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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER and EVICTION Suffered by EXCLUDED Communities as IDEAS Destroy only in Hegemony Rule While DREAMS Bring us CLOSE Together

CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER and EVICTION Suffered by EXCLUDED Communities as IDEAS Destroy only in Hegemony Rule While DREAMS Bring us CLOSE Together

Trobled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams- 477

Palash Biswas

http://indianholocaustmyfatherslifeandtime.blogspot.com/

It happened in America right from the Great Revolution, Civil War and Incarnation of First Black US President Barrack Obama! What Martin Luther King pronounced on a Historical Moment with heavenly VISION that WE HAVE a Dream, changed the course of CIVILISATION and History as well. It happened during Renaissance which first pumped the Dreams of Liberty , Freedom and Fraternity and inspired FRENCH Revolution to end FEUDALISM. it was the same case in India`s Struggle of Freedom and CRY Freedom in South Africa. On the Other hand , Ideology handled by Market Dominating Communities, Nobles and Genome Superior Communities as in India the Brahaminical Hegemony Converted all Ideologies Tools of Genocide and Economic Ethnic Cleansing, have caused Mass Destruction, Holocaust and Infinite Ethnic Cleansing!


I came to this point with the release of my favourite Film Maker Godard`s latest Release , SOCIALISM in Cannes as he once upon a time said, Ideas Divide, Dreams Bring Us Together!
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.
Jean-Luc Godard

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
Jean-Luc Godard

Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
Jean-Luc Godard

I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie.
Jean-Luc Godard

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
Jean-Luc Godard

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
Jean-Luc Godard

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
Jean-Luc Godard

To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
Jean-Luc Godard

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.
Jean-Luc Godard



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Meanwhie,Home Minister P Chidambaram today made a fresh offer to hold talks with Naxals if they "suspend" violence even for just 72 hours, a day after Maoists unleashed another attack in Chattisgarh.

"Maoists should say 'We will abjure violence. We will suspend violence and actually suspend violence for 72 hours'. We will get the Chief Ministers on board. We will respond. We will fix a date, time and place for talks and let the Maoists come for the talks on anything they wish to talk,"Chidambaram told CNN-IBN. Maoists blew up a bus killing at least 36 people near Dantewada yesterday.

Chidambaram said CPI(Maoist) never responded "seriously" to the offer of talks. "They are indulging in gimmickry I am afraid media plays up that gimmick," he said.

Asked whether government forces will also halt all operations against them during the period of cease-fire, the Home Minister responded, "That goes without saying".

Chidambaram said "if they observe complete suspension of violence for just 72 hours, it goes without saying that police will not take any action against any CPI(Maoist) activist, hideouts or camps." He said complete suspension means there should not be any attack on infrastructure, any landmine blast or any targeting of telephone towers.

On the issue of Hindu extremists, the Home Minister said there are evidence pointing to various groups which are supported by extreme right Hindu fundamentalist group. "Don't call Hindu terrorist. A terrorist is a terrorist. Except in this case, the terrorist subscribes to extreme fundamentalist Hindu philosophy. We feel that there are evidence to the Ajmer Blast, Mecca Masjid Blast and investigating agencies are closely following the trail that we have stumbled upon or discovered," he said.

The Home Minister said investigation alone will show whether the dots are being rightly connected to that one organisation or to different organisations working in co-ordination.


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Film

Godard, With That Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi at the Cannes Film Festival

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/movies/18cannes.html?src=me

Wild Bunch Distribution

Mathias Domahidy in "Film Socialism," the new movie from Jean-Luc Godard, in which the animals, and the people, talk in many languages.

Published: May 17, 2010

CANNES, France — If I am remembering clearly — and my head is filled with so many densely layered words and images, it is hard to unpack them — the first image in "Film Socialism," the new movie by Jean-Luc Godard, is of two red-headed parrots, side by side on a tree limb. The parrots are among a handful of animals that appear in the movie, which had its press premiere Monday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, including a pair of hilariously talkative cats (whose meows are, in turn, parroted by a young woman watching them on a laptop), as well as a llama and a donkey. Surrounding these animals is a menagerie of talking, quoting, babbling human beings, speaking in French, German, Russian, English and Arabic, among other tongues.

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Patti Smith in a scene from "Film Socialism."

