Jean-Luc Godard, like many of his European contemporaries, came to filmmaking through film criticism. This collection of essays and interviews, ranging from his early efforts for La Gazette du Cinema to his later writings for Cahiers du Cinema, reflects his dazzling intelligence, biting wit, maddening judgments, and complete unpredictability. In writing about Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Truffaut, Bresson, and Renoir, Godard is also writing about himself,his own experiments, obsessions, discoveries. This book offers evidence that he may be even more original as a thinker about film than as a director. Covering the period of 1950-1967, the years of Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, Alphaville, La Chinoise, and Weekend, this book of writings is an important document and a fascinating study of a vital stage in Godard's career. With commentary by Tom Milne and Richard Roud, and an extensive new foreword by Annette Michelson that reassesses Godard in light of his later films, here is an outrageous self-portrait by a director who, even now, continues to amaze and bedevil, and to chart new directions for cinema and for critical thought about its history.

Cinema is quite simply a unique book from one of the most influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Here, Jean-Luc Godard looks back on a century of film as well as his own work and career in the industry. Born with the twentieth century, cinema became not just the century's dominant art form but its best historian. Godard argues that - after the century of Chaplin and Pol Pot, Monroe and Hitler, Stalin and Mae West, Mao and the Marx Brothers - film and history are inextricably intertwined. Against this backdrop, Godard presents his thoughts on film theory, cinematic technique, film histories, as well as the recent video revolution. As the conversation develops, Godard expounds on his central concerns - how film can 'resurrect the past', the role of rhythm in film, and how cinema can be an 'art that thinks'. Cinema: the archaeology of film and the memory of a century is a dialogue between Godard and the celebrated cinphile Youssef Ishaghpour. Here Godard comes closest to defining a lifetime's obsession with cinema and cinema's lifelong obsession with history.

Artist and photographer Joke Robaard, originally trained in fashion, investigates human configurations (e.g., networks of friends or neighbors). After "directing" individuals into certain positions and patterns in relation to one another, she photographs them, using clothing to illustrate where connections lie and how they constantly shift.