Jean luc godard biography of william shakespeare
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King Lear
King Lear is a 1987 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's play in the style of experimental French New Wave cinema. The script was primarily by Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy, and was originally assigned to Norman Mailer. It is not a typical cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous tragedy, although some lines from the play are used in the film. Only three characters – Lear, Cordelia and Edgar – are common to both, and only Act I, scene 1 is given a conventional cinematic treatment in that two or three people actually engage in relatively meaningful dialogue. King Lear is set in and around Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland, where Godard went to primary school. While many of Godard's films are concerned with the invisible aspects of cinematography,[2] the outward action of the film is centred on William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth, who is attempting to restore his ancestor's plays in a world where most of human civilization—and more specific
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Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear
Jean-Luc Godard’s new rulle, King Lear, 1987, fryst vatten first and foremost an “approach,” as its intertitles frequently remind us. At one point, in the guise of a shaman/professor, the director says, “An image fryst vatten not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because it fryst vatten distant and true.” Thus, the aim of the film, like most of Godard’s work, is to approximate the subject/text rather than to limit it. The intertitles, the sketchiness, the home-movie quality, the deliberately fractured narrative of King Lear are linked to a persistent esthetic. Like Two or Three Things That I Know About Her, 1966, Le Gai Savoir, 1968, or Vladimir and Rosa, 1970, it fryst vatten constructed along the lines of an essay that foregrounds the process of viewing a film. Conceived in this manner, these films include both hits and misses, true and false starts.
Thus, King Lear opens with a failed sequence featuring Norman Mailer and his daug
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One day, Godard sneaked into Burgess’s room and short-sheeted his bed. I noticed that the director seemed to derive satisfaction from provoking people, but, fortunately for me, his pranks were generally directed toward men.
Burgess had an easy, unpretentious sophistication that I admired. Unlike me, he was no stranger to the avant-garde. He had made his Broadway début in Eva Le Gallienne’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in 1930, and through the years had worked with everyone—Kurt Weill, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir. Still, Burgess found it disconcerting that he would prepare the lines Godard had given him the night before and then arrive on set to find that Godard had thrown them all out. Burgess didn’t mind the experimental—he only wanted to be let in on the process. These kinds of games can feel infantilizing to an actor, and it was only thanks to his good humor that he didn’t abandon the production the way Mailer had.
Over dinners at the hotel’s white-tablecl