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In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless, would make him an icon of French cinema, inaugurating a career that has consistently expanded society’s definitions and expectations of cinema. That film alone would have reason enough to consider him an important filmmaker, but Godard went on to direct fourteen more features through 1967, culminating with his attack on bourgeois culture, Weekend.

Following this extraordinary run of films, Godard found himself at a moment of great change. His romantic and artistic partnership with Anna Karina had ended, to be replaced with a new (but short-lived) marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who would serve as a bridge to the current youth culture. Godard’s politics had also changed considerably since the 1950s. His conservatism, a relic of his parents’s politics, had been replaced with an interest in Maoism and an increasing distaste for anything evoking America. (Classic Hollywood cinema initially got a pass,...

+“Sometimes the class struggle is also the struggle of one image against another image, of one sound against another sound. In a film, this struggle is against images and sounds.”

- British Sounds

There was something in the air when Jean-Luc Godard took up the political banner of the late 1960s and shifted his filmmaking focus in terms of storytelling style and stories told, and in a general sense of formal reevaluation and reinvention. Always considered something of the enfant terrible of the French Nouvelle Vague, Godard was keen from the start to experiment with the conventional norms of cinematic aesthetics, from the jarring jump cuts of Breathless (1960), to the self-conscious playfulness of A Woman is a Woman (1961), to the genre deviations of Band of Outsiders (1964) and Made in USA (1966). But Godard was still, at a most basic level, operating along a fairly conventional plane of fictional cinema, one with...

Very few people see.

For Ever Mozart (1996) from Jean-Luc Godard is half Contempt (1963), a quarter The Seventh Seal (1957), and a quarter In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011).  Like every Godard film I've ever seen, I was challenged, annoyed, depressed, and moved.  Most films, if you're patient enough, can be appreciated in some way.  Godard actively antagonizes patience by confusing the narrative, using theatricality, and hammering home philosophical dialogue.  If you're on his wavelength, then the experience is probably an exhilarating one.  But, as with other modern poets, I am a world apart.  Where is the consistency?  Where are we going?  Where are the rest of the damn subtitles!?

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What a great start to the year. We’ve got hot stars, big hit TV shows, an indie horror flick that you really must see, an Oscar winner, and two from a legend. Pick your favorites to start 2014. Here’s how I’d rank ‘em…

We Are What We Are

Photo credit: eOne

“We Are What We Are”

Jim Mickle’s Sundance hit is a dark, twisted gem, a film that plays more like a Gothic thriller than a modern horror flick. It’s a wonderful reimagining of the Mexican 2010 film that recasts the Parker clan as a family on the edge of collapse after the matriarch dies in a storm. Struggling to keep their family together, they face the inevitable decay of their disgusting traditions. Mickle takes a giant leap forward with this genre hit, finding a visual sense that has propelled him to the front of the list of young horror directors.

Abdellatif Kechiche won a Palme d'Or for his latest film, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, about a lesbian relationship between two students. But since then the director has been criticised for his working methods, and the film's young stars have said they'll never work with him again

Abdellatif Kechiche has not been a happy man lately. His new film, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, about a French teenager embarking on a lesbian relationship, has been garlanded with ecstatic reviews and is performing robustly at the box office since its release in France earlier this month. And at the Cannes film festival, back in May, Steven Spielberg's jury awarded his film the legendary Palme d'Or.

Still, even the Palme seems a mixed blessing for this eminently serious, soft-spoken man. "There's a certain anxiety that comes with that sort of recognition," he says in French, making a habitual pensive gesture with his hands,...