“All you need to make a movie is a gun and a woman.”
I belong to that segment of the baby boomer generation that Jean-Luc Godard called “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” (Masculin Féminin). I am amazed at the persistence of the love of so many younger than me for Godard. A student in Paris from 1967 to 1973, I grew up in university canteens, courses of Lacan and Foucault, and Nouvelle Vague. But, unlike many other old people, who think that the certainties and passions of their youth are eternal, I always take it for granted that much of what I thought and loved in my youth has no currency today. When I see that certain young people of the elite say more or less the same drivel I said in my twenties, and become passionate about things that made me passionate at the time, I am left quite perplexed.
Around 1968 the passion for Godard was very much linked to the age variable. You had to be under 30 to appreciate him. Alberto Moravia, born in 1907, who was a film critic too, was rather lukewarm towards Jean-Luc, even though the latter had based a film on of one of his novels, Contempt. Bernardo Bertolucci, born in 1940, admired him. For us, the youth of the time, Godard was the Picasso of cinema. So, for a few years several young directors began to ape Godard at full blast. Godardism became a manner.
Godard Derivations
I have often read that after A bout de souffle (‘Breathless’) it is no longer possible to continue making films as they were made before it. Is this true? I do not consider here cinema as “contemporary art”, the elite cinema in which Godard’s influence remains evident. Here I am considering the cinema you see in regular mass theatre circuits.
The kind of “American” cinema that even the most sophisticated directors do today seems to have very little to do with Godard. (I will write “American” in quotation marks here, to refer to films not necessarily produced in the USA, but in the path of the mainstream cinematic aesthetic.) Since the 1980s, what I would call expressionist turbo-realism has taken place. Here viewers feel they are part of the scenes they are watching, as if they were among the characters, in the middle of a “lousy reality” as Sorrentino makes Fellini say: a rough, raw, often dirty reality. All this with an extremely fast film editing. This type of cinema makes classic films seem like stage plays filmed in slow motion; the actors of the time seem to move against the background of lacquered sets. Today, cinema tends more and more to involve us, not to distance us as Godard wanted. I would say that we are in a Caravaggesque and Rembrandtian phase of cinema, we are in the 17th century of cinema.
It is said that after Les demoiselles d’Avignon and Cubism it was no longer possible to paint as before. But today no one paints cubist paintings, indeed today almost no one paints anymore. In short, Picasso seems very far away. Yet that Picasso season still marks a watershed because we feel that, since then, art has begun to think of itself differently. In more or less the same way, with Godard we felt that we could think of cinema differently, but by no means is all cinema necessarily Godardian. A bout de soufflé, therefore, is comparable to the Demoiselles d’Avignon. Picasso and Godard cannot be a model for long, they are events.
However, not all of Godard’s inventions have been lost, since many of the directors now considered among “the best” use them in different contexts. We find them in Amos Gitai, the Cohen brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Vincent Gallo, Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, Leos Carax, Martin Scorsese.
Two filmmakers who seem to me to be close to the spirit of Godard are Quentin Tarantino[1] and Lars von Trier, because of their completely artificial conception of cinema. Tarantino has managed to kill two birds with one stone: he pleases both mass audiences and the cinephile elites. The absolute implausibility of his films is striking, breaking any mooring with historical reality, and politically correct to the point of absurdity. For example, in Inglourious Basterds Hitler is eventually killed by Jews, along with the entire Nazi establishment, in a Parisian cinema while watching a movie… It shows us history as we wished it would have gone. Tarantino repeats sardonically: “Cinema is just a machine to entertain people. Period.”
Von Trier uses titled chapters in films. Godard, too, often divided his films into chapters, the equivalent of the signs that Brecht lowered down from the ceiling onto the scene. Similarly, Dogville, the evil American town of the film of the same name, a pack of dogs and paradigm of any community, is not made of walls but the houses are plotted on the ground, nothing is invisible inside the houses. Dogville is not represented but signified.
I will try to separate the various traits that make up the Godard system. I will deal with: Parody; Verfremdungseffekt; Ungrammaticalities; Poor cinema; Beautiful women; Rants; Digressions; Boredom and Ritual.
