25 great Godard gifts!

 Laura Forde’s brilliant videoed presentation of her thesis:

Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967
(link from Atelier Carvalho Bernau) Check out Laura Forde's great blog Thesis Anxiety. It has a lot more Godard material.

The films of Jean-Luc Godard have been written about perhaps more than any other cinematic works, often through the lens of cultural theory, but not nearly enough attention has been paid to the role of designed objects in his films. Collages of art, literature, language, objects, and words, Godard’s films have an instant, impactful, graphic quality, but are far from simple pop artifacts. The thesis this presentation derives from, “Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967,” explores and interprets the role of visual language within the films—title sequences, intertitles, handwritten utterances, and printed matter in the form of newspapers, magazines, and posters.

   By examining le graphisme within the cultural context of Paris during the 1960s, this thesis seeks to amplify the significance of graphic design in Godard’s first fifteen films, beginning with 1960’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and ending with 1967’s Weekend. While Godard was not a practicing graphic designer in the traditional sense, he was an amateur de design, an autodidact whose obsession with designed objects, graphic language and print media resulted in the most iconic body of work in 1960s France. [Laura Forde]

Désolée mais...Film Studies For Free's author has had a bit of a busy week blogging elsewhere on urgent matters.

Had things been different, today's post might have appeared on the intended date of December 3: Jean-Luc Godard's 80th birthday. Oh well... FSFF is pretty hopeful that Godard himself would approve of revolting students and academics and of their creative responses to proposed devastating cuts! 

Most of the links below were tweeted on the happy day itself by @filmstudiesff (FSFF's nifty, nippier, microblogging twin).

Don't miss a much publicised on the day "Godard Birthday gift to everyone" from Atelier Carvalho Bernau,  a wonderful Jean-Luc typeface. Don't forget FSFF's recent study of Godard's 1980 film Sauve qui peut (la Vie). Et, pour les francophones: Rencontre publique avec Jean-Luc Godard. 

A belated Happy Birthday, Jean-Luc!

Godard Theses Online:

• Gary Elshawe, 'The Depiction of late 1960's Counter Culture in the 1968',  MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2004

• André Habib, 'Origine et fin : Méthode(s). À partir et autour des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard', Masters thesis, Concordia University, 2001(in French)

• Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard and the other history of cinema, PhD Thesis,  University of Warwick, 2002

• Thibaut Schilt, 'Marginal Pleasure and Auteurist Cinema: the Sexual Politics of Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat and François Ozon', PhD e-thesis, Ohio State University 2005

 Other freely accessible, good quality resources:

• Idit Alphandary, 'Radical Hope or the Moral Imperative of Images in the Work of Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard', Culture Unbound, Volume 1, 2009: 487–501

• Scott Durham, 'On the Authenticity of Jargon: From Barthes and Adorno to Godard', World Picture 1.1, 2008

• Judith Halasz, 'Gender Politics and the Critical Gaze: Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin-Feminin', PhD Thesis excerpt, The Graduate Center City University of New York, 2004

• Andrea Hyde, 'Godard's Intertitles', Walker Art Centre Blog, November 10, 2009

• Laleen Jayamanne, '"Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma OR “Memory of the world”, Screening the Past, Issue 23, 2008

• Olivia Keung, 'The cinematic rendering of unconscious space: Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville and Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva', Faculty Project, University of Waterloo, 2004

• Roland-François Lack, The point in time: precise chronology in early Godard',  First published in Studies in French Cinema 3:2 (2003), 101-109

• Roland-François Lack, 'Good work, little soldier: text and pretext', (on Godard’s Le Petit soldat and Denis’s Beau travail), first published in Journal of European Studies 34:1-2 (2004)

• Roland-François Lack, 'A Bout de souffle: The Film of the Book", first published in Literature Film Quarterly 32:3 (2004)

• Roland-François Lack,‘Sa voix’ (on Godard’s voice), originally published in M. Temple, J. Williams, M. Witt (eds), For Ever Godard ( London: Black Dog, 2004)

• Roland-François Lack,‘Vivre sa vie: an Introduction and A to Z’, Senses of Cinema 48 (2008)

• Tony McKibbin, 'THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: High Mimetics in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma', Experimental Conversations, Issue 3, Spring 2009

• Richard Raskin, 'Five explanations for the jump cuts in Godard's Breathless', in 'The Art of Film Editing', Special Issue of P.O.V: A Danish Journal of Film Studies, edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma', JonathanRosenbaum.com, May 21, 2009

• Jonathan Rosenbaum, 'LE VRAI COUPABLE: Two Kinds of Criticism in Godard’s Work', JonathanRosenbaum.com, May 14, 2009

• Daniel Yacavone, 'Jean-Luc Godard and Roy Lichtenstein: Originality, Reflexivity, and the Re-Presented Image', Forum, Issue 1, Autumn 2005