pertinent if not vital on these days. The capture of Kirkuk has blessed me with a mouthful of ash. I feel ever defeated.

This is a brilliant view on a difficult period in the Godard oeuvre: 1968-1980. I find some of the analysis effervescent and some of it bullshit. I appreciate the end of chapter interviews with Godard where the director leaps clear of the ideological baggage and bracketing which MacCabe wants desperately to ascribe to the auteur.

I imagine this will be sought soon as the entire Groupe Dziga Vertov finds its way to retail.… (meer)