Encounters with Godard : Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams, James S.

Series:

SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Godard, Jean-Luc, 1930-2022--Criticism and interpretation.

Godard, Jean-Luc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (340 p.)

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : State University of New York Press, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard's multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Contents:

Contents; Illustrations Credits; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Encountering Godard; Ethics/Aesthetics/Politics; A Series of Encounters: Order of Play; 1. The Politics of Violence and the End(s) of Art: Speaking (for) the Other in La Chinoise (1967); Prehistory of La Chinoise; Revolutionary Rhythms; The Words of Others; By Any Means Necessary?; The Reality of Terrorism in France; Missing in Action, or the Burden of the Political; The Face of the Black Other; The Immigrant; The Revolutionary; The Worker; The Prophet; Race, Nation, Cinema: The Impossible Project

2. The Signs in Our Midst: European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98)Europe; Art; World War II; Cinema as National Event; 3. Beyond the Cinematic Body: Digital Rhythms and In/human Breakdown; Body, Machine, Affect; The Fall: Performance and Poetic Will; New Vibrations, New Feelings; 4. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben; The Law of the Crystal: Revealing the Image from Within; Stabbing Darkness in the Back: The Silence of the Gesture; Cinema: The Sphere of Pure Means; 5. Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event

The Infinity of MusicHail Mary, Music of Love; The Tracks of Love; The Cinematic Event; In Praise of Music; 6. Crossing the Darkness: Metaphor, Difference, Dissymmetry in Notre Musique (2004); The Theory of Montage: The Poetics of Champ/contre-champ; Theory into Practice: Occupying the Reverse Field; The Color of Metaphor: Native Americans/Jews/Palestinians; Jew Muslim: Poetic Transfer; The Eternal Double Bind; 7. Entering the Desert: Giving Face in Film socialisme (2010); 8. Soft and Hard/Back to Back: Erotic Encounters between Voice and Image in the Zone; Soft and Hard: Hard to Say

Duras/Godard: The Right Side and Inside OutCocteau/Godard: Back to Back; For a New Erotics of the Cinematic Encounter; Coda: Cinema after Language; Notes; Works Cited; Select Filmography/Discography; Select Discography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

ISBN:

9781438460642

1438460643