Encounters with Godard

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema; Gender and French Cinema (coedited with Alex Hughes); and The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras.

• Illustrations CreditsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Encountering Godard1. The Politics of Violence and the End(s) of Art: Speaking (for) the Other in La Chinoise (1967)2. The Signs in Our Midst: European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98)3. Beyond the Cinematic Body: Digital Rhythms and In/human Breakdown4. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben5. Music, Love, and the Cinematic Event6. Crossing the Darkness: Metaphor, Difference, Dissymmetry in Notre Musique(2004)7. Entering the Desert: Giving Face in Film socialisme (2010)8. Soft and Hard/Back to Back: Erotic Encounters between Voice and Image in the ZoneCoda: Cinema after LanguageNotesWorks CitedSelect Filmography/DiscographyIndex

"…a scholarly tour de force that opens up Godard's polymorphous oeuvre to far-reaching historical, political, aesthetic, and philosophical scrutiny … This is an indispensable contribution to Godard studies, attractively produced, and exhaustively referenced." — French Studies"A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole." — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible"Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century." — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema