Famous director Jean-Luc Godard died
French director Jean-Luc Godard has reportedly passed away. / Jean-Luc Godard died
Famous director Jean-Luc Godard, known as the father of the French New Wave movement, passed away… / Jean-Luc Godard died
Liberation newspaper based the news of his death on the relatives of 91-year-old Godard. Godard, who has a wealthy family and was born on December 3, 1930, in the 7th district of Paris’s luxury district, became the agenda in the 1960s by reversing cinematic boundaries.
Godard also inspired names such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino who came after him.
He changed cinema forever: Jean-Luc Godard dead
Legendary director Jean-Luc Godard has died. With his work, he left a lasting mark on film history. He is known for films like Out of breath and Contempt.
Jean-Luc Godard is dead. The French-Swiss director died today, September 13, 2022, at the age of 91, the Guardian reports. He is one of the key figures of the Nouvelle Vague that challenged and changed cinema forever in the 1950s.
⚫ Jean-Luc Godard est mort https://t.co/gDLynUc7Ta pic.twitter.com/LQ5DXWPgap
— Libération (@libe) September 13, 2022
Born on December 3, 1930 in Paris, the most illustrious of Franco-Swiss artists died on September 13, Le Monde learned, confirming an earlier report by Libération. And he did not leave empty-handed. Like all exceptional creative figures, he is taking with him something that has been torn from the collective consciousness. First, there is the loss of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, the electroshocks of images and sounds that his work rekindles in the memory of his contemporaries around the world and with a sphere of influence that very few French filmmakers ever reached.
Then there is the last roll of the New Wave, since Godard so personified it. A symbolic moment finally relegating what was dubbed “cinematographic modernity,” alive while Godard still was, into a chapter in the great book of cinema.
This creative rupture of modernity born with Italian neo-realism from the disaster of the Second World War is what Godard embodied more passionately, violently and painfully than many others, including his former New Wave companions. So much so that he immediately became the movement’s standard-bearer all over the world, an example followed and admired by all those who thought cinema was created to change the world.
An artist with a romantic temperament, an inventor of beauty like no other, a genius of provocation and a furious self-destructing personality, Godard delivered as many blows as he received. A filmmaker at turns adored and hated, Godard demands to be placed as high on the cross of modern cinema’s tortured gods as Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. They both preceded him into the grave on the same day, July 30, 2007. These three film icons engraved the modern odyssey of love’s disarray and the torture of couples in Celluloid’s inflammable marble.
A dazzling surprise
It would be an exaggeration to claim that it only took one film for Godard to rise to this level. Yet Breathless, his first feature film made in 1960, was an unrivaled lightning strike, including the rest of its creator’s career. A dazzling surprise, a stroke of genius, an instant public and critical success, an aesthetic shock and influence for many future filmmakers, Breathless remains part of the short list of films that have changed the history of cinema. Even so, its plot is startling in its banality: a young thug named Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) falls in love with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student living in Paris. The boy dreams of the impossible; the girl prefers to deal with the possible. She betrays him; he is shot by the police. While dying, he describes what happened as “dégueulasse” (disgusting), a word that his fiancée neither wants nor can understand.
What really matters in this film lies elsewhere: In the film’s emotional editing, in the sense of rediscovered freedom by bodies, language and spirits, in the proud allure of a cobbled-together and inspired cinema that in a single day seemed to have become a hundred years younger. It is also in this distillation of cinephilic material that extracts an equally singular essence from the mixed influences of Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Rouch and Ingmar Bergman. More than François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which preceded it, Breathless was the New Wave’s inaugural film because it invented the form that best corresponded to the movement’s innovative spirit and because it celebrated the coming of age of a generation discovering itself and imposing its values on French society.
The recognition of this film was a moment of precarious grace in Godard’s life and career, which was marked by the all-consuming permanent revolution. This began very early on within his family circle. This scion of the Franco-Swiss Protestant upper middle class lived through the horrors of the Second World War in the cocoon of the privilege afforded by his birth and his young age. The post-war period, during which he discovered his grandfather’s collaborationist affinities, served as a repellent. His increasing misbehavior led him to fall out with his family, who forbade him to attend his mother’s funeral in 1954.
