Godard

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. …

Jean-Luc Godard - Numéro deux (1975)
MPEG2 Video 480x480 (4:3) 29.97fps 2520Kbps | MPEG Audio 44100Hz stereo 128Kbps | French | ENG hard subs | 2x41mins | 2x630MB
Drama/Art-house | "Number Two" | Starring: Sandrine Battistella, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Oudrey

Jean-Luc Godard says that this film is a remake of À bout de souffle (1960). Due to financial matters, the film was shot on Video. The finished Movie (on Video) was filmed back into 35mm to distribute it that way. This was Godard's first film after the Dziga Vertov collaborations of the late sixties and early seventies,and his last feature film for five years.It can be seen as poised uncertainly between the analytical agitprop of the Vertov period and the more accessible films of the eighties which were his return to commercial film making.Its radical innovation which is at once striking and deeply unsettling for the average viewer is his use of split screen for most of the running length. The film tells of a youngish couple who live a seemingly conventional family life with their two young children and his mother and father, but beneath the facade of normality there runs a relentless deconstruction of the sexual power play of married life,the boredom and frustration of the wife and the alienation of the husband trapped in an exploitative job. An extremely pessimistic and very difficult film to watch.
La vie d'un jeune couple au travers d'un reportage vidéo. Les images se succèdent, présentées sous formes de tableaux présentant les membres de la famille et leurs activités.

Following the remarkable success of Victor Sangiorgio’s recording of Benjamin Godard’s delightful First Piano Concerto for Dutton Epoch, we now have Godard’s even more tuneful Second Concerto of 1893 and the colourful Fantaisie Persane (1894), also for piano and orchestra, both of which are essential listening for Godard fans. Conductor Martin Yates completes the programme with orchestral music from two of Godard’s operas – the powerful overture to Les Guelfes of 1882 and the orchestral suites from Jocelyn (1887), until now only remembered for the enchanting Berceuse, here played by Aleksei Kiseliov in its version for cello and orchestra.