Wave maker
The auteur who breathed new life into cinema… Godard :The Essential Collection 15
It’s hard to fully grasp the impact of the French New Wave now that most of the techniques it pioneered go unnoticed everywhere from reality TV shows to Marks & Spencer adverts. But when Jean-Luc Godard started running his camera through the streets of Paris on a wheelchair, improvising tracking shots in Á Bout De Souffle AKA Breathless (1960), he really was rewriting the language of cinema.
Still directing at the age of 85, Godard now has more than 100 credits to his name. This Blu-ray boxset contains only five – but they’re a handful of the enfant terrible’s most iconic and influential early masterpieces. We kick off with seminal New Wave text Breathless ( a heady collision of life, death, love, art, sex, philosophy, chain-smoking and boundless cinematic reinvention. Nearly six decades on, it’s still intoxicating stuff and still effortlessly, impossibly cool.
From there, we see his camera fall in love first with then-wife Anna Karina in the subversive anti-musical Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961, – and then with Brigitte Bardot’s bum in the sprawling meta-cinema of Le Mepris (1963, The Orwellian surfaces of Alphaville (1964,
offer the biggest intellectual chill of the set. But the surprise standout is Godard’s glorious perversion of his famous “gun and a girl” maxim – the Bonnie And Clyde- esque Pierrot Le Fou (1965,
Perfectly restored on Blu – cleaned up but not over-polished – and bristling with feature length docs, interviews and retrospectives, it’s a monumental collection. The sort that should come with a warning: other films may seem very dull after viewing… Extras › Intros › Documentaries › Featurettes › Interviews