The film legend dies at 91
Jean Luc Godard died
09/13/2022 11:44
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Jean-Luc Godard celebrated his greatest successes in the 1960s, when, as a leading figure in the “Nouvelle Vague”, he was one of the founders of a new era of cinema. But his influence on the medium of cinema goes far beyond that. The French director died at the age of 91.
Demanding and experimental: some have called Jean-Luc Godard the god of intellectual cinema, others the freest thinker in cinema. And Godard himself called what he did not film, but produced.
Godard, who has now passed away at the age of 91, was one of the most innovative and influential directors. His wife confirmed his death to the Swiss news agency SDA.
French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke. He paid homage to the deceased as a brilliant director and pioneer of modern cinema. Godard was a “national treasure,” Macron wrote on Twitter. And again: “Jean-Luc Godard, the greatest iconoclast among the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, has created an extremely modern and very free art”. He also posted a photo showing Godard with his signature horn-rimmed glasses and a movie camera.
Up to the limit
In his works, the Franco-Swiss director pushed the limits of classic cinema and the medium of film. With him died the last leading director of the “Nouvelle Vague” (French “New Wave”).
Godard has directed over 60 films. Among his best known are “The Contempt” (1963), “A Married Woman” (1964) and “Out of Breath”, with which he celebrated his film debut. When he shot the drama with Jean-Paul Belmondo in 1959, he was unknown to the public and completely sold out. The film, for which François Truffaut wrote the screenplay, became a masterpiece and the son of a Swiss doctor, born in Paris, was considered an overnight genius.
Instead of shooting in the studio as usual, Godard captured the cafes and streets with his hand-held camera, in front of which Jean-Paul Belmondo moved freely. His cuts followed neither rules nor rhythms. Godard revolutionized the language of cinema in 1960 with “Out of Breath”. Since then he has tirelessly experimented with form, content and viewers’ viewing habits. He needs his freedom of him. And he gets it by creating a certain confusion and playing by the usual rules, it was his belief in him.
Dissolution of narrative structures
The director was the most provocative and innovative of the protagonists of the “Nouvelle Vague”. Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette belonged to this style, which at the end of the 1950s moved away from French cinema, which had become too conventional for them. They made the authors’ individual worldview, personal style and cinematic experimentation a hallmark of their cinema.
It revolutionized cinema in the 1960s.
(Photo: IMAGO / Ronald Grant)
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But Godard wanted to renew more than just cinema. He wanted to explore his limits, invent new forms. He quarreled with Truffaut, whom he considered too conformist, and increasingly turned his back on the “Nouvelle Vague”.
While his gangster stories “Out of Breath” and “The Contempt” about a screenwriter with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli still have plots in the classic sense, since the mid-1960s the plots have become increasingly fragmented. In 1967’s “Weekend”, Godard began to radically dissolve the conventional narrative structure. In the film about a couple’s weekend getaway, there is no more plot, only snippets of action and streams of images and associations.
Lifetime Achievement Oscar
In his latest work, Godard continued his quest for formal and stylistic freedom in a more radical way than ever. This is the case of “Bildbuch” of 2018, a kaleidoscope of images and excerpts from films that accompany Godard’s comments, sometimes even with a cacophonic soundtrack. Godard tackles topics such as war and war crimes and shows, among other things, the murders of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia.
While in the previous collages “Film socialisme” and “Adieu au langage” there were still protagonists, in “Bildbuch” the dean did without any characters. In Cannes he was awarded a special palm. Godard received the Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2010.
Corruption, conflict in the Middle East, the Vietnam War: Godard has always been political in his films. In “The Chinese Woman” he revealed himself to be a Maoist and “The Little Soldier” recalls the horrors of the war waged by the French army against the independence movement in Algeria. The film was initially banned in France.
“Star Wars” was “too stupid” for him
With “Mary and Joseph”, a story about the Immaculate Conception, he provoked the Catholic Church. The film was condemned as blasphemous by the Vatican and indexed by some countries. And in “Deutschland Neu (n) Null” he was the subject of the reunification of Germany.
Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930 into a middle-class Protestant family living in France and Switzerland. After attending school in Nyon, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, he returned to Paris after his parents’ divorce, where he founded the film review magazine “Cahiers du Cinéma” together with the co-founders of the “Nouvelle Vague” Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer. Since the early 1980s he has lived in seclusion in Switzerland in Rolle on Lake Geneva.
Godard’s films are manifestations of an intellectual cinema, in which there is history and reflection on history, narrative and questioning of narration. And this includes the question of image and language and their relationship to each other. Godard rejected the idea that language and words are copies of reality. Few films have been box office hits. But commercial cinema has never interested Godard. For him, films like “Star Wars” or “The Matrix” were simply “too stupid and too ugly”.
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