The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Suny Series, Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video) [Paperback]

Wheeler Winston Dixon (Author)

Book Description

Series: SUNY Series Cultural Studies in Cinema/Video | Publication Date: March 6, 1997

One of the most important, controversial, and prolific filmmakers in film history, and a founder of French New Wave cinema, Jean-Luc Godard has maintained an unbroken string of films in various genres and mediums from the late 1950s onward. Godard has established a reputation as a rebel who can work within and outside the system, producing films that are creative, breathtakingly beautiful, and yet commercial enough to earn back their production costs. In this book, Wheeler Winston Dixon offers an overview of all of Godard's work as a filmmaker, including his work for television and his ethnographic work in Africa. Free from the jargon and value judgments that have marred much of what has been written about Godard, this is the only book that covers the entirety of Godard's career, from his early film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema to his most recent video/film work. Illustrated with forty-six rare stills and researched in detail, it is the Godard book for the 1990s.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Wheeler Winston Dixon's new book presents a macroscopic view of Godard's career to date, covering every film or video he has ever made. It is divided into five chapters, which correspond more or less to the five film-making periods of MacCabe's biographical schema, except that he divides the New Wave into two at Le Mepris, an elegy for a decayed studio system (incarnated in Fritz Lang) which he sees as marking an irreversible disenchantment with the industry, portraying Prokosch, the producer (played by Jack Palance) as 'simultaneously ruthless, vain, childish, arrogant, stupid, greedy, self-deluding'. -- London Review of Books, September 17, 1998

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is Professor of English and Chair of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Re-Viewing British Cinema and It Looks At You: The Returned Gaze of Cinema, both published by SUNY Press, and co-producer and co-director of the hour-long documentary "Women Who Made the Movies" (1991). His films have been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of the Moving Image (London), The Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and elsewhere.

Product Details

• Paperback: 310 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (March 6, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791432866
• ISBN-13: 978-0791432860
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,915,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the UNL Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010); Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009); A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008), which has gone through five printings, was issued in a Spanish translation from Ediciones Robinbook in November, 2009 as Breve historia del cine, and is forthcoming as an audio book from University Press Audiobooks in 2010; Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007); Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006); American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2006); and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Southern Illinois UP, 2005). In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.