Gilberto Perez

Nachdem neulich ein imbeziler Text zu Godard verlinkt war, hier ein schon etwas älterer, sehr schöner, der sich in einen Dialog nicht nur mit Colin McCabes Godard-Buch begibt, sondern auch mit dem Werk selbst. Sehr klug, sehr kundig, wunderbar geschrieben, Passagen wie diese: "Critics and academics are prone to overrate a work as critical and academic as the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which plays an intricate game of intellectual montage with incessant references and cross-references. It is at all events thought-provoking, though often more interesting in the provocation than in the thought." Der Autor ist der Filmkritiker und -theoretiker Gilberto Perez, den ich nicht kannte, der mir aber nach ersten ergoogelten Informationen hoch interessant scheint. Hier ein Amazon-Link zu seinem Buch "The Material Ghost", mit Aufsätzen zu Regisseuren von Keaton bis Kiarostami.

Und großartig ist hier die "Search Inside the Book"-Funktion, allein die Ergebnisseite zu Godard:

1. on Page 37:
"... and narrative: these are different aspects of the film medium, different ways in which it can behave. W~i~ i`lf~ Jean-Luc Godard said that every film is a documentary of its actors. For Robert Warshow the abstraction of Willy Loman in Death ..."

2. on Page 40:
"... Sica and Satyajit Ray, Rouch and Pennebaker, Ford and Nunez and Burnett, Kurosawa and Gutierrez Alea and Pereira dos Santos, Godard and Sembène and Kiarostami, Antonioni and Straub and Huillet. Not satisfied with a veneer, these filmmakers have sought from reality ..."

3. on Page 280:
"... their vitality and their viability. For these last the key figure in the rise of a film modernism was Jean-Luc Godard, who came to filmmaking with a self-conscious aware- ness of what had been done in the past and a readiness ..."

4. on Page 281:
"... of the medium while rescuing it for his purposes until, around 1968, he apparently decided it was beyond rescue. Watching Godard's films when they were coming out in the sixties gave me, at an impressionable age, my first experience of modernism ..."

5. on Page 282:
"... that appeals exclusively to the converted, the theoretically converted postmodernists who are fighting political battles in their heads. Still another Godard emerged in the eighties, a post-postmodern Godard who is again a modernist, though not so popularly involved a modernist as ..."

6. on Page 288:
"... the old universals and seeks a ground in the shifting particulars of history. One must put everything into a film, Godard once said; nothing can be left out with impunity, everything in the complex world of our modernity may pertain to ..."

7. on Page 336:
"... stays in the collective memory as an epitome of the nouvelle vague: the brisk and auda- cious Breathless of Jean-Luc Godard (1959). If the light of Lola was magical, the light of Breathless was existential: the undimmed light of the immediate ..."

8. on Page 337:
"... midst of a bedroom no less than in the streets-was itself not an improvisation but a calculated effect for which Godard and Coutard took pains to get the right film stock. This was not the first time that the reputedly amateurish ..."

9. on Page 338:
"... violence. As the protagonist and narrator, the central consciousness of this spy thriller taking over the space of real life, Godard purposely chose a character on the wrong side of the strug- gle, Bruno Forestier, an opinionated young man working for ..."

10. on Page 339:
"... Her, wrote Colin MacCabe in Screen in the days when that magazine was setting the pace of English-speaking film theory, Godard was "still offer[ing] an aesthetic position to the viewer," still "hesitating between the art cinema and the political cinema."' MacCabe ..."