Cinema

Jean Luc Godard started making films in the late 1950s and is still making them. From his first feature, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Godard changed the way movies were made. Godard has always taken film-making seriously, treating it - from his days on the famous review, Cahiers du Cinema, to the extraordinary collage of his Histoires du Cinema - as an art form worthy of analysis. Today, his influence extends across such key contemporary film-makers as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.Jean Luc Godard started making films in the late 1950s and is still making them. From his first feature, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Godard changed the way movies were made. Godard has always taken film-making seriously, treating it - from his days on the famous review, Cahiers du Cinema, to the extraordinary collage of his Histoires du Cinema - as an art form worthy of analysis. Today, his influence extends across such key contemporary film-makers as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.Youssef Ishaghpour is Professor at the University Rene Descartes, Paris V. His writings on cinema, painting, philosophy and literature have been widely translated.Translated by John HoweJohn Howe, is a translator, journalist and writer. His many translations include Godard's voiceover for the complete soundtrack edition of Histoire(s) du cinema.

Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career in the industry. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after the century of Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Against this backdrop, Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. As the conversation develops, Godard expounds on his central concerns - how film can 'resurrect the past', the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an 'art that thinks'. Cinema: the archaeology of film and the memory of a century is a dialogue between Godard and the celebrated cinphile Youssef Ishaghpour. Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history.

Also available in hardback, 9781845201968 £45.00 (February, 2005)

Constellation and Classification * The Angle and the Editing * The Urgency of the Present and the Redemption of the Past * History and Recall * Video as a Way of Telling the Story of Cinema * Only Cinema can Tell its Own History * Quoting and Editing * History/ies of Cinema * History and Archaeology * History of Love, of the Eye, of the Look * The Loss of the Magic of Cinema and the New Wave * After and Before Auschwitz * What Cinema Can Do * Only Cinema, Telling its Own Story, Can Recount History * Cinema as Christianity... the Image and the Resurrection * Images and Editing * Towards the StarsAppendix: Jean Luc Godard: Modern Life, Poetry and History by Youssef Ishaghpour