Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy

An intimate portrait of the turmoil that spawned the New Wave in French Cinema and the story of its greatest director Jean-Luc Godard. Godards early films revolutionized the language of cinema. Hugely prolific in his first decade--Breathless Contempt Pierrot le Fou Alphaville and Made in USA are just a handful of the seminal works he directed--Godard introduced filmgoers to the generation of stars associated with the trumpeted sexuality of postwar movies and culture: Brigitte Bardot Jean Seberg Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina.. As the sixties wore on however Godards life was transformed. The Hollywood he had idolized began to disgust him and in the midst of the socialist ferment in France his second wife introduced him to the activist student left. From 1968 to 1972 Europes greatest director worked in the service of Maoist politics and continued thereafter to experiment on the far peripheries of the medium he had transformed. His extraordinary later works are little seen or appreciated yet he remains one of Europes most influential artists.. Drawing on his own working experience with Godard and his coterie Colin MacCabe in this first biography of the director has written a thrilling account of the French cinemas transformation in the hands of Truffaut Rohmer Rivette and Chabrol--critics who toppled the old aesthetics by becoming legendarily directors themselves--and Godards determination to make cinema the greatest of the arts.