Parody of popular cinema
In the 1970s, a friend of mine from Paris told me: “After all, quality European cinema is just a reflection on American cinema.” Because the real cinema was the American; this much was clear to us at the time. Cinema is first and foremost an entertainment industry, like Disneyland. Already with Méliès, it was made to amuse the masses. We Europeans were left with a thoughtful parody of Hollywood. An explicit operation in Le Mépris: a film about how an American historical-mythological film is produced.
I don’t know if my friend’s statement applies to all European cinema, it certainly applies to Godard. The Godard films we love – those of the 1960s – were meant to be a form of caricature of “American” cinema. When you think of “American” cinema, apart from the western, a cinema of gangsters and whores comes to mind. And Godard’s best cinema is one of gangsters and whores.
A bout de souffle takes up the theme of Humphrey Bogart’s hunted man. Bande à part mimics the movies about robberies that take a wrong turn. Mission Alphaville reproduces a dystopian science fiction film, while the short Un nouveau monde[2] mimics Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. Les carabiniers imitates a war movie. Pierrot le Fou is taken from an American noir novel, Obsession by Lionel White. Made in the U.S.A., as the title itself says, is a pastiche of American films and evokes The Big Sleep by Hawks. We liked Godard because his was a cinema of reflection and one that reflected something, in the sense that it was a reflection on cinema and reflected other films. And this is not only because in his films we often see characters watching other films (the sequence of the prostitute Nana in tears while watching Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is famous). He himself said that he was not interested in telling stories, but in using cinema to reflect.
It seemed to us that with Godard, even more than with the other directors of the nouvelle vague that we also liked (Truffaut, Varda, Rohmer, Melville), cinema finally ceased to be a minor art, fun for the crowds, that we could finally afford a modernist “avant-garde”, as had happened for the arts and literature. The most obvious comparison is with Andy Warhol, although no one has ever labeled Godard a ‘pop filmmaker’.
But what did we mean – and what do we mean today – by modernist or avant-garde art, and what would I call unpopular art?
At the time, the aesthetics of unpopular art was rigorously theorized by Barthes, Sontag, Eco… Those were the roaring years of structuralism, not only in France, and it was clear to all of us that art had to finally turn to the signifier. Art, therefore cinema too, needed to stop being pure narrative representation of the world, it needed not to be forgotten in what it represented, but turn to the signifier, that is, to art itself. In short, art had to become art of art, “iconoclast” as President Macron would say in Godard’s obituary. By ‘of’ I mean ‘about’, art about art; but ‘of’ also in the sense that art itself is unmasked, in which the viewer, far from being a user of representations, takes the eyes and ears of the artist. Godard never made us forget that a film is cinema, only cinema. He loved few films, cinema very much. Godard himself said that his films of the 1960s had no other subject “than cinema itself and its way of dealing with things”.[3]
Godard touched us because he always shamelessly expressed his love for cinema.
This focus on the signifier does not go against the fact that Godard said “cinema is truth 24 times a second” (Le petit soldat). He continued the cinéma-vérité (Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch), that is, the attempt to document realities without cosmetic filters, filming with a light camera in order to reveal the truth behind reality. His model was The Man with the Camera (1929) by the Soviet Dziga Vertov, ‘truth cinema’ of the Stalinist era. This seems to clash with the theatricality of Godard’s films, which he took from Sacha Guitry.
This is the point: unpopular art bets, precisely by shifting attention to the signifier, on the fact that it is possible to grasp something of the real. The cinema should not make us interested in Ferdinand Griffon, but in the very real Jean-Paul Belmondo who plays him in Pierrot le fou… The point is that the real world no longer has anything true about it: it is a world-show, steeped in signs. It was necessary to unmask the artificial form of nature.
Verfremdungseffekt (Estrangement Effect)
Godard had taken literally the double list of traits that according to Brecht separate “dramatic theater” from “epic theater” – here we would say, “American cinema” from “unpopular cinema”. Brecht, in the 1960s, was our aesthetic deus. And Roland Barthes was his prophet. Today Brecht is rarely represented, at the time theaters overflowed with Brecht’s plays. Godard sought epic cinema by producing distanciation, thanks to a completely anti-naturalistic acting. Its actors don’t really act, they quote. This anti-naturalistic turn of acting had its French precedents, for example in the way Robert Bresson made his actors perform. In Godard’s films, the actors read texts, which appear often completely disconnected from the plot of the film. In La femme mariée at the end the two lovers leave reciting Racine’s Bérénice.