Wittily, perversely, contrastingly, the final words in the movie are "no comment," which appear in large English letters like a declaration, bringing this 1 hour and 41 minutes of sights and sounds to an abrupt close. Mr. Godard, 79, was scheduled to appear at a press conference after the screening, but made good on these last words by not showing up. Though the rumor that he would be a no-show had circulated before the screening, several dozen journalists trooped to the press room to see if a representative might appear with an explanation. Nothing. Not even a note. No comment.

According to the French newspaper Libération, Mr. Godard sent a fax to the festival's director, Thierry Frémaux, saying that "problems of the Greek type" ("des problèmes de type grec," perhaps referring to Greece's financial crisis) had prevented him from attending and that he would go to his death for the festival, but not one step more: "Suite à des problèmes de type grec, je ne pourrai être votre obligé à Cannes. Avec le festival, j'irai jusqu'à la mort, mais je ne ferai pas un pas de plus. Amicalement. Jean-Luc Godard."

Any new Godard movie is a noteworthy occasion, and this initial screening was packed with an audience primed for difficulties of some kind. On Friday the British newspaper The Independent reported that the movie's English-language subtitles would be in what was characterized as "Navajo English," to replicate the fractured words spoken by Hollywood-style American Indians in westerns (and in the sitcom "F Troop"): "If a character is saying, 'Give me your watch,' the subtitle will read, 'You, me, watch.' " In the 1950s Mr. Godard worked in the Paris publicity office for 20th Century Fox and knows how to stir things up. (He had already tempted us with a trailer in which the movie appears in hyper fast forward; the complete film can be viewed through Wednesday on the Web site FilmoTV.fr.)

My thoughts on the movie — which looks as if it were shot in both low-grade video and high-definition digital — are tentative and, for now, brief. Structurally , it can be divided into three sections, the first set on Mediterranean cruise ship on which the mostly white passengers eat, mingle and gamble. Among the travelers are several men and women, as well as a teenage girl and younger boy, who speak to one another and themselves in largely untranslated languages. As promised, the English-language subtitles are sparse, with words sometimes joined together or widely spaced: "nocrimes noblood"; "German Jews black"; "impossible story"; "Kamikaze divine wind"; "right of return." Every so often, Patti Smith appears, singing in a cabin and strolling on deck or below with an acoustic guitar.

The second section is set in and around a small gas station and adjoining house, where two women, a white journalist, perhaps, and a black camera operator, are lurking around the garage owners, a French family of four. (An exterior wall is emblazoned with the name J. J. Martin.) Here, the discussion turns to the liberté, égalité, fraternité, and with these ideals the French revolution is invoked.

The third section turns to different places: Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hell As (more on that in a moment), Naples and Barcelona. "Hell As" refers to Hellas, the Greek word for Greece, but might also be a punning reference to the French word for alas — hélas — and an earlier Godard film, "Hélas Pour Moi," which retells the myth of Amphitryon and Alcmene. Along the way, Jews, Hollywood and the Holocaust are referred to.

Obviously, it will take many more viewings of "Film Socialism," an improvement in my French and many more fully translated subtitles before I can begin to get a tentative grasp on it. Such are the complicated pleasures of Mr. Godard's work: however private, even hermetic, his film language can be, these are works that by virtue of that language's density, as well as the films' visual beauty and intellectual riddles, invite you in (or turn you off). I imagine it will be awhile before the movie travels to the United States, but if you want to prepare, I suggest you look at a Thursday (May 13) interview with Mr. Godard from Telerama.fr that includes this quotation from the movie: "Les Américains ont libéré l'Europe en la rendant dépendante," which translates as "the Americans liberated Europe by making it dependent."

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BJP skirts blame-game, demands policy that will not be 'soft'

New Delhi, May 17: The BJP emphasised it would not indulge in a blame-game over the latest Maoist massacre in Chhattisgarh nor was it out to score a brownie point over the Congress-led UPA or sound partisan.

The party said its immediate concern was the need for a "comprehensive and uniform policy" that would "not treat the problem in a soft way".

Spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman told The Telegraph: "The first thing we need is more facts on what caused this attack before we jump to conclusions on whether it was intelligence failure of something else."

