JEAN-LUC GODARD (born 3 December 1930) the French-Swiss Film Director, Screenwriter and Film Critic, celebrates his Birthday today. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement La Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinemas Tradition of Quality, which emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation. To challenge this tradition, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films. Many of Godards films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. He is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s. Several of his films express his political views. His films express his knowledge of film history through their references to earlier films. In addition, Godards films often cite existentialism, as he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. His radical approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him an influential filmmaker of the French New Wave. After the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, and a Marxist perspective. In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics top-ten directors of all time. He has created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century. He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticisms vocabulary. In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award, but did not attend the award ceremony. Godards films have inspired diverse directors like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Thomas Anderson, Arthur Penn, Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, Jørgen Leth, John Woo, Abel Ferrara, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Brian De Palma, Sofia Coppola, Oliver Stone, Mamoru Oshii, Wes Anderson, Derek Cianfrance, Harmony Korine and Ken Loach. Tributes: From Hollywood to the Third World, from the mainstream to the Avant-Garde, Godards name is perhaps the only one that occurs wherever cinema is discussed or produced. – Colin Myles MacCabe Like Picasso, Godard reveals to us throughout his work his world as source and subject; the artists studio, the objects of his daily life, the references to and repetitions of his own works, the layering of words and images, the women he has loved, the horrors of war. – Mary Lea Bandy. Godards is an art of plastic age, of fluent, pliable, putty characters. – Raymond Durgnat Godards importance lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to mainstream cinema: it is with his work that film becomes central to our centurys major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed through such figures as Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno as to whether realism or modernism is the more progressive form. –Robin Wood. Wishing Monsieur GODARD, Many Many Happy Returns of the Day.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 01:33:23 +0000
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