Godard eschews any dramatic representation of the world, in which acts and events are signified rather than represented. An example. In Les carabiniers the two protagonists are soldiers who commit all kinds of war crimes, including, of course, rape. But when they are confronted with an unarmed woman, they just raise her skirt a little from behind with the tip of a rifle. In another scene the soldier makes the woman undress and she remains in a petticoat, one expects a truculent sex scene, and instead the soldier puts the woman on all fours and rides her like a horse… A potentially terrible scene results in a gag. In short, Godard carefully avoids to anguish, impassion or move us; Godard aims above all to make us laugh. In particular, to make us laugh at his own cinema. Significantly, his favorite films were those of the American comic actors, such as the Marx Brothers or Jerry Lewis. About the latter, educated Americans thought that his films were for children or for retarded adults, while Godard appreciated them as a very rare example of naïve cinema, and for this reason we (youth of the time) also liked the Douanier Lewis.
So, Godard also made us enjoy those “American” films, so compelling, in an ironic way, we watched them with a sneer. We enjoyed the James Bond films or Sergio Leone’s westerns as if they were Godard films, appreciating the cunning of cinematic artifice.
It is the paradox of the nouvelle vague: it has made us love great popular movies, while retaining a look as a producer and not as a consumer of cinema. Those who loved Godard dreamed of becoming directors themselves.
At the beginning of the film Two or Three Things I Know About Her, the lead actress, Marina Vlady, is presented twice almost identically: as Vlady and then as her character, Juliette. We often wonder throughout the film whether it is the actress or her character that is performing. This disconnection between actor and character makes us accomplices of an ars poetica. Normally we make a strict distinction between the work and its meaning – political, cinematographic, philosophical, psychological… – that would be written by the cinema critic or historian. Godard, on the other hand, reviews his own film as a critic throughout the film itself. Significantly, quite a few Nouvelle Vague filmmakers began their careers as critics in Cahiers du cinéma. From film criticism they moved on to making films that made cinema criticism.
In every film Godard wants to give us a “strong message”, a plenty of sense that clashes with the lack of sense, the absurd, of the narrative itself. He conveys his message with long rants. It’s as if between the solidity of the signifier and the gaseous state of the sense, he skipped the liquid state typical of “American” cinema, a leap that in chemistry is called sublimation. Godard’s sublimity lies in this: the boredom of the existential or political message of the film stands out against the effervescent background of senseless images and actions. This inclusion of the film’s “message” in the film itself will also be used by Pasolini, particularly in The Hawks and the Sparrows and Theorem.
In those years there was also the revival of Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty”, that is to say a theater that was almost the reverse of Brecht’s epic theater: shows of deep carnal involvement and sensations taken to the limit, even of a mystical type. How could we appreciate at the same time the Brechtian ratio and the Artaudian Mysteries? In fact, a cultural epoch is never just a certain thing, it is itself and the contradiction of itself. Art seduces us when it seems to attune the contradictions that tear an era apart. And our age wants to be both rationalist and Dionysian.
Poor Cinema
Godard uses film techniques already widely exploited by Italian neorealism: he relinquishes sound stages and he films on the streets, he makes actors improvise, like in the canovaccio scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte. He doesn’t use stage lighting; he shoots practically without a script. It is an almost sloppy cinema, at the time one would have said that his cinema was poor.
The term poor enchanted us in the 60s and 70s. The poor theater was the most popular (Grotowski, Barba, The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, Brook…). In Italy the Arte Povera movement then arose. Poor not in the sense of neorealism, which represented, and thus celebrated, a humble and poor world. Now the poverty was no longer that of the referent – as was then said then in semiotic terms – it was the poverty of the artist and his tools. The artist, now a rag, exalts the poverty of his materials. Indeed, Arte Povera often sarcastically represents “high”, classical figures.
The artist presents his works as a bricolage, the result of his arte d’arrangiarsi, art of getting by. In fact, the preference for the adjective “poor” was already a polemical gesture against a culture that wanted to be opulent for everyone, against “American” films, which lavishly showed off how much they had cost. Godard’s cinema is more that of a scrap merchant than that of an engineer.