Aware that Chhattisgarh is BJP-ruled and the target of the big Maoist attacks in the recent past, Nirmala admitted that "no one state police unit can match the resources of a Naxalite unit or independently handle the strikes. The first thing we need is comprehensive attacks on their armouries."

In a nuanced departure from the Congress's policy of using counter-insurgency and development initiatives simultaneously instead of prioritising one over the other, Nirmala stressed that "security and safety" will have to take precedence over development activities.

"What are we talking about? Nothing reaches the pockets controlled by the Maoists. They blow up schools and hospitals, they will not allow essential supplies, medicines to reach people. It is clear that we cannot take development to the districts that are ruled by their guns.

"First and foremost, these islands have to be reclaimed by the Indian state. They don't make a distinction between civilians and security forces. What sin did the busload of passengers who were killed today commit?" asked the spokesperson.

Nirmala said the Maoists were waging an "ideological warfare" that was predicated on a negation of the Indian state and Constitution. "In such circumstances, we have to be clear we will not negotiate with them unless they recognise the Indian state, abjure violence and lay down arms," she said.

Despite her assertions not to politicise the episode, Nirmala claimed that the battle in Chhattisgarh got considerably enfeebled when in 2005, its neighbour, Andhra Pradesh, negotiated with the People's War Group without pre-conditions, except for a three-month ceasefire.

When the talks broke down, fighting intensified. The Andhra government unleashed its might on the PWG after its activists migrated to Chhattisgarh and consolidated their base in the state, she said.

"That was a setback to the effort to put the Maoists down. Because Chhattisgarh and Andhra are not independent entities and Naxalism is not confined to one state. If one state adopts a soft approach and the other a hard policy, the mixed signals will embolden the Maoists. Therefore, we need a uniform policy," Nirmala said.


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On death road, a clear message: civilians are no longer immune

New Delhi, May 17: Monday's Maoist attack on a busload of police and civilians occurred on a road that is known to pass through rebel territory and is frequently used by the security forces for supplies and reinforcements.

Driving to Sukma and beyond a day after the April 6 killing of 76 policemen was risky. Even before that killing, National Highway 221, from Konta near the Andhra border through Sukma to Jagdalpur, and the smaller roads that lead from it into the forests were known as a kind of "death road".

At night, gangs of drunken tribal youths, women among them, put up barricades and stop what little traffic passes through and demand money. At many places, trees are felled across the road — as in Lalgarh, only in larger numbers — and that makes the going slow.

The road is two-way, but narrow. It snakes its way through a reserve forest that is thick with sal trees. It also goes uphill and downhill.

At Sukma, the road is closest to the Orissa border after crossing the Indravati river. Orissa's Malkangiri district, another rebel base, is just east of Sukma.

The administration and local people have known for a long time that the Maoists could attack the road almost at will. But they have also known that such an attack would most likely be on security forces because the Maoists would not want to lose influence in villages on either side of the road.

Monday's attack, however, makes the brutal point that killing non-combatants is on the Maoist agenda in their reply to P. Chidambaram's Green Hunt if such an attack will take the lives of a few policemen.

Indications are that the Maoists targeted the busload of special police officers (SPOs) after tracking them for some time.

The SPOs present a bigger threat to the Maoists than the paramilitary forces such as the CRPF. Unlike the constabulary of the paramilitary forces, Chhattisgarh's SPOs are "home and hearth" cadre, often drawn from among the same tribes from which the Maoists recruit their rank and file.

In and around Sukma, one such SPO unit calls itself the "Koya Commandos", Koya being the language they speak.

A Koya Commando who was in Mukram (where the CRPF men were killed) on April 7 as part of the forces who were securing the road for the visit of the director-general of police Viswa Ranjan to visit, took this correspondent around the village, identifying trees and implements. The SPOs know the terrain much better than the CRPF or even the State Armed Police.

Since the April 6 killings near Mukram, central forces have been told strictly that they are not to go on patrol without being escorted by the SPOs.

First, patrolling has become more infrequent since that bloodbath.

Second, after today's targeting of the SPOs, the Maoists have sent out the message that they will go after the "special police" even at the cost of civilian lives.

Chhattisgarh and Dantewada have become more dangerous than they already were.

