Four Short Films (DVD), Ecm, Music & Performance

A release dedicated to the work of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, this edition brings together four short films made between 1993 and 2002. Four short films, as writer Michael Althen notes, "that encompass everything: art and freedom, presence and memory, violence and passion. Four symphonies composed of images, tones, quotes, and soundtracks. Four essays in which the cinema itself seems to speak to us, in friendly dialogue with painting, literature and music - as a brother to all the arts." The release of this DVD in 2006 coincided with a major retrospective of Godard's work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and also marked fifteen years of close collaboration between JLG and ECM Records. The information spills and bleeds through these four films, independent pictures that are also interconnected, with themes and sub-themes carried from one work to the next. The DVD Four Short Films is issued with a 120-page hardbound book, incorporating the complete text of Jean-Luc Godard's and Anne-Marie Miéville's narration (in French and English translation), an essay by Michael Althen (in German, French and English), and more than 70 stills from the film, in black and white and color.