So, the Paris Godard shows us does not sparkle, it is often miserable, wintery, dilapidated… Above all we see construction sites and housing projects. The many bistro scenes in his films are shot with real light, the dialogues in the cafés appear improvised, clumsy, like real bistrot conversations. Evidently Godard was looking for the cinematic equivalent of free jazz, of an extemporaneous music, with no score, a non-orchestral music. One of the most constructed arts, cinema, now exploited chance, letting images drip like in a Pollock painting.
Beautiful Women
Godard owes part of his initial success to the actresses he hired: Jean Seberg, Anna Karina, Marina Vlady, Anne Wiazemsky… Women he often loved and some of which he married. Thanks to him, some of these actresses became stars. Godard filmed his women, his signifiers, with loving irony.
Godard shows us the face of the starring actress at length just so we can admire her. Truffaut said that it is enough to have a beautiful woman to film, and the film is done. The plot of many famous films is just a halo around the Belle who is the real subject of the film. Godard reminds us of this ecstatic function of cinema: photographing beautiful people. “American” cinema has certainly always enhanced the beauty of actors and actresses, but this enhancement was masked by the narration, the charm of the diva had to be hypocritically stolen by the story.
Godard was among the first to see an essential change in the model of female beauty that took place then. In “American” films before 1965, even the most attractive actresses of the time appear to us today as carefully made to look uglier by the directors. They appear disfigured by a sort of wax that gives them all the same olive skin. Then the beautiful woman had to look old, she had to look like a forty-year-old even if she was 25. One aimed at the Junoesque perfection of the woman. The paradigm was Sofia Loren, who exhibited her erogenous zones with ostentatious majesty. In Italy at the time they were known maggiorate, “majored”, a neologism that appeared the inverse of minorata. “minored”. From the second half of the 60s, however, women are considered beautiful when they appear as pretty girls, even they’re 50. Today, beautiful women are those who remain teenagers, minors, in short, imperfect. Godard understood this teen-aging slide of attractiveness.
Ungrammaticalities
For right-thinking audiences it’s Godard’s ungrammaticalities that are unbearable. The immediate reaction, when something ungrammatical appears, is “so, what does this have to do with anything?” I heard this exclamation when I saw Le mépris with a young friend for the first time. Here, while Piccoli and Lang discuss the character of Ulysses walking through Capri, we see from time to time interpolating images of statues of Greek gods, which – an unacceptable offence at the time – were colored (as they actually were in Antiquity). “What’s it got to do with anything?”, my friend shouted. Ungrammaticality is something that breaks the supposed continuous line of the story.
Some Godardian grammatical errors are idiosyncratic. For example, the director suddenly eliminates the soundtrack and plunges us into the heavy silence of the silent film, and then suddenly returns to sound. Or, the film suddenly turns from positive to negative, and then returns again to positive. And to this we can find no reason. Sometimes Godard shows us a couple, but we only see the nape of the man’s neck completely covering the face of the woman. It is the rule of every love scene that the faces of both lovers should be clearly seen! Except in Magritte’s Les amants.
Another ungrammaticality that sends people into flying rage is the following: while a character is singing, the background music is suddenly turned off so all we hear is the singer’s voice, which appears ridiculous, pathetic, since it is supported only by silence.
Yet for some time we had become accustomed to famous ungrammaticalities, to those of Picasso in particular. In many Picasso portraits the features of the face, eyes, nose, mouth are shifted… compared to their “proper shape”. What is that delights us in these systematic blunders? The fact that they reduce to “a grammar” what we take to be a good form of reality: in Picasso a portrait is no longer a facsimile of a face, but it becomes an object regulated by a syntax different from that of the perceived world. The grammatical blunder, when successful, reveals art as construction, not as reconstruction. And narrative succession does not tell history, it tells stories.
Many Godardian ungrammaticalities have been adopted by “American” cinema, but made grammatical. Errors too can be regularized. In Kill Bill, for example, Tarantino shows us the heroine singlehandedly fighting a tide of yakuza that look like clones and the film veers for a while from color to black and white. Why is this blunder accepted by the audience here? Because we ipso facto ascribe an expressive sense to it: the unequal duel begins to appear too long, yet this length is necessary, which is why the director connotes the duel as routine by diverting it to black-and-white. A film comments on itself (that’s what every musical track does) and this self-commentary of the film – analogous to the commentary in ancient tragedies represented by the chorus – is accepted as a “grammatical” reflection.
