Free Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard Ebooks To Download
A landmark biography explores the crucial resonances among the life, work, and times of one of the most influential filmmakers of our ageWhen Jean-Luc Godard wed the ideals of filmmaking to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. Unlike any earlier films, Godard's work shifts fluidly from fiction to documentary, from criticism to art. The man himself also projects shifting images--cultural hero, fierce loner, shrewd businessman. Hailed by filmmakers as a--if not the--key influence on cinema, Godard has entered the modern canon, a figure as mysterious as he is indispensable.In Everything Is Cinema, critic Richard Brody has amassed hundreds of interviews to demystify the elusive director and his work. Paying as much attention to Godard's technical inventions as to the political forces of the postwar world, Brody traces an arc from the director's early critical writing, through his popular success with Breathless, to the grand vision of his later years. He vividly depicts Godard's wealthy conservative family, his fluid politics, and his tumultuous dealings with women and fellow New Wave filmmakers.Everything Is Cinema confirms Godard's greatness and shows decisively that his films have left their mark on screens everywhere.
Hardcover: 720 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books; Revised edition (May 13, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805068864
ISBN-13: 978-0805068863
Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.7 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #796,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #273 in Books > Arts & Photography > Performing Arts > Individual Directors #473 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Movie Directors #6880 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Actors & Entertainers
Jean-Luc Godard's output has been prodigious, and this massive book by Richard Brody manages to cover most of Godard's films up to 2004 and how they relate to the auteur's life. Brody, who first came to prominence as a writer for The New Yorker, has seen every one of Godard's films, and not only does he take us from Godard's early life and first feature A BOUT DE SOUFFLE up to his then most-recent feature NOTRE MUSIQUE, but he also describes Godard's many short films and television works, some of which are little known.Proceeding chronologically through Godard's life, Brody first describes the context for how each film was made: Godard's personal relationships with the actors or screenwriters involved, where the money for the shoot was coming from, and how the shoot itself proceeded. Without getting too in-depth -- this is fundamentally a work of biography, not of very close analysis -- Brody describes the general plot and main episodes of each of the films. Brody sometimes claims that events on screen reflect events in Godard's private (usually romantic) life, and from other reviews here these claims seem to be contentious. However, that Godard's early films mirrored his relationships with Anna Karina and Maria Vlady was noted even in the 1960s by people close to Godard, and Brody is often basing himself on published sources. (Nearly all factual claims in the book are sourced, and the book ends with a lengthy section of endnotes).Brody finds Godard's work to be interesting and often rewarding overall, but he does not believe that every film that Godard has made is of equal value, and he sometimes mentions his preferences. He feels that Godard was at an artistic nadir in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his politically radical films (the Dziga Vertov years).
"(Richard Brody's) Everything is Cinema", famous French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is quoted as commenting on the back cover, "is better than a biography, it is a novel". Fiction, in other words. I prefer to invoke the title of a Charles Mingus composition, viz "All the things you'd be by now if Sigmund Freud's wife were your mother": Over nearly 600 pages, page by page, precisely and adoringly, emerges the profile of a total neurotic, a mysogenist misanthrope, a miser.A bit of a private life component may be the spice of a biography, but if nothing else but his private (ie off-screen) life is advanced to determine and explain all of Godard's films and video activities, the reader tires rather quickly: In the end, Le mépris (1963) is an excellent and intelligent film because Alberto Moravia's underlying novel is great (sociological rather than psychological) analysis, and Godard a skilled and innovative metteur en scene.Some things are irrelevant, like his failed alliance with a relatively more mature Marina Vlady - Anne-Marie Miéville, the author rightly remarks, will be the first and only of Godard's women of equal caliber. And whether Godard held hands with Brigitte Bardot walking up the stairs of Curzio Malaparte's avant-gardist villa is about as irrelevant as his "accusation" of François Truffaut of having had a candid affair with Jacqueline Bisset during the turning of La nuit américaine (1973), and not showing it in that movie... ("how come only the director has no affair in that film?").Brody's method of endless narration makes it difficult for him, and subsequently the reader, to in any defined way assess the weight/quality of Godard's individual films. This is perhaps the main weakness of the book.
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard Air Fry Everything: Foolproof Recipes for Fried Favorites and Easy Fresh Ideas by Blue Jean Chef, Meredith Laurence (The Blue Jean Chef) Cinema for Spanish Conversation, Third Edition (Foreign Language Cinema) (Spanish Edition) The Death & Rebirth of Cinema: MASTERING THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY IN THE DIGITAL CINEMA AGE Jean-Paul Hébert Was There/Jean-Paul Hébert Etait Là (English and French Edition) Fast Favorites Under Pressure: 4-Quart Pressure Cooker recipes and tips for fast and easy meals by Blue Jean Chef, Meredith Laurence (The Blue Jean Chef) French Kiss: A Detective Luc Moncrief Story (BookShots) Fighting for Total Person Unionism: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship (Working Class in American History) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs Working With Independent Contractors (Working with Independent Contractors: The Employer's Legal Guide) Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-Francois Champollion Lost Artwork of Hollywood: Classic Images from Cinema's Golden Age American Cinema / American Culture, 4th Edition A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Wisconsin Studies in Film) Cinema (Eyewitness Guides) Children's Book of Cinema Amore E Cinema [With CD (Audio)] (Imparare Leggendo) After Effects and Cinema 4D Lite: 3D Motion Graphics and Visual Effects Using CINEWARE Flesh of Images, The: Merleau-Ponty between Painting and Cinema (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (Routledge Key Guides)
