Sunday 5 December 2010

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:
 Other freely accessible, good quality resources:

1 comment:

Darya Antonovna Papko said...

This is great!!




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