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CIVILIAN SLAUGHTER
35 killed in Maoist hit on passenger bus

Raipur, May 17: At least 35 people, many of them civilians, were killed in Dantewada today when Maoists for the first time blew up a passenger bus in which home-grown security personnel were travelling in violation of the rulebook.

The Chhattisgarh massacre suggests the Maoists no longer distinguish between civilians and security personnel as long as a few policemen can be killed.

Among the dead were 24 civilians and 11 security personnel, dubbed special police officers (SPOs). The LTTE-style attack on the bus was triggered around 4.30pm in Chingawaram, about 40km from Dantewada town from where the vehicle had rolled out three hours earlier.

The SPOs are villagers recruited and trained by the state government to fight the Maoist guerrillas in the densely forested terrain of the Bastar region. As many as 25 of them, returning from a search operation, had boarded the bus though they are supposed to move only on foot through Naxalite-affected areas.

At least 14 SPOs and a woman are being treated for wounds at the government hospital in Sukma, a small town on the Orissa border where the bus was headed.

The attack came six weeks after Maoists massacred 76 CRPF jawans near Chintalnaar in Dantewada.

The bus, owned by a private transport company, was ferrying about 55-60 people when the landmine, planted on the state highway cutting through the dense forests, was set off.

The bus (registration number CG 17 SS 9295) was flung about 20 feet high, a senior police officer said. Some of the bodies were tossed so high that they got trapped among branches of trees. The explosion created a crater about 10 feet in diameter.

Sources said the front of the bus bore the impact of the explosion. "Had the blast occurred a fraction of a second later, the vehicle could have been blown up from the middle and the casualties could have been much more," a security expert said.

Dantewada superintendent of police Amresh Kumar had passed through the spot 10 minutes earlier. Sources said the Maoists appeared to have targeted the SPOs to warn locals against joining in the battle.

Reports from the site said several bodies are trapped in the mangled remains of the vehicle. "It would take hours to extricate the bodies by cutting the metal," an officer said.

The 25 SPOs boarded the bus somewhere on the way, possibly to hitch a ride though the standard operating procedure prohibits them from doing so in civilian vehicles. Sources said these locals-turned-Maoist hunters often travel by bus as they are too tired to make the journey by foot.

Unconfirmed reports said a few of these officers, armed with weapons like Insas rifles, were sitting on the roof of the bus.

The rebels appear to have taken a leaf out of the LTTE manual. Like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Maoists had dug a tunnel on either side of the road to reach the concrete top from below to plant the landmine, security officers said.

"In this way, they do not disturb the crust so as to avoid any suspicion. The signs of dredging on the sides of a road can be easily wiped off," an officer said. The device must have been planted days before.

Four years ago, the Maoists had blown up 28 villagers returning in a truck after an anti-rebel peace march specifically associated with the Salwa Judum, a government-sponsored vigilante force. The Salwa Judum has since been disbanded.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100518/jsp/frontpage/story_12461174.jsp

PC wants 'limited mandate' revisited

New Delhi, May 17: Today's Maoist assault turned to ammunition in the hands of Union home minister P. Chidambaram, who lost no time seeking an expansion of his mandate to include, among other measures, air power support for security forces.

Signs are that the security campaign against Maoists will turn more aggressive, at least in the immediate.

Initially stunned by the reverse, both the government and the Congress appeared to respond with renewed resolve to "fight off and resolutely defeat acts of terror against innocent people and against the state".

Chidambaram, who was in a pre-scheduled meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when news of the Dantewada bus blast broke, told NDTV in an interview that he had requested the Prime Minister to "revisit" the "limited mandate" he had been given to meet the Maoist challenge.

A meeting of the cabinet committee on security (CCS) is being called soon to discuss a revision of strategy and the home ministry is hopeful it will get a "larger mandate" that includes a go-ahead to employ air support.

Chidambaram said he had the support of "all chief ministers" on the use of air power and even claimed the chief ministers of Bengal, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh had actively sought it in the past.

The home minister, whose security drive has been under attack from sections within his party, also fired tangentially at critics, telling the TV channel: "We have a two-pronged strategy (on tackling the Maoists)… both the Prime Minister and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are very clear on this…. But I concede that some discussion in recent weeks may have weakened one of the two prongs." He also said civil society groups had "a lot to answer for today's attack".

Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh and Rajya Sabha member Mani Shankar Aiyar are among those who can be said to have "weakened one of the two prongs" of the government's strategy with their open, and repeated, criticism of what they have often called the home minister's "one-eyed" policy.

The sceptics feel the policy is too heavily accented on the security offensive and too little on development and socio-economic measures to address problems in the backward areas where Maoists have gained the upper hand.

Chidambaram — and his senior-most official G.K. Pillai — sought to project today's blast as an illustration of the Maoists being "ruthless, indiscriminate killers" whom the state needs to neutralise.

"Naxalites don't discriminate, only kill," a sombre Chidambaram told the channel.

Briefing journalists around the same time, home secretary Pillai said: "The killing of civilians has been a hallmark of Naxalite violence over the years. They are known to have conducted condemnable killings of civilians even in the past. They have killed CPM workers and alleged police informers. Even if they were police informers, what is their crime? How can they kill people just because they are CPM workers?"

Justifying Chidambaram's policy, the home secretary said the security grid was helping villages in Maoist-affected areas.

After the deployment of the BSF in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh, for instance, ration shops had reopened in villages and a tribal festival in Parthapur was held after 15 years, he said.

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi tried to allay the sense that there was a division in the party on acting against Maoists. "Our resolve to root out such despicable acts is firm and unwavering. We also want all stake holders of the civil society to remain united in this fight," Singhvi said.

Another party spokesperson, Manish Tiwari, said today's incident had "exposed the barbarity of the Maoists who take a leaf out of Pol Pot's book".

Asked about the duality of the party's approach, another senior Congress leader referred to the party president's article in the latest issue of Congress organ Sandesh and said: "Sonia Gandhi wrote that acts of terror must be dealt with decisively and forcefully when she talked of targeted development in backward districts."

Civil society groups feared the worst from the consequences of what is an exploding confrontation in south Chhattisgarh. Kavita Srivastava of the PUCL condemned today's attack but alleged that through its policies, the government was "handing over entire populations to the Maoists".

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Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard
Born3 December 1930 (1930-12-03) (age 79)
Paris, France
Occupation Actor, director, cinematographer, screenwriter, editor, producer
Years active1950–present
Spouse(s)Anna Karina (1961-1967)
Anne Wiazemsky (1967-1979)
Anne-Marie Miéville (not official)

Jean-Luc Godard (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃lyk ɡɔˈdaʁ]; born 3 December 1930) is a French and Swiss filmmaker and one of the founding members of the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave".

Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood cinema as well as the French equivalent, namely the "tradition of quality".[1] He is often considered the most extreme or radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His films express his political ideologies as well as his knowledge of film history. In addition, Godard's films often cite existential and Marxist philosophy.

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[edit] Early life

Godard was born in Paris, the son of Odile (née Monod) and Paul Godard, a physician.[2] His parents both came from Protestant families of Franco-Swiss descent, and his mother's relatives included composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod, and pastor Frédéric Monod.[3][4] Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland, and at the Lycée Rohmer, and the University of Paris. During his time at the Sorbonne, he became involved with the young group of filmmakers and film theorists that gave birth to the New Wave.

[edit] Cahiers and early films

After attending school in Nyon, Godard returned to Paris in 1948. It was there, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, that Paris ciné-clubs were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave, André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He has said; "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread — but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope...a telescope...At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about..They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer..We watched silent films in the era of talkies..We dreamed about film..We were like Christians in the catacombs..."

Despite its intricate manifesto, the guiding principle behind the movement was that "Realism is the essence of cinema." According to Bazin and other members of the New Wave, cinematic realism could be achieved through various aesthetic and contextual media. They favored long shots that embodied a more complete scene, where visual information could be transmitted consistently, and avoided "unnecessary editing"; they did not want to disrupt the illusion of reality by constant cuts. This technique can be seen in some of Godard's most celebrated sequences, though there are equally famous sequences in his films featuring fastcutting, especially those where jump cuts proliferate.

An interesting aspect of Godard's philosophy on filmmaking was his inherent and deliberate embrace of contradiction. In short, Godard used "mass-market" aesthetics in his film to make a statement about capitalism and consequent societal decline.

