Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour
Tranlated from French by John Howe
This book is a brilliant though at times incomprehensible dialogue between Jean-Luc Goddard, the film-maker and Youssef Ishaghpour, the cinephile.
This book was first published in French in 2000 and has only now been translated into English by John Howe, a journalist and a writer. With its collection of dialogues on Goddard’s concept of history of cinema, montage, video and cinema narratives, the book, undoubtedly, has its own separate existence. And yet to comprehend the true spirit of the book, it becomes necessary to understand the ‘birth’ of the book.
This book in fact emerges from Goddard’s masterpiece ‘Histories du cinema’. ‘Histories du cinema’ is a video made for television and can be broadly described as a history of cinema juxtaposed with and superimposed over the history of the twentieth century. It has been described by John Howe as a ‘dense collage’ of all sorts of film clips -early films, Hollywood films, other cinema, newsreel, still photographs, reproductions of painting, captions, subtitles et al.
The sound-track is made of snatches of recorded music, broadcast speeches, poems and this plethora of images and sounds are bound together by the voiceover of the auteur Goddard. This book thus becomes an explanatory note or a detailed footnote to ‘Histories du cinema’
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