Jean-Luc Godard movies

Godard's political ardour fuelled by the May 68 upheaval in France led to the shutting down of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students ...

His political ardour, fuelled by the May ‘68 upheavals in France, would culminate in protest, co-organised by François Truffaut, that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Being an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy, the intellectual penchants resound in his moving images that often touch upon socio-political issues. He threw down the gauntlet to mainstream French cinema's “Tradition of Quality”, which enshrined established convention rather than innovation and experimentation.

The master stylist and provocateur behind 'Breathless,' 'Alphaville,' and 'Goodbye to Language' broke every cinematic rule he could find for six decades.

His first feature as a director, 1960’s Breathless, has the energy of a young genius braying, “don’t tell me what to do!” in the face of decades of film “rules.” Shooting quickly and with a low budget, rather than try to hide edits that don’t quite match (typically the mark of a “mistake”), Godard leaned into it with noticeable jump cuts, giving his film about lovers and criminals a jazzy, unpredictable feel. Of this wave, no one’s work felt more “new” than Godard’s. Jean-Luc Godard, the Franco-Swiss film critic turned director and lynchpin of the French New Wave, has died.

The French director did more than transform the aesthetic and the practice of filmmaking—he turned the cinema into the central art form of his time.

To the end of his life, he was still fighting his way up and in, even from the heights of cinematic history that he had scaled. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. (I interviewed Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who called the town Rollywood.) Godard made his domestic activities and local observations converge with the history of the cinema and the grand-scale politics of his era. At the restaurant where we ate, he was voluble, and his conversation was wide-ranging, embracing Shakespeare (we discussed “Coriolanus”) and “Schindler’s List,” the Second World War and the later films of classic Hollywood directors and aspects of his own youth (such as his avoidance of military service both in France and in Switzerland), and he talked of food (the coffee and the local fish), and made winking fun of the shirt that a man at another table was wearing. There was no legend to look up to, no dominant figure to inspire or overawe; I naïvely but sincerely saw the film face to face, so to speak, and saw him in it the same way, as a filmmaker virtually addressing his audience, across the decades, in real time. And, as prolific as he was during his first flush of artistic fervor, he was even more so at the time of his return—though he made fewer features (“only” eighteen from 1980 onward), he also created video essays, including the monumental “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that were crucibles, epilogues, and living notebooks for his features. He sought a culture of his own, and, with his largely autodidactic passion for movies, he found one that was resolutely modern—and that, with his intellectual fervor, he helped raise to equality with the classics. Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort and propriety—his father was a doctor, his mother was a medical assistant and the scion of a major banking family—and his artistic interests were encouraged, but his voyage into the cinema was a self-conscious revolt against his cultural heritage. At twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Cahiers, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of rigorously reasoned artistic freedom; at twenty-five, he wrote an instant-classic essay on film editing, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. What he retained to the very end of his career (his final feature, “ [The Image Book](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-image-book-reviewed-jean-luc-godard-confronts-cinemas-depiction-of-the-arab-world),” was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of adventure. [to Bob Dylan’s](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bob-dylan-in-correspondence).) Yet, like many artistic heroes of the sixties, Godard found that his public image and his private life, his fame and his ambitions, came into conflict. But it wasn’t just the news that made his films feel like the embodiment of their times—it was Godard’s insolence, his defiance, his derisive humor, his sense of freedom.

The titan of French film has died, aged 91. His was a career of immense creativity, which redefined the grammar of cinema.

His response: “to become immortal…and then die”. But the intellect as sharp as ever. Quentin Tarantino called his production house A Band Apart in homage to Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. The hands frail. As a young man, Godard had tremendous reverence for the American studio system. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. He’d leave in mistakes – like actors forgetting their lines – to remind viewers that all cinema was essentially fake. He dabbled with anthropology as a student, but his great love was cinema, and in particular American B-movies directed by Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and his idol Howard Hawks. The voice was raspy. Conventional, “invisible” editing was replaced by abrupt jump cuts; smooth long shots alternated with unsettling montages and rapid close-ups; characters broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience. [Agnès Varda, a pioneering artist who saw the extraordinary in the ordinary](https://theconversation.com/agnes-varda-a-pioneering-artist-who-saw-the-extraordinary-in-the-ordinary-115437) [From Nazis to Netflix, the controversies and contradictions of Cannes](https://theconversation.com/from-nazis-to-netflix-the-controversies-and-contradictions-of-cannes-77655)

THR's Paris-based film critic chooses his five favorite works by the bold and brilliant auteur.

Blossoms in Sumptuous but Shaky Biopic of a Classical Violinist](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/chevalier-kelvin-harrison-jr-stephen-williams-1235218307/) This ruminative documentary is arguably Godard’s most personal work, starring the director, in his early 60s at the time, as himself with his home in Rolle, Switzerland, as the main setting. This collage-like fiction was made with two other movies, La Chinoise and Weekend, in a year that saw Godard transform from a New Wave director experimenting with genre and form to an overtly political filmmaker who would engage in the uprisings of May 1968 the year after. With a mix of melancholic humor and dialectical genius, Godard reflects on his career and the cinema in general, finding poetry in the simple things that surround him: a favorite movie playing on television, a painting on the wall or a brisk walk around Lake Geneva. In the end, The Odyssey that Lang is adapting onscreen only serves as a backdrop to the battles, both personal and professional, that happen behind the camera. One of the director’s strongest collaborations with his then wife and muse Anna Karina, the film is both a cruel, almost documentary-like portrayal of a girl who descends into poverty and prostitution after leaving family life behind, and a tragic tale of freedom curtailed that nonetheless offers its shred of hope and the sublime. Not only does it mark the first time he worked with Anna Karina, who is filmed with as much rapture as Jean Seberg was in Breathless, but it foreshadows the murky and controversial political battles — in this case, those surrounding the Algerian War — that the director would wage throughout much of his career. Adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel, Contempt is one of Godard’s most celebrated movies and perhaps the closest he ever came to making an epic Hollywood feature. But the director’s second feature, made the year after his groundbreaking debut but released only in 1963 after being censored by the French government, is, at least for this critic, the more memorable of the two — and certainly one of Godard’s greatest achievements. It’s a work inspired by both Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is seen playing in a movie theatre, and Jean Renoir’s Émile Zola adaptation, Nana, whom the main character is named after. Odds are most people remember the latter two over the Hawks film, which goes to show that any list is entirely subjective and should be taken with a grain of salt — or, to cite a Godardian staple, an unfiltered Gauloises cigarette. Some Godard enthusiasts think that everything he made was genius, to the point that any ranking of his oeuvre will immediately bring its share of haters and snobs.

The late filmmaker not only helped kick off the New Wave, he changed the language of cinema forever.

“Pierrot le fou” is one of the most beautiful works of art of the 20th century. But it’s the writing and the quotability of “Breathless” that may really cause it to lodge in people’s brains the way it does. Godard amusingly took to promoting the film on “The Dick Cavett Show” and said this was his “second first film.”—RL While the film has elements of