Jean-Luc Godard
“I try to work not with an idea of vertical sound where there are many tracks distinctive from one another, but horizontally, where there are many, many sounds but it’s still as though every sound is becoming one general speech, whether it’s music, dialogue or natural sound.”
Variety has written of French film director Jean-Luc Godard (b.1930): “no single filmmaker has done more to test and reassert the possibilities of the moving image during the last half-century of the art form”. To his groundbreaking quest to explore the possibilities of the moving image must also be added his acute sensitivity to the power of sound to convey meaning and feeling, often wordlessly, often weaving music into the acoustic texture.
In [...]
“I try to work not with an idea of vertical sound where there are many tracks distinctive from one another, but horizontally, where there are many, many sounds but it’s still as though every sound is becoming one general speech, whether it’s music, dialogue or natural sound.”
Variety has written of French film director Jean-Luc Godard (b.1930): “no single filmmaker has done more to test and reassert the possibilities of the moving image during the last half-century of the art form”. To his groundbreaking quest to explore the possibilities of the moving image must also be added his acute sensitivity to the power of sound to convey meaning and feeling, often wordlessly, often weaving music into the acoustic texture.
In a conversation with Wim Wenders, published in 1992, Godard described his approach to sound: “I start at the cutting table by looking at the pictures with no sound. Then I play the sound without the pictures. Only then do I try them together, the way they were recorded. Sometimes I have a feeling there's something wrong with a scene — and maybe different sound will fix it. Then I might replace a bit of dialogue with dog barks, say. Or I put in a sonata. I experiment with things until I'm happy” (The Way of Seeing, trans. Michael Hofmann, Faber and Faber). Claire Bartoli in her essay on the soundtrack of Nouvelle Vague, wrote: "Godard, with large cuts of the scissors, divides the material into fragments, producing sound miniatures, as pure elements." Godard, in other words, behaves very like a composer. Such is the importance of sound to the director that one critic went so far as to state: “The soundtrack of Nouvelle Vague is Nouvelle Vague.”
Godard has a long-standing relationship with ECM, and for the last 25 years, his films have regularly incorporated ECM recordings. Godard’s 3D film, Adieu au language, for example, which was awarded the Jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival 2014, uses music by Giya Kancheli, Dobrinka Tabakova and Valentin Silvestrov (alongside Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Schoenberg).
Several key works by Godard have also been released on the ECM label. The double CD, Nouvelle Vague, presents the complete soundtrack (dialogue, music, noises) from the film of the same name and marked the beginning of the collaboration between Godard and ECM’s Manfred Eicher. Godard has said: “if you 'see' the soundtrackwithout the images, it will have an even greater impact." Among the musicians featured in the soundtrack are Dino Saluzzi, David Darling, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Giger, Meredith Monk and Heinz Holliger.
The 5-CD set Histoire(s) du Cinéma presents the complex interwoven soundtrack of Godard’s monumental video series, a work that is frequently cited as a magnum opus. It has been described as “an extended essay on cinema by means of cinema. A history of the cinema, and history interpreted by the cinema. An hommage and a critique.”
Four Short Films (2006) was ECM’s first DVD release. The disc presents four works by by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville: De l'origine du XXIème siècle, The Old Place, Liberté et patrie and Je vous salue, Sarajevo. Sukhdev Sandhu in the Daily Telegraph described these films as “video-essays, at once personal and political, artistic and abstract, that range across subjects from the role of memory in an amnesiac age to the status of the image in consumerist societies,” concluding: “they have a meditative intensity that is quite beguiling”.
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