In the meantime, the young outlaw had found a second family under the auspices of the ogre Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque française, and the critic André Bazin and his Cahiers du Cinéma comrades. They were preparing their invasion on the cinematographic scene by proclaiming their love of American genre cinema, their auteur policy and their detestation of a French corporation they considered prodigiously sclerotic. The New Wave itself, a movement of rebellious sons searching for freely chosen fathers, became the pursuit of an aesthetic genealogy. Yet this second family also fizzled out in the mid-1960s.
Permanent revolution
The price to pay for the New Wave’s undeniable artistic and ideological victory in the long run was its failure in terms of box office receipts and the group’s splintering into the many individualities composing it. Compared to the reformism of Truffaut and Chabrol, and the strategic withdrawal of Rohmer and Rivette, Godard became the one who kept the sacred fire of permanent revolution alive at the risk of a permanent rupture. This was a dangerous approach, combining the explosion of a genius mind and the temptation of a scorched earth policy, the dream of collective solidarity and a sinking into solitude. This was to be Godard’s destiny: furious victories and bitter disappointments, magnificent utopias and doubtful stumbles. His was the story of a man who never stopped wanting to recreate a family while ensuring that no one could ever fulfill this desire.
His work devoted to this ambiguous quest traces a long and winding path –more than one hundred films in a career spanning some sixty years and marked by several major cinematic periods. The first one sees an insolent young creator full of talent establishing himself in a few years as a great artist despite censorship for his film on Algeria (The Little Soldier, 1963) and the bitter failure of his attempt at fierce Brechtism (The Carabineers, 1963). A string of successive titles reminded us of his ironic and graceful genius, so typical of Godard, who melted in the crucible of cinema lightness and melancholy, puns and revolt, the ambition of thought and the lyrical trembling of emotions, quotations and inventions, dazibao and song, love of genres and the poetic freedom to betray them, the chronicle of his loves and the acute intuition of the social issues of his time. All this and so much more is on display in A Woman is a Woman (1961), My Life to Live (1962), Bande à Part (1964, and Masculin féminin (1966).
Contempt (1963), a haughty and torrid meditation on cinema with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, and then Pierrot le fou (1965), a Rimbaudian road movie about a couple on the run with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina – the woman Godard was separating from – were the touchstones of his artistic elevation, sanctioned by Aragon in the magazine Les Lettres françaises: “What is art? I have been struggling with this question ever since I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, where the sphinx Belmondo asks an American producer the question: ‘What is cinema?’ There is one thing I am sure of, so may I at least begin all stands before me and frightens me with an assertion, like a solid stilt in the middle of the swamp: art today is Jean-Luc Godard.” Thus begins the article “Qu’est-ce que l’Art, Jean-Luc Godard ?” (What is art, Jean-Luc Godard ?), the poet’s eloquent praise for a young filmmaker who he celebrated as an avatar of modern painting’s inventors.
Openly militant
As soon as he acquired this status of acclaimed artist, Godard undertook to undermine and destroy it. All without sacrificing Marina Vlady’s melancholic beauty or Anne Wiazemsky’s disarming candor, the educated investigator of capitalist inhumanity (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967) and the critical companion of the young Maoists of Nanterre (La Chinoise, 1967), the grotesque May 68 prophesier (Weekend, 1967).
This era, while promoting the liberation of individual desire, also celebrated the dissolution of the individual in collective action. This galvanized Jean-Luc Godard, who contributed to the collective film Far from Vietnam (1967), supported the workers’ strike at the Rhodiacéta in Besançon, seized cinema’s means of production under the name “Medvedkine groups” (1967), marched in support of Henri Langlois who was threatened with dismissal (February 1968), hung from a curtain of the Palais to interrupt the Cannes Festival in solidarity with the student revolt (May 1968).
He was also the anonymous director of “cinétracts” inspired by the Situationist International during the protests of May 1968, and then of a provisional assessment of the movement in A Film Like Any Other (June 1968), shot in Flins – the last and bloody bastion of the revolt where high school student Gilles Tautin was killed – where he recorded the words of the Renault factory workers.
