Jean-Luc/Cinema/Godard

Course available by permission of instructor
only.
Jean-Luc Godard once said, "as long as I'm alive,
[the cinema] shall live." No other film director
has identified himself so intimately and
passionately with the cinema and its history. And
no other director has created so many new
cinematic forms and connections between images,
as his motto demands: "An image is not strong
because it is brutal or fantastic, but because
the association of ideas is distant and true." We
can certainly learn something from Godard about
images and sounds and montage. To create cinema,
you have to know what it is.
The course will concentrate on his lesser-known
films, from Le petit soldat to Helas pour moi and
Eloge de l'amour. The primary text will be
Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of
Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody. Brody's
accounts of Godard's films are often
reductionist, but this failing has the virtue of
demystifying the films, which can seem daunting
and obscure on a first or second viewing.
Students will be required to watch Godard's other
films and write short papers on five of them.