Godard

Charlotte is young and modern, not a hair out of place, superficial, cool; she reads fashion magazines - does she have the perfect bust? She lives in a Paris suburb with her son and her …

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, “the last romantic couple.” With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French New Wave, and was Godard’s last frolic before he moved ever further into radical cinema.

Vaughan Jones has his hands full with this repertoire. Rare (for which read ‘obscure’) music for violin from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is his speciality, and this disc represents work he does on the exploration, arrangement and transcription of this lesser-spotted repertoire. Like most music for solo violin presented as suites or sonatas, Bach casts his long shadow over many of them. And although they may not display the originality or depth of, for instance, Ysaÿe’s own examples, the two career-spanning sonatas of Benjamin Godard are a good example of a diverting snapshot in time. They offer a sentimentality amplified in the monomaniacal sonata of his Norwegian contemporary Christian Sinding and completely absent in the curiously sociopathic music of Franz von Vecsey.

Carmen is a member of a terrorist gang who falls in love with a young police officer guarding a bank that she and her cohorts try to rob. She leads him on while dragging the two of them closer to their ultimate doom. Jean-Luc Godard intercuts the film with shots of a string quartet practicing Beethoven, and his main protagonist, Carmen, is played by Maruschka Detmers creating a stunning effect in many scenes of extended nudity.

Carmen is a member of a terrorist gang who falls in love with a young police officer guarding a bank that she and her cohorts try to rob. She leads him on while dragging the two of them closer to their ultimate doom. Jean-Luc Godard intercuts the film with shots of a string quartet practicing Beethoven, and his main protagonist, Carmen, is played by Maruschka Detmers creating a stunning effect in many scenes of extended nudity.

Set in the near future, Paula, a leftist writer, goes from Paris to the French town of Atlantic-Cité when she learns of the death of a former colleague and lover, Richard P. Is she there to investigate? On the surface, faces are beautiful, colors bright, clothes trendy. Beneath, little is clear: some talk to Paula as if she's Alice in Wonderland, corpses pile up, and ideological struggles insert themselves. A murder victim's nephew and a political party's hired hands hover around Paula. Is obscuring things her goal or is it life that's obscure?

Michel Poiccard, an irresponsible sociopath and small-time thief, steals a car and impulsively murders the motorcycle policeman who pursues him. Now wanted by the authorities, he renews his relationship with Patricia Franchini, a hip American girl studying journalism at the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Nice a few weeks earlier. Before leaving Paris, he plans to collect a debt from an underworld acquaintance and expects her to accompany him on his planned getaway to Italy. Even with his face in the local papers and media, Poiccard seems oblivious to the dragnet that is slowly closing around him as he recklessly pursues his love of American movies and libidinous interest in the beautiful American.

"Belle Époque 1886" celebrates a golden age of French chamber music, uniquely coupling Cello Sonatas by César Franck and Benjamin Godard. Franck’s Cello Sonata – an arrangement by cellist Jules Delsart of his Violin Sonata, originally composed for violinist Eugène Ysaÿe’s wedding and the only alternative version sanctioned by the composer – is notable for the lyrical, singing quality of its cello writing while boasting complex harmonies and sophisticated thematic devices throughout.A prolific composer, versatile musician and close associate of Franck’s, Godard’s Cello Sonata, says Gavin Dixon in his booklet notes, “demonstrates an innate knowledge of the instrument, especially of the varied expressive potential of its different ranges”. It is shot through with vivid colouring of the cello’s voice in shifting registers and Godard’s penchant for the operatic.

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.