- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre / Not Applicable (Feb 15 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374163782
- ISBN-13: 978-0374163785
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 16.2 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 785 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#854,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Books > Entertainment > Movies > Biographies > Directors
- #46 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Movie Directors
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Not quite a biography, nor a guide for newcomers, this reckoning of Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard's still-evolving film and video oeuvre-encompassing Contempt, Alphaville, Week End, Tout Va Bien, King Lear, Histoire(s) du Cin‚ma and more-is an annotated, episodic chronology, an approach reflecting Godard's own suspicion of narrative conventions. The former British Film Institute head of research, MacCabe has collaborated with Godard and has firsthand experience of Godard's methods, politics and aesthetics, as well as of the man himself. He begins with a somewhat awestruck accounting of several generations of Godard's patrician family, centered in French-speaking Switzerland (to which Godard returned in the early '70s and where he remains) and of the young Godard's eventual rebellion and break with them. MacCabe's account of the Nouvelle Vague's theoretical formation via the journal Cahiers du Cinema, which brought eventual directors Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer and Chabrol under the ideological sway of critic Andre Bazin, is superb and worth the price of admission alone. MacCabe is terrific in giving concise shape to the political history of the 1960s, from which Godard's work then is inseparable. But finally, there's too much work for MacCabe to be able to account for it all, though he clearly outlines Godard's 30 years of collaboration with writer/editor/actress Anne-Marie Mieville (buttressed by a complete filmography by Sally Shafto), which has produced extraordinary experiments with video and sound. MacCabe ends with apocalyptic warnings about cinema's destruction (along with the world's), but the vein of elegiac, uncompromising resistance that pervades Godard's work is present here, as is its beauty. Illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Much has been written about the films of Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the most innovative and influential director of his generation, but his life has been given short shrift. MacCabe's enthusiastic portrait makes considerable amends, though it is too opinionated and idiosyncratic to be totally satisfying as a biography. Although MacCabe is revealing about Godard's family and childhood, his evocative account of postwar Paris, where Godard met Truffaut, Rohmer, and the other cinephiles who launched the Nouvelle Vague, is the emotional centerpiece of the book. MacCabe worked with Godard on several films in the 1990s, and he treats both Godard's groundbreaking early '60s films (e.g., Breathless, Contempt) and the overtly political films that followed knowledgeably. More valuable is his appreciation of the infrequently screened films of the past two decades, which he finds as rewarding as the acclaimed early work, though he falters in doing full justice to Godard's dauntingly prolific output from this period. That this most iconoclastic director receives such quirky, perhaps overly partisan, biographical treatment seems quite fitting. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
In the autumn of 1963, Jean-Luc Godard had a rare meeting with his father Paul, whom he had barely seen for over a decade. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
In the autumn of 1963, Jean-Luc Godard had a rare meeting with his father Paul, whom he had barely seen for over a decade. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
The viewer over my shoulder,
By "tangoviudo" (Iowa) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Hardcover)
For anyone who is only marginally curious about the vacillating fortunes of Jean-Luc Godard, which has dimmed to virtual darkness since the 1960s, Colin MacCabe's book Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy contains very little that is useful and a great deal that is both confusing and misleading. MacCabe is blessed with intimate knowledge both personally and professionally of Godard, and doesn't hesitate to demonstrate this. What he fails to demonstrate to this non-convert to Godard is precisely anything that might sway me from the conviction, cultivated over 30 years, that - at best - Godard was politically stupid, technically puerile and artistically bankrupt from beginning to end - an end which MacCabe is anxious to prove is as much the end of European culture as Dante's Divine Comedy was its beginning (he even cavils that this "is no exaggeration.").Such admiration as this would be charming if it were to any degree justified. A little objective discrimination, presuming Mr MacCabe still believes in such things, would've been far more welcome. This book, however, is founded on the premise that Jean-Luc Godard (a co-founder of the French New Wave) is a film artist of unprecedented importance. That this premise is sheer flapdoodle tends to deflate most of the points Mr MacCabe attempts to make about Godard, or Film, or European culture for that matter.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not the definitive biography,
By A Customer
This review is from: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Hardcover)
The French New Wave is one of the most interesting eras of cinema. Much has been written about the whole Cahiers du Cinema group. And now, we have this new book on the life of Godard.The book is well divided, broken into 5 chapters. Godard's early family life, the Cahiers years, his early films, his late 60's political films and his years with Anne Marie Mieville. Unfortunately, minus the index, bibliography and filmography, the text runs only 330 pages. Probably 40% or more of the biography is made up of tangents by the author. He often spends several pages explaining some historical event (such as several pages on the history of Protestantism in France) or spending several pages interpreting a quote of JLG's. This would be fine in a longer biography, but when several of his films aren't even discussed, or described in just a sentence, it is rather frustrating. Plus, since the author has also written books on James Joyce, he spends quite a bit of time talking about and quoting from Joyce when he should be talking about Godard. So, this isn't the definitive Godard biography, which has yet to be written. Still, when he does focus on Godard, it is quite interesting and worth a read. I only wish there had been a stronger editor to keep it in focus.
3.0 out of 5 stars
vulpecula venenata,
By Alvaro Lewis "jwatson5" (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Hardcover)
The author of this book writes aptly about the cultural and political contexts that frame the life of its protagonist and particularly well about Godard's experiences on or around May 1968. MacCabe shows himself as almost totally sympathetic (yet not completely uncritical) to a relatively unpleasant subject. Perhaps, Godard is too private for compassionate emanations, perhaps the priveleged scope of this work stretched only to the opus of the film maker and not beyond, but there seems to be very little evidence of the delightful emotions that mark most lives in the life of this subject. Will the brilliance of the films outshine the unkind specter of the living artist? MacCabe writes very well on the evolution of Godard's techniques and fascinations. Godard works autonomously, vigorously and in daring fashion from the beginning. There is no doubt that Godard is an innovator and a believer in his style and visions.It's just that the creator of the films doesn't seem to be the sort of person who endures either the scrutiny of a biographer or the acquaintance of people who are not cinematic savants well at all. That surprise though is hardly grounds for the criticism of the book or its subject by one who stands wholly uninjured by both.
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