JLG Carnival! #2

JLG: "A man, nothing but a man... no better than any other, but none better than he."

Intro.
[Hullo TLC! The JLG Carnival is back this week with books and articles and other stuff you probably won't read. Let's welcome gaston and his brief musing on viewers and JLG.]

With audiences, there is usually an offended resistance towards Jean-Luc Godard's films. Claims to his snobbery, contextual lameness, and some other superficial annoyances disinterest casual viewers to the point of anger and disgust. Such reactions are, unfortunately, expected from on-the-fly moviegoers who look for nothing more than mordant pleasure or brief life lessons. But to anyone who claims to be a student of culture, and more appropriately cinema, there is arguably no filmmaker whose oeuvre is richer than Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard's constant exercise of filmed and recorded language is incomparable, mainly because few filmmakers have considered the motion picture as a language. His fascinating use of sound, text, and image isn't intended to mix in or complement each other to create some "real" effects; on the contrary: his sounds, text, and images are all utilized to their genuine power to present multiple thoughts pertaining to cinema's relationship with the world.

It is understandably considered that Godard's practice as stated was born in the late sixties, beginning with some of his first forays into the filmed essay, mastered with his Dziga Vertov Group documentaries and video essays of the seventies. Though this isn't to say that his earlier, more celebrated films are useless; those films represent Godard's fascination with narrative where secondhand characters excavate a radically blooming Paris in the sixties. Although there aren't any messages or montages, Godard's early films still represent a relationship between text (voice-overs), image, and sound -- it should be mentioned that Godard was probably forced to dabble with post-synchronized sound due to monetary reasons considering the expense of sound equipment. There are also Godard's infantile thoughts on socialism by way of Hollywood and crime novels (I use the term infantile not because his thoughts are childish, but because his views on socialism are relatively basic compared to his later, wiser films). And then there is some deserved interest towards the comparison between his youthful narrative films of the sixties and his more thought-provoking and classical study on the narrative form of the eighties, where his take on the narrative as thought blossomed and ultimately matured.

-gaston monescu

Books.
There are many books on JLG and his work. Here are good places to begin:
Godard on Godard by JLG
Jean-Luc Godard by Douglas Morrey
Speaking About Godard by Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman
For Ever Godard by Michael Temple
Nul mieux que Godard by Alain Bergala
Jean-Luc Godard: son + image, 1974-1991 by Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy
Godard: images, sounds, politics by Colin MacCabe
Jean-Luc Godard: interviews by JLG
Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 by Colin MacCabe
The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000

Articles and Interviews.
Expanding the article links wig and David began at TLC. Some interviews, too. Do some browsing.
Jean-Luc Godard by Craig Keller
Only the Cinema by John Conomos
A Beautiful Exception: Godard's For Ever Mozart by Fergus Daly
Leap Into the Void: Godard and the Painter by Sally Shafto
The Man With The Magnétoscope by Alexander Horwath
Thanatos ex Machina: Godard Caresses the Dead by David Sterritt
End Game: Some thoughts provoked by recent exhibitions, and Godard's Éloge de l'amour by Jon Jost
Germany Year 90 Nine Zero by Marc Lauria
Detective by Anna Dzenis
Rosenbaum on Histoire(s) du Cinema
Numéro Deux Godard’s synthesis: politics and the personal by Reynold Humphries
Le Gai Savoir Godard and Eisenstein—notions of intellectual cinema by Ruth Perlmutter
Le Gai SavoirPicture and act—Godard’s plexus by James Monaco
Speaking and Writing About Godard: A Response to Nochimson and Sutton by David Sterritt
For Ever Godard. Two or three things I know about European and American Cinema by Peder Grongaard
Qu'est-ce que l'art, Jean-Luc Godard? by Louis Aragon[!]
On Jean-Luc Godard by Christopher Mulrooney
Godard's Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma by Robert Keser
I, a Man of the Image by Michael Witt
In Images We Trust by Hal Hartley
JLG's BFI page

TLC JLG MoM thoughts.
David discusses Sontag article
wigwam on Caméra-oeil
roujin on 2 or 3 Things...
Eddie Yang on Band of Outsiders
Eddie Yang on Je vous salue, Sarajevo
Ally on Breathless
Simon M on Band of Outsiders
David on For Ever Mozart
James on a bunch
Eddie Yang on Sympathy for the Devil...
Mango on 2 or 3 Things
Carmelo on several
wigwam on L'amore
wkw on Hail Mary
Carmelo on For Ever Mozart/Notre Musique
Will on Notre Musique
Eddie Yang on Anticipation
James on Prenom Carmen/Made in USA
Simon M on Masculin feminin
Eddie Yang on Puissance de la parole
Will on Passion/Carmen
wigwam on Le gai savoir
Will on Helas pour moi
Eddie Yang on Une femme mariee
Simon M on Made in U.S.A.
James on Married Woman/Notre Musique/JLG/JLG
Some new ups