Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy [Paperback]

Colin MacCabe (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0571211054 | ISBN-13: 978-0571211050 | Publication Date: January 13, 2005 | Edition: First Edition

Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionized the language of cinema. Hugely prolific in his first decade--Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and Made in USA are just a handful of the seminal works he directed--Godard introduced filmgoers to the generation of stars associated with the trumpeted sexuality of postwar movies and culture: Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Anna Karina.

As the sixties wore on, however, Godard's life was transformed. The Hollywood he had idolized began to disgust him, and in the midst of the socialist ferment in France his second wife introduced him to the activist student left. From 1968 to 1972, Europe's greatest director worked in the service of Maoist politics, and continued thereafter to experiment on the far peripheries of the medium he had transformed. His extraordinary later works are little seen or appreciated, yet he remains one of Europe's most influential artists.

Drawing on his own working experience with Godard and his coterie, Colin MacCabe, in this first biography of the director, has written a thrilling account of the French cinema's transformation in the hands of Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol--critics who toppled the old aesthetics by becoming, legendarily, directors themselves--and Godard's determination to make cinema the greatest of the arts.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; First Edition edition (January 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571211054
• ISBN-13: 978-0571211050
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #619,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #66 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Movie Directors

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the definitive biography, June 1, 2004

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 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Godard, September 26, 2005

By 

j - See all my reviews

This review is from: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Paperback)

I'm a fan of Godard's work and really enjoyed this book. It is part biography and part history and tends to go off on tangents which make the book all the more strange and interesting. Towards the end it becomes more personal because of the experiences MacCabe had with Godard later on in his life. Although the form and construction of the book are not very tight, it does a nice job of weaving through the complex mosaic that is Godard's life. It has some really cool pictures too.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A blow-by-blow account of 70 long years, August 29, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Hardcover)

Once upon a time, Godard was the leading filmmaker in the world, and if he lost some of his stature after a run of didactic, neo-Rossellini and Maoist tracts in the 1970s, he never really wanted to be famous, just influential. MacCabe, who has written interesting books on Warhol and Nicolas Roeg, explicates the progression of a great artist from enfant terrible to a man most think has died. The chapter about Anna Karina is wonderful, and we get the impression that Karina remains for MacCabe one of the icons of femininity, whereas he is cool and respectful towards Anne-Marie (Godard's frequent collaborator) you get the feeling he's not turned on by her the way he is by Karina. Also, we see him being tremendously gallant I think, towards Jane Fonda, with whom Godard made a film TOUT VA BIEN and then after it failed, he turned on her with the vicious "cinema portrait" LETTER TO JANE, castigatig her for her vanity and her foolish liberalism. MacCabe delivers a reproof to Godard and Gorin that says it all.

I do agree that Godard has made too many films for any one critic to account for. It is not MacCabe's fault exactly, but he might have written two books, one on Godard's international career as auteur in the 1960s, and the other of the virtually unknown films. He makes you want to see them on the one hand, but on the other hand one realizes with a sinking heart, well, life's too short!