Monti is right. Not only any French film course, but any course on film

history could use a couple of weeks on Godard. But why not 4 films, 2

each week in a double screening so that you could get *A bout de Souffle*

*Vivre Sa Vie* *La Chinoise* or *Made in The USA* and one of the 80s

masterpeices as well: say *Sauve Qui Peut* or *Hail Mary*(comes with the

seminal short by A.M. Meiville (sp?) *The Book of Mary* and also a handy

text book in the form of the anthology af essays about *Hail Mary* that

just came out.) In the eighties Godard begins work on the image as such.

The cinemographic problems he tackels in thsi period are still at the for

front of formal problems of the cinema (for example "what does it mean to

decompose an image and how do youi shoot an image from behind?)

 

As for the original post on this thread which said that the poster found

that students didn't like Godard, I always thought that part of the job of

the film scholar in the university was to teach students how to see films

that they initially resist. Why show them what they want to see? What does

that theach them? Well it can teach them stuff about the cultuire from

which those films emerge and thats all to the good; but surely our job

invovles teaching the students how to see certain thinga that are not yet

visible to them ( and how to hear what is not yet audiable to them) At the

level of the relation between the students and the film text we ought to

be broadening a few horizons by presenting difficult material. This might

not be a popuylar veiw, but I think that what is at stake here is at the

at the heart of what we do.

lgs