His approach to film began in the field of criticism. Along with Éric Rohmer and Rivette, he founded the film journal, Gazette du cinéma, which saw publication of five issues in 1950. When André Bazin founded his critical magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, were among the first writers. Most of the writers for Cahiers du cinéma started making some brief forays into film direction in the years before 1960.

Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building, Opération béton (1955). As he continued to work for Cahiers, he made Une femme coquette (1955), a ten-minute short; Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (1957) another short fiction film; and Une histoire d'eau (1958), which was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut.

In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules, an homage to Jean Cocteau.

[edit] Cinematic period

His most celebrated period as a film maker is roughly from his first feature, Breathless (1960), through to Week End (1967) focused on relatively conventional works that often refer to different aspects of film history. This cinematic period stands in contrast to the revolutionary period that immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema's history as "bourgeois" and therefore without merit.

[edit] Films

After seeing Orson Welles' Touch of Evil at the Expo 58, Godard was influenced to make his first major feature film, Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. The film distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture — specifically American cinema. The film employed various innovative techniques such as jump cuts, character asides and breaking the eyeline match rule in Continuity editing. François Truffaut, who co-wrote Breathless with Godard, suggested its concept and introduced Godard to the producer who ultimately funded the film, Georges de Beauregard.

From the beginning of his career, Godard crammed more film references into his movies than any of his New Wave colleagues. In Breathless, his citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate); visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio. Most of all, the choice of Jean Seberg as the lead actress was an overarching reference to Otto Preminger, who had discovered her for his Saint Joan, and then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse. If, Rohmer's words, "life was the cinema", then a film filled with movie references was supremely autobiographical.

The following year, Godard made Le Petit Soldat, which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence. Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Godard and Danish-born actress Anna Karina, whom he later married in 1961 (and divorced in 1967). The film, due to its political nature, was banned by the French government until January 1963. Karina appeared again, along with Belmondo, in A Woman Is a Woman (1961), intended as a homage to the American musical. Angela (Karina) desires a child, prompting her to pretend to leave her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) and make him jealous by pursuing his best friend (Belmondo) as a substitute.

Godard's next film, Vivre sa vie (1962), was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress whose financially straitened circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker. It is an episodic account of her rationalizations to prove she is free, even though she is tethered at the end of her pimp's short leash. In one touching scene in a cafe, she spreads her arms out and announces she is free to raise or lower them as she wishes. Very soon, events over which Nana has no control, intrude on her life—in the end, fatally. The film's style, much like that of Breathless, boasted the type of camera-liberated experimentation that made the French New Wave so influential.

Les Carabiniers (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent injustice. It was the influence and suggestion of Roberto Rossellini that led Godard to make the film. It follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in the whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders. His most commercially successful film was Le Mépris (1963), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot. A coproduction between Italy and France, Contempt became known as a pinnacle in cinematic modernism with its profound reflexivity. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by the arrogant American movie producer Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, which the Austrian director Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's 'high culture' interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy. Another prominent theme is the inability to reconcile love and labor, which is illustrated by Paul's crumbling marriage to Camille (Bardot) during the course of shooting.

In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), another collaboration between the two and described by Godard as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka." It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, who both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several gangster film conventions.

Une femme mariée (1964) followed Band of Outsiders. It was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black and white picture without a real story. The film was entirely produced over the period of one month and exhibited a loose quality unique to Godard. Godard made the film while he acquired funding for Pierrot le fou (1965).

In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire. Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution, a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer. Pierrot le fou (1965) featured a complex storyline, distinctive personalities, and a violent ending. Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation in the way it played on so many of Godard's earlier characters and themes. With an extensive cast and variety of locations, the film was expensive enough to warrant significant problems with funding. Shot in color, it departed from Godard's minimalist works (typified by Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Une femme mariée). He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, in order to guarantee the necessary amount of capital.

Masculin, féminin (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, La Femme de Paul and Le Signe, was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola."

Godard followed with Made in U.S.A (1966), whose source material was Richard Stark's The Jugger; and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), in which Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute.

La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events, the film is thought by some to foreshadow the student rebellions that took place.

That same year, Godard made a more colorful and political film, Week End. It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains some of the most written-about scenes in cinema's history. One of them, a ten-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is often cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends. Week Ends' enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema", appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard's filmmaking career.

