FOREIGN FILM

The Nation reviews a new book on my favorite French director, Jean-Luc Godard:

MacCabe--a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a film producer who has worked on some of Godard's later ventures--does a superb job at tracing the evolution of Godard's ideas. This is all the more important in that Godard always saw the passage from critic to filmmaker as a natural one--and that was because (maybe even before he understood it himself) he was on his way to becoming less a storyteller or a moviemaker than an ontologist steadily teaching us to study the seething interaction of the world seen and the process of observing and choosing. While Godard started out wanting to be Sam Fuller or Nicholas Ray, he has become a cousin to Roland Barthes, Noam Chomsky or John Berger (yet with a seasoning of Jerry Lewis and the best flavors of pulp--the girl and the gun have been eschewed, but they linger in his mind).

Click here.

If you've never seen Breathless, you should rent it right now.

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