Jean-Luc Godard (1930-)

Born in Paris, moved to Switzerland

Wealthy, bourgeois Swiss background

Studied ethnology at the Sorbonne

Financially cut off from his family for a time

Made a living in film industry and as manual labourer

Jean-Paul Belmondo (1933-)

A stage actor

Breakthrough role in Godards Breathless 1960

Switched from New Wave to popular films

That man from Rio 1964

A very popular film actor up to 1999

Anna Karina (1940-)

Born in Denmark

Studied dance and painting

Also sings and writes novels

Hitchhiked to Paris in 1958

Became a model

Godard first saw her in an ad for soap

Offered her a role in Le Petit Soldat

Married to Godard 1961-67

Godard and the New Wave

At the Paris Cinmathque met

Andr Bazin, editor of the Cahiers du Cinma

Franois Truffaut

Une certaine tendance du cinma franais, Cahiers du cinma, January 1954.

Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Agns Varda

Irony and distancing

Actors sometimes address the audience

Songs interrupt narrative

Jamais je ne tai dit que je taimerai toujours

Ma ligne de chance

Intertextuality

Films studded with references to the arts

Painting

Literature

Political involvement

Attacks the bourgeoisieWeek-end (1967)

1968-86: radical politics Tout va bien 1972

Sauve qui peut 1979

Since 1986, more personal

Histoire(s) du cinma (1998)

loge de lamour/ In Praise of love (1999)

Pierrot le fou (1965)

A work of many layers

Wealth of cultural references

Popular culture

High culture

Appearance of lightheartedness

Deep philosophical concerns

Pierrot le fou

A daring attempt at inventing a new cinematic language

Sam Fullers appearance at cocktail party

Cinema is a battleground Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!

Sam Fuller (1912-1997)

An American marginal film maker

China Gate 1957

Banned by French government for for anti-French view of colonial history

Bamboo 1955, Forty Guns 1957

Violent, individualistic narratives

Praised by Godard

A palimpsest

Names Ferdinand

Louis Ferdinand Cline (1894-1961) Voyage au Bout de La Nuit

Grand Guignol/Guignols Band A marionette show with farcical elements

Pierrot Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot,

Prte-moi ta plume pour crire un mot..

A character in Italian comedies

Pierrot in thought

Le fou/Madman/Jester

Questioning of common wisdom

Amour fou: passion

I could not care less Je men fous

When tortured Boum, boum, tralala

Scene with Raymond Devos

Say that I am mad!

Marianne/Freedom

Marianne Renoir Homage to Auguste Renoir

Juxtaposition with La Petite fille la gerbe

Marianne Symbol of the French Republic

Wears a Phrygian cap

La Libert guidant le peuple by Delacroix

La Petite fille la gerbe

La libert guidant le peuple

Bleu, blanc, rouge

Dominate palette

Opening predominantly red

Closing credits blue

Filmed in the island of Porquerollesbecause of its whiteness

Marianne dies in red

Pierrot paints his face blue to prepare for his suicide

Bleu, blanc, rouge

Colours of France and of the USA

Dominant colours in work of Nicolas de Stal(1914-1955)

A Russian born abstract painter who died young and tragically

Godards obsession with suicide in the 50s

Stories about the fall of Constantinople, or the story of Nicolas de Stal and his suicide or the one about William Wilson

William Wilson a short story by Edgar Allan Poe: theme of madness

Bateaux

Le bateau

Blue

Picassos blue period Triggered by the suicide of his friend

Carlos Casagemas

Yves Klein (1928-1962) Obsession with blue

Blue Monochrome

Blue Sponge

Petit Blue

First words

Velasquez

XVIIth century Spanish painter

A quotation from lie Faures History of art The world he lived in was sad,. A degenerate king

inbred infantas, idiots, dwarfs, cripples a few deformed clowns clothed as princes whose only job was to look at themselves and to amuse those lifeless outlaws who were constrained by etiquette, conspiracy, lies, and linked by confession and remorse. At the portals, the Auto-da-f, silence.

Las Meninas

Quotation from lie Faure

Prefigures

Grotesque characters at cocktail party

Brutality

Allusion to Spanish Inquisition

Auto-da-f: the burning to death of heretics

Wars

Exploitation

Consumer society

Reinterpretation

A literary work

Genres Love story

Road movie

A literary adaptation

Obsession by Lionel White Part of Srie noire collection

First person narrative

Adaptation but keeps major themes Reinvention of identity

Flight across America

Search for gangster brother

A femme fatale

A femme fatale

She is irresistible

She is fickle

No, of course she will not leave Pierrot

Yes, of course, she will

She is a killler

The scissors

Dial M for Murder by Alfred Hitchcock 1954

A new kind of love story

Questioning of romantic love

I never promised to love you for ever

Questioning of fate

Ma ligne de chance

Yet destructiveness of passion

A gangster film, road movie

Two gangsters on the lam

Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn 1967

Thelma and Louise by Ridley Scott 1991

Escape to the Riviera

Mediterranean coast

Provence-Alpes-Ctes-dAzur

Toulon

Calanques, pindes

Invention of a new genre

Have you forgotten who is Balzac, too?

Balzac: former telephone exchange

Honor de Balzac

Prolific XIXth century novelist

La Comdie humaine

Classic narrative fiction

Omniscient narrator

Criticized by proponents of the Nouveau Roman

New genre

Mixture of low and high culture

A political movie

A philosophical movie

New poetic language Visual and spoken

Popular culture: use of advertising

At the party

Replaces conversation

Comment on Emptiness of social exchanges

Pervasiveneness of consumerism

Popular culture: comic strip

Clines Guignols Band First World War presented as a puppet

show/extended comic strip

La Bande des Pieds nickels

A story of the gangsters Ribouldingue, Croquignol and Filochard in their travels across France

Subtext/Intertext: High culture

Medieval literature

Aucassin and Nicolette

XVIIIth century literature

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 1719

Leibnitz satirized by Voltaire in Candide The best of all (possible) worlds

Popular culture/High culture

What to do with money

Marianne

Chicago, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo

Ferdinand

Florence, Venice, Athens

A political ani-war film

Vietnam War Newsreels

Nephew of Uncle Sam/ niece of Uncle Hosketch

Algerian War Torture methods

Arms trade to Yemen, Angola and the Congo

Against consumerism

All-pervasive nature of consumer society

Association with totalitarianism

Thought control/Hidden persuaders

Power of international conglomerates

SS in Esso

Total Brand Name

A philosophical film

What does it mean to be alive?

Emphasis on vie in neon signs

Dans envie il y a vie. Javais envie, jtais en vie

Better to live a short passionate life than a long boring life?

New poetic language

Rimbauds LAlchimie du verbe I invented the colours of the vowels A black, E

white, I red, O blue, U green - I regulated the form and movement of each consonants, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had invented a poetic language accessible one day to all the senses.

Ferdinands diary

Poetic language rises from the ruins Valry

Explosion of colors

Custard pie transformed into a fireworks display

Lights on the road play on the windshield

Transformation of cinematic language into poetry

Similarity to Rimbaud inventing a new poetic language

Last words

A quotation from Lternit by Arthur Rimbaud It has been found again/ What has? -

Eternity/It is the sea gone off with the sun.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) A precocious genius Stopped writing at the age of 20, died at the age

of 37 A Season in Hell

Rimbauds most famous collection of poems Title of a chapter in the film