[edit] Politics

Politics are never far from the surface in Godard's films. One of his earliest features, Le Petit Soldat, dealt with the Algerian War of Independence, and was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute rather than pursue any specific ideological agenda. Along these lines, Les Carabiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metonym. In addition to the international conflicts Godard sought an artistic response to, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in Vivre sa vie.

In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as the colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. The side that opposed such colonization included the majority of French workers, who belonged to the French communist party, and the Parisian artists and writers who positioned themselves on the side of social reform and class equality. A large portion of this group had a particular affinity for the teachings of Karl Marx. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End, but is evident in several films — namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée.

[edit] Vietnam

Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam conflict. Furthermore, there are two scenes in Pierrot le fou that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on the way the radio dehumanizes the Northern Vietnamese combatants.

In the same film, the lovers accost a group of American sailors along the course of their liberating crime spree. Their immediate reaction, expressed by Marianne, is "Damn Americans!" an obvious outlet of the frustration so many French communists felt towards American hegemony. Ferdinand then reconsiders, "That's OK, we'll change our politics. We can put on a play. Maybe they'll give us some dollars." Marianne is puzzled but Ferdinand suggests that something the Americans would like would be the Vietnam War. The ensuing sequence is a makeshift play where Marianne dresses up as a stereotype Vietnamese woman and Ferdinand as an American sailor. The scene ends on a brief shot revealing a chalk message left on the floor by the pair, "Long live Mao!" (Vive Mao!).

Notably, he also participated in Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from La Chinoise), Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

[edit] Bertolt Brecht

Godard's engagement with German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (Verfremdungseffekt) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (in Brecht's case theater, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used filmic expression for specific political ends.

For example, Breathless' elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content.[citation needed] Godard also employs other devices, including asynchronous sound and alarming title frames, with perhaps his favorite being the character aside. In many of his most political pieces, specifically Week End, Pierrot le fou, and La Chinoise, characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions.

[edit] Marxism

A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard's early work. Godard's direct interaction with Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until Week End, where the name Karl Marx is cited in conjunction with figures such as Jesus Christ. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie's consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man's alienation — all central features of Marx's critique of capitalism.

In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Ranciere states, "When in Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism, and of a feminist denunciation of women's false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story." The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticizing the Marxist rhetoric, rather than solely being tools of education.

Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analyzing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity. Georges Sadoul, in his short rumination on the film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman". '

[edit] Revolutionary period

The period that spans from May 1968 indistinctly into the 1970s has been subject to an even larger volume of inaccurate labeling. They include everything from his militant period, to his radical period, along with terms as precise as Maoist and vague as political. The term revolutionary, however, gives a more accurate impression than any other. The period saw Godard align himself with a specific revolution and employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric.

[edit] Films

Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in Maoist ideology. He formed the socialist-idealist Dziga-Vertov cinema group with Jean-Pierre Gorin and produced a number of shorts outlining his politics. In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. His films became intensely politicized and experimental, a phase that lasted until 1980.

According to Elliott Gould, he and Godard met to discuss the possibility of Godard directing Jules Feiffer's 1971 surrealist play Little Murders. During this meeting Godard said his two favorite American writers were Feiffer and Charles M. Schulz. Godard soon declined the opportunity to direct; the job later went to Alan Arkin.[citation needed]

[edit] Jean-Pierre Gorin

After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle republic", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like-minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. The most notable of these collaborations was with a young Maoist student, Jean-Pierre Gorin, who displayed a passion for cinema that grabbed Godard's attention.

Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was Tout va bien, which starred Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, at the time very big stars. Jean-Pierre Gorin now teaches the study of film at the University of California, San Diego.

[edit] The Dziga Vertov group

The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker—whose adopted name is derived from the verb to spin or rotate[5] and is best remembered for Man with the Movie Camera (1929) and a contemporary of both the great Soviet montage theorists, most notably Sergei Eisenstein, and Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Part of Godard's political shift after May 1968 was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle.

[edit] 1980 - 1999

His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example Passion (1982), Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982), Prénom Carmen (1984), and Grandeur et décadence (1986). There was, though, another flurry of controversy with Je vous salue, Marie (1985), which was condemned by the Catholic Church for alleged heresy, and also with King Lear (1987), an extraordinary but much-excoriated essay on William Shakespeare and language. Also completed in 1987 was a segment in the film ARIA which was based loosely from the plot of Armide; it is set in a gym and uses several arias by Jean-Baptiste Lully from his famous L'armide.

