James S. Williams 
Encounters with Godard [EPUB ebook] 
Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of
La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including
Nouvelle vague (1990),
Film socialisme (2010),
Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible,
Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

Tabela de Conteúdo

Illustrations Credits

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Encountering Godard



1. The Politics of Violence and the End(s) of Art: Speaking (for) the Other in
La Chinoise (1967)



2. The Signs in Our Midst: European Culture and Artistic Resistance in
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98)



3. Beyond the Cinematic Body: Digital Rhythms and In/human Breakdown



4. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben



5. Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event



6. Crossing the Darkness: Metaphor, Difference, Dissymmetry in
Notre Musique(2004)



7. Entering the Desert: Giving Face in
Film socialisme (2010)



8. Soft and Hard/Back to Back: Erotic Encounters between Voice and Image in the Zone



Coda: Cinema after Language

Notes

Works Cited

Select Filmography/Discography

Index

Sobre o autor

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include
Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema;
Gender and French Cinema (coedited with Alex Hughes); and
The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras.