Pitt Professor Colin MacCabe Is Author of Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, The First Biography of Director Jean-Luc Godard

PITTSBURGH—Colin MacCabe, University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Professor of English and Film, has written the first biography of French Director Jean-Luc Godard, titled Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004). The book's publication will be celebrated with a film and book signing today beginning at 6:30 p.m. at MoMA Film at the Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23rd St. at Lexington Ave., N.Y.

At the University since 1985, MacCabe also is a professor of English at the University of Exeter and serves as the chair of the London Consortium, which he cofounded in 1995. He is the author and producer, respectively, of The Eloquence of the Vulgar (The British Film Institute, 1999) and BaadAsssss Cinema (The Independent Film Channel, 2002).

In Godard, MacCabe looks at the French cinema's transformation in the hands of Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol, other legendary directors. Godard's early films—Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, and Made in USA—revolutionized the language of cinema. His films introduced such stars as Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Ann Kaina.

During the '60s, Godard turned away from Hollywood as his work became influenced by the activist student left. From 1968 to 1972, he experimented on the far peripheries of the medium he had transformed. While he remains one of Europe's most influential artists, his later works are little seen or appreciated.

The two films from MoMA's Film and Media Archive to be shown are Suave qui peut (la vie), at 6:30 p.m., and The Old Place: Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of 20th Century, at 8:30 p.m. The book signing will begin at 8 p.m.

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2/20/04/tmw