Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58177 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com
After leaving his filmmaking base and home in France in 1978 for Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard's films became more overtly introspective but less revolutionary in his middle age. The 1983 First Name: Carmen is a perfect example of the director's reconnection with his roots in the French New Wave while musing about his own role, life, and legacy in the movement. Essentially three films bundled into one (or, more accurately, three levels of the film's self-awareness), Carmen stars Godard himself as a languishing filmmaker hired by his niece to make a movie; what he doesn't know is that she wants the project to be a front for terrorism. That submerged sense of betrayal and final futility permeates Carmen as we see a string quartet struggle through a Beethoven soundtrack (rather than Bizet), a love story of Carmen and Don José that crumbles, and Godard himself as the creator tempted to end up the sum of all that has undone his greatest efforts. An amazing, confessional film, First Name: Carmen finds Godard, as he did in the early days, making an endless loop of his life in cinema and the cinema in his life. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Great movie but don't buy it.
This is a very good Goddard movie that Fox Lorber treats badly. On both video and DVD it is advertised as letterbox but it is actually full frame on both. If that doesn't bother you then movie is worth seeing just to enjoy Goddard presenting himself as an institutionalized washed-up filmmaker determined to stay institutionalized..

Prenom: Carmen


One of J-L Godard's most poignant films and the saddest of his continuing interrogations on the meaning of love, `Prenom: Carmen' is an apocalyptic, autobiographical noir. Godard uses the language of noir to make a reflexive, personal essay on the nature of images and his own isolation. He loves the symbols of genre movies and doesn't deconstruct them so much as keep them as primal as possible, `Prenom: Carmen' is a film told in those symbols: a girl, a boy, a gun, a car, a terrorist front, a television screen flickering. In all of Godard's noirs about isolation and alienation (A Bout De Souffle, Vivre Sa Vie Band Of Outsiders, Pierrot Le Fou) there are only objects, people and colors, and everyone is a victim. It's a film about abandon, Godard himself has been abandoned, he's a director gone crazy, finding refuge only among the sick, staying in hospitals, the girl, the one who shouldn't have been named Carmen, has abandoned Joseph, who has been abandoned by the saint of the same name. This is cinema, in its purest form, just as Godard wrote `Nicholas Ray is cinema' in the Cahiers of his past, I write `Godard is cinema' because he's taken Ray, he's taken Hitchcock, he's made images that transcend us to another level, the flickering television that Joseph caresses, feeling his solitude in the almost-musical crashes of imagery that reflect off the screen, the blue light that awakens him tells him that it is the end. Quoting `that American film' (`Carmen Jones') Carmen tells Joseph `If you love me that's the end of you' and that is a metaphor for the entire film, it's about the destruction of love, it's about the impossibility of love, it's about solitude. `I'll tell you about it tomorrow' Carmen says at one point, `it is tomorrow' he answers, and for a moment Godard creates an incendiary, much too emotionally powerful scene and we want to turn away from it, he shows us the distance between these two lovers that could have never really love each other, and we feel their desperation, their madness even, they exist, the screen opens up to us and we are with them, it is more than film, it is art at it's most powerful, because Godard has broken the barriers, the ones another director would have put up to separate us from them, suddenly emotions exist, and cinema isn't about itself but about us, and the images continue to come and the film ends, but something has happened.

Regarding the aspect ratio
In response to one of the amazon reviewers, the correct aspect ratio for "First Name: Carmen" is 1.33:1. As proof, you can see the reel markers while watching the DVD. Thus, while the film might have been "window boxed" to absolutely contain all the edges, a full frame format is adequate and "normal" for films in this ratio. Almost all of Godard's feature films from "Passion" onward can be formatted correctly in the same ratio. "King Lear" and "For Ever Mozart" were soft-matted, meaning they could be projected at 1.85:1 and 1.66:1, respectively, in theatre screenings while matting part of the image in the projector gate. For example, the out-of-print, Cinematheque Collection VHS tape of "King Lear," which is full frame, contains more of the image at the top than a theatrical presentation does.