Young Jean-Luc Godard’s Ten Favorite Films
A selection of films in Godard’s style: a highly personal combination of aesthetic awareness, poetry and present momentum.
Jean-Luc Godard is a legendary genius in the history of filmmaking. He is, together with Francois Truffaut, one of the most solid pillars of the Nouvelle Vague, one of the most vanguard cinematic movements from the second half of the twentieth century, which reassessed many of the postulates surrounding the making of films. His impact however, went far and beyond, reaching theoretical developments like structuralism; burgeoning in a new way of perceiving the world.
In this discipline however, as in others, the Latin thesis ‘from nothing, comes nothing,’ is applicable. In Godard’s case, and that of other filmmakers, his genius can be explained by the exhaustive and incisive obsession he felt for other films, watching clips with a critical sense and curiosity, always willing to be amazed and to the discovery of the clues that great masters left embedded in their work, and to the rescue of pearls that can maybe be found in minor works.
We now share with you a list of ten American films that the director of Alphaville asserted where his favourite, a selection that casts a light on his distinguishing style, even if he made the list many years ago, when he was thirty-three. Films that are a combination of intellectual rigour; poetry; well-defined aesthetic senses; appreciative of tradition, and of the momentum of life. In this sense, Scarface can be found alongside Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo, and next to a true film lover’s choice: Ernst Lubitsch.
A list which, like that by Stanley Kubrick, invites us to explore the pathways of film guided by the expert hand of an unbeatable master like Jean-Luc Godard.
Scarface (Howard Hawks)
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Searchers (John Ford)
Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg)
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