Jean-Luc Godard's Political Filmmaking

by Irmgard Emmelhainz

Overview

This book offers an examination of the political dimensions of a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from the 1960s to the present. The author seeks to dispel the myth that Godard’s work abandoned political questions after the 1970s and was limited to merely formal ones. The book includes a discussion of militant filmmaking and Godard’s little-known films from the Dziga Vertov Group period, which were made in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The chapters present a thorough account of Godard’s investigations on the issue of aesthetic-political representation, including his controversial juxtaposition of the Shoah and the Nakba. Emmelhainz argues that the French director’s oeuvre highlights contradictions between aesthetics and politics in a quest for a dialectical image. By positing all of Godard’s work as experiments in dialectical materialist filmmaking, from Le Petit soldat (1963) to Adieu au langage (2014), the author brings attention to Godard’s ongoing inquiry on the role filmmakers can have in progressive political engagement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319720944
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	04/27/2019
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	327
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent writer and scholar based in Mexico City. She is the author of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico's Neoliberal Reconversion (2016; in Spanish) and The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine (Forthcoming; in Spanish).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Who Speaks Here?: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Militant Filmmaking’ (1967-1974).- 3. Elsewhere: Dialogue of Points of View: Jean-Luc Godard and Tiersmondisme .- 4. Technique and Montage: Saying, Seeing and Showing the Invisible .- 5. Representing the Unrepresentable: Restitution, Archive, Memory .- 6. Conditions of Visuality and Materialist Film at the Eve of the 21^st Century.- 7. Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this wide-ranging and incisive study, Irmgard Emmelhainz situates Jean-Luc Godard’s output—both his feature films and lesser known audiovisual pamphlets and essays—within the history of materialist aesthetics. Her theoretically sophisticated examination of his oeuvre in this perspective underpins a compelling retrieval of him as a fundamentally political artist and offers an enormously rich contribution to how we think about his work.” (Michael Witt, University of Roehampton, UK)