His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — Nouvelle Vague (New Wave, 1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December, 1995), and For Ever Mozart (1996). Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991) was a quasi-sequel to Alphaville but done with an elegiac tone and focus on the inevitable decay of age. During the 1990s he also produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series Histoire(s) du cinéma, which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself.

[edit] 2000 - Present

Godard has continued to work actively into his seventies. In 2001, Eloge de l'Amour (In Praise of Love) was released. This film is notable for its use of both film and video, the first half captured in 35 mm black and white, the latter half shot in color on DV, and subsequently transferred to film for editing. The blending of film and video recalls the statement from Sauve Qui Peut, in which the tension between film and video evokes the struggle between Cain and Abel. Eloge de l'Amour is rich with themes of aging, love, separation, and rediscovery as we follow the young artist Edgar contemplating a new work on the four stages of love (should it be an opera? a film?). He meets up with a lost love who is terminally ill, and at her passing we are thrust into the second half of the film where Edgar meets with her at her grandparent's house two years before. Producers for Steven Spielberg are negotiating the purchase of her grandparent's World War II story; the young woman attempts to stall the deal. This is one of Godard's most tender films, yet it is characteristically enigmatic and demands the viewer's full attention.

In Notre Musique (2004), Godard turns his focus to war, specifically, the war in Sarajevo, but with attention to all war, including the American Civil War, the war between the US and Native Americans, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The film is structured into three Dantean kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Godard's fascination with paradox is a constant in the film. It opens with a long, ponderous montage of war images that occasionally lapses into the comic; Paradise is shown as a lush wooded beach patrolled by US Marines.

Godard is currently finishing a new film, Film Socialisme, for which a trailer has been released.[6] He is rumored to be considering directing a film adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn's "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," an award-winning book about the Holocaust.[7]

[edit] Tributes

  • " From Hollywood to the Third World, from the mainstream to the Avant-Garde, Godard's name is perhaps the only one that occurs wherever cinema is discussed or produced." -- Colin Myles MacCabe
  • " Like Picasso, Godard reveals to us throughout his work his world as source and subject; the artist's studio, the objects of his daily life, the references to and repitions of his own works, the layering of words and images, the women he has loved, the horrors of war." -- Mary Lea Bandy.
  • " Godard's is an art of plastic age, of fluent, pliable, putty characters." -- Raymond Durgnat
  • " Godard's importance lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to (though, during the early period, at the same time within) mainstream cinema: it is with his work that film becomes central to our century's major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed through such figues as Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno as to whether realism or modernism is the more progressive form." -- Robin Wood.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  • Steritt, David. 1998. "Jean-Luc Godard Interviews". Mississippi: University Press.

[edit] Further reading

  • Temple, Michael. Williams, James S. Witt, Michael. (eds) 2007. For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing
  • Morrey, Douglas. 2005. Jean-Luc Godard. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6759-6
  • MacCabe, Colin. 2003. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury.
  • Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
  • Godard, Jean-Luc: The Future(s) of Film. Three Interviews 2000/01. Bern — Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 2002. ISBN 978-3-906127-62-0
  • Loshitzky, Yosefa. The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci.
  • MacCabe, Colin. 1980. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. London: Macmillan.
  • Silverman, Kaja and Farocki, Harun. 1998. Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press.
  • Sterrit, David. 1999. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Temple, Michael and Williams, James S. (eds). 2000. The Cinema alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • Almeida, Jane. Dziga Vertov Group. São Paulo: witz, 2005. ISBN 85-98100-05-6.
  • Nicole Brenez, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James E. Williams, Michael Witt (eds), Jean-Luc Godard:Documents, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007
  • Godard Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
  • Diane Stevenson, "Godard and Bazin" in the Andre Bazin special issue, Jeffrey Crouse (ed.), Film International, Issue 30, Vol. 5, No. 6, 2007, pp. 32–40.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAMEGodard, Jean-Luc
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTIONFrench-Swiss filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH3 December 1930
PLACE OF BIRTHParis, France
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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