Godard’s path to modernity, therefore, was essentially transgressive: multiplying “errors.” Instead, an author we adored, Buñuel, at the time focused above all on the suspension of sense. El angel esterminador (The Exterminating Angel) unfolds like a traditional film, but we’ll never know why those bourgeois characters are trapped in a prison without bars.
Even Godard often suspends sense. Why is it – a friend asked me – that at the end of Pierrot le fou, before killing himself, Belmondo paints his face blue? We can find many senses in it. Is it an anticipation of the image of the sunny sea that will close the film?… Any significance is welcome, but the fact remains that this final part has its own charm. Why? Because something as dramatic as blowing yourself up is represented as a theatrical staging, the farce of a clown.
Rants
The character who talks and talks, without being able to focus on a single theme, already had a story in the theater of the absurd (Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter). Godard inflicts ramblings on us in cinema too. It is one of the “ordeals” imposed on the viewer also taken up by “American” cinema, with the ramblings of particular characters in, for example, the films of Tarantino or the Cohen brothers. Sometimes in Godard the ramblings are duets, apparently lovers’ skirmishes, but which avoid bantering.
On other occasions the ramblings are political, mostly Marxist-Leninist clichés. These long lessons amused us because we gave them an ironic sense, but then we discovered that Godard was serious: he really wanted to teach us the lesson. When I saw La Chinoise shortly after its release, I took it for a satire of the Maoist groups that existed at that time, then we learned that Godard was a Maoist. In a way, it is as if Godard had become one of his characters in his first phase, as if Shakespeare had become Falstaff himself.
Narrative ramblings are also the long lists, which at the time were rampant in literary texts. Lists that seem endless. For example, the two soldiers in The Carabineers show their women an endless stream of postcards from all over the world.
Rambling is a cinematic portraiture: it doesn’t matter what the babbling character says, the important thing is his way of speaking. The rambling is a linguistic portrait of a character revealed in their fragility. Jabbering on illustrates the symbolic solitude of human beings: they are closed in their language, in fact they do not dialogue, they resolve themselves in a word that returns to the speakers themselves like a boomerang.
Digressions
“We have to put everything into a movie,” Godard said. His films never follow a straight narrative line: they are full of centrifugal branches; they seem to slide in all directions… Sometimes a film overflows towards reality itself, famous actors and actresses appear in passing playing themselves … Like everyday reality, the film is drenched in the unexpected. Godard disorderly plunders images and signs of reality.
In Two or Three Things I Know About Her we see two men behind a messy table full of books of all kinds. One of them opens a random volume from time to time and reads a sentence, which the other transcribes gravely, and thus they go on endlessly. They are Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two bizarre copy-clerks of Flaubert’s unfinished novel of the same name. In the end, the two heroes of the novel decide to copy all human knowledge. They are the sarcastic prophecy of Wikipedia. It’s quite clear that Godard considers himself a Bouvard-et-Pécuchet: it is as if he wanted to film everything, anything, but in a fragmentary way, like an Encyclopedia that has not yet found its order.
So far, Godard alone has attempted a History of Cinema that is itself a film. Histoire(s) du cinéma is a sort of monumental and buffonesque encyclopedia of cinema, from the Frères Lumière to a certain junk cinema of today (the film is 4 and a half hours long). This History of Cinema has now made history, so we can reconstruct other films in the same way as cinema has reconstructed the French revolution or the Vietnam War. Not only has the world become a fairy tale, as Nietzsche said, the fairy tale has become the world. If you make a vampire movie, for example, you have to respect all the traits of the vampire epic, fidelity to the myth coincides with historical fidelity. Thus, Godard’s typical film quotations have now become common currency.
This Histoire(s) has entered the semi-official list of the 100 best films of all time[4], i.e., the history of cinema enters the history of cinema… This is reminiscent of Russell’s paradox of collections of all collections that do not contain themselves as members. But the film on the History of Cinema can only be a jumble. What happened with the famous 1 : 1 scale map of China described by Borges: a map that has the same extent as what it maps. Of this map, Borges writes, only fragments remain, fragments scattered throughout China. Godard’s cinema is an open series of remnants of his immense attempt at a cinema that translates the whole of reality into images/signs. By laying bare the signifier, we arrive at building a double of the real.
Boredom and ritual
The boredom that Godard’s films, especially of the so-called political period, produce in the viewer, is evoked by anyone who hates Godard. I have seen a great deal of underground movies, especially American ones, from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were all artfully boring. Often disproportionately long, such as Andy Warhol’s Empire: eight hours of a fixed image on the Empire State Building. In the 1970s a provocative slowness was cultivated, in contrast to the speed of modern life.
Around 1972 a group of students of which I was a member met Godard at the screening of one of his unwatchable political films featuring Jean-Pierre Gorin, a screening which was followed by a debate. One student said he was bored to death. Godard replied that he really wanted to bore the audience, so that filmic pleasure would not distract it from the political reality on which he wanted to make an impact.
Godard had debuted with the successful A bout de souffle and had directed several films that did not fare badly at the box office, but then reached the most anhedonic, non-marketable avant-garde. The choice in favor of unpopularity after a great popularity surprised many. This militant turn was pandemic in the art of the time. When you see the retrospectives of many famous artists, you notice that their works between the late 1960s and late 1970s are mostly of political criticism. For a dozen years, avant-garde art was Bolshevik. Then this season also came to an end, as all seasons do.
But why was it so important for the avant-garde in those years to bore the public? The greatest theorists of this austerity had been Adorno and the Frankfurt philosophers: the more art bores the public, the purer and more revolutionary it is. Adorno exalts Schönberg precisely because dodecaphony is appreciated by the few… Of course, intellectual pleasure remains, similar to that which the solution of a mathematical equation can offer. But intellectual pleasure is in fact reserved for art producers. And intellectual pleasure was also sacrificed at that time: the Revolution was identified as the renunciation of all the pleasures of what Guy Debord had called the “society of the spectacle”. There was an ascetic hubris in political engagement.
This Puritan complacency had already cracked with the publication of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973), after which philosophical thought moved more and more towards a mystique of jouissance, of enjoyment. Later Godard also renounced Frankfurt anti-hedonism and returned to an ironic cinema, and also produced some good films, but by this time the Kairos was no longer there.
An Italian journalist wrote that chic audiences go to see Godard as if going to a ritual, considering then the members of that same audience become bored and some fall asleep. How true. Even when you attend a Noh show in Japan you become bored, the Japanese themselves often doze off, but this does not mean that they don’t love Noh theater. Because it’s a ritual? No, Noh dramas derive from religious mysteries but they are not rituals, even if they have the cadence of rituals.
In the 1960s and 1970s a passion for popular religious rituals spread. Avant-garde theater plays took the form of mystery rites. Thus a certain cinema became ritualistic, even revolutionary politics was represented as a ritual. Now, ritual is something boring in itself. The Catholic Mass, for example, especially when it was in Latin, was extremely boring. Yet for many, participating in the rite is essential. Why? Because the ritual does not aim to entertain, but claims to be a performative act, to affect reality. Godard’s militant cinema was boring because it wanted to be part of revolutionary action, not idyllic celebration of the Revolution. But when art wants to act, when it wants to affect reality directly (and not only indirectly, this is obvious because, as we know, life imitates art), it finds itself in a stalemate: art-as-action congeals into a dull representation, that is, in ritual.
Yet art, at the beginning, wanted to be a magical, effective act, not a mere pleasant reproduction. But once faith in magic is lost, even faith in a revolutionary magic, art remains art, a yearning desire for effectiveness. The charm and limit of Godard’s cinema is that he wanted to change the world while laughing at it. In this way he laid bare that failure which produces in us the enjoyment of art: the art of the Moderns is the delectable resignation to its futility.
NOTE
[1] Tarantino has always exhibited his love for Godard, especially for Vivre sa vie and Bande à part. Significantly, he named his production company A band apart; something Godard did not appreciate.
[2] in Ro.Go.Pa.G., 1963.
[3] Due o tre cose che so su di me. Scritti e conversazioni sul cinema, edited by Orazio Leogrande, minimum fax 2007.
[4] A list published by Sound and Sight and compiled every ten years by top cinema experts. https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time.