The Films of Jean-Luc Godard examines the work of one of the most versatile and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. With a career ranging from France's New Wave movement in the early 1960s to a period of political experimentation in the late 1960s and 70s, and, currently, a contemplative period in which Godard has explored issues of spirituality, sexuality, and the aesthetics of sound, image, and montage, the filmmaker's work defies easy categorization. In this study, David Sterritt offers an introductory overview of Godard's work as a filmmaker, critic, and video artist. In subsequent chapters, he traces Godard's visionary ideas through six of his key films, including Breathless, My Life to Live, Weekend, Numéro deux, Hail Mary, and Nouvelle Vague formats. Linking Godard's works to key social and cultural developments, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard explains their importance in modernist and postmodernist art of the last half century.

In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon offers an overview of all of Godard's work as a filmmaker, including his work for television and his ethnographic work in Africa. Free from the jargon and value judgments that have marred much of what has been written about Godard, this is the only book that covers the entirety of Godard's career.

Originally released as a videographic experiment in film history, Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma has pioneered how we think about and narrate cinema history, and in how history is taught through cinema. In this stunningly illustrated volume, Michael Witt explores Godard's landmark work as both a specimen of an artist's vision and a philosophical statement on the history of film. Witt contextualizes Godard's theories and approaches to historiography and provides a guide to the wide-ranging cinematic, aesthetic, and cultural forces that shaped Godard's groundbreaking ideas on the history of cinema.

In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon offers an overview of all of Godard's work as a filmmaker, including his work for television and his ethnographic work in Africa. Free from the jargon and value judgments that have marred much of what has been written about Godard, this is the only book that covers the entirety of Godard's career.

"This monograph explores the under-researched use of music in Jean-Luc Godard's films and video essays from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. While Godard is largely hailed as a leading innovator of visual montage, unique storytelling style, and ground-breaking cinematography, his achievements as a leading pioneer in sculpting complex soundtracks altering the familiar relationship between sound and image have been mainly overlooked. On these soundtracks, music assumes the unique role of metafilm music. Metafilm music self-consciously refers to its own role as film music and disrupts the primary function of film music as an essential filmic device creating cinematic illusion. The concept of metafilm music describes how Godard thinks with film music about film music. Metafilm music manifests itself in Godard's work in four distinct manners: as fragmentized musical cues; as the same fragment verbatim repeated several times; as extrapolated, short excerpts from classical or popular music; and as music mixed unusually loudly into the soundtrack. With a detailed analysis of these parameters, the book explores fragmented and repeated music as Godard's critique of the leitmotif technique. Godard further self-reflexively investigates genre-specific music in musical comedies, films noir, and melodramas, as well as prototypical film music as arguably its own musical genre. His last foray into metafilm music entails music-making as a metaphor for filmmaking. By thinking with music about the function of film music, Godard has created throughout his career multi-layered soundtracks which challenge the conventional norms of film music and sound"--

Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), made at the height of the French New Wave, remains a milestone in French cinema. More accessible than his later films, it represents the diverse facets of Godard's concerns and themes: a bittersweet analysis of male-female relations; an interrogation of the image; personal and international politics; the existential dilemmas of consumer society. This volume brings together essays by five prominent scholars of French film. They approach Pierrot le fou from the perspectives of image-and-word-play, aesthetics and politics, history, and high- and popular culture. A full filmography and a selection of reviews are included.

Collected interviews with the French director of Breathless and Hail Mary

From New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard presents a "serious-minded and meticulously detailed . . . account of the lifelong artistic journey" of one of the most influential filmmakers of our age (The New York Times). When Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images—cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a—if not the—key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable. In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers. Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.