Intoxicating and informative, a personal glimpse at one of the masters of cinema that will appeal to casual readers and...
Meticulously detailed biography of the renowned filmmaker, from his early days as a critic to success as director of such classic French New Wave films as Contempt and Alphaville.
Born in 1930, art-school reject Godard spent the immediate postwar years watching every movie he possibly could, mostly at the Cinémathèque in Paris. He became a teenage critic for Cahiers du cinéma, where he honed his attention to detail and ultimately crafted the theory that would become the basis of his own films: What happens on screen is connected to what occurs in everyday life. The moderate success of a short movie shot in Geneva called Une Femme coquette allowed him to return to France in the hopes of directing a feature which would “rival Citizen Kane in outsized ambition.” What ensued was a memorable series of films that changed the face of cinema—audacious, radical works like Breathless and Weekend (which ended with the famous title cards, “end of story” and “end of cinema”). Godard never enjoyed much commercial success, but he wowed the cognoscenti and such up-and-coming directors as George Lucas and Brian De Palma. New Yorker editor, film critic and independent moviemaker Brody draws on interviews with those closest to Godard to chronicle memorable events in his life and also offers in-depth discussion of the films. Taking a page from his subject, Brody mixes art and documentary to consider Godard’s existence, forever aware that what occurred in the director’s life was directly related to his films, which themselves drew on the high-pitched political climate of the 1960s and ’70s before becoming more formal and elegiac in later years.
Intoxicating and informative, a personal glimpse at one of the masters of cinema that will appeal to casual readers and filmgoers as well as Godard’s devoted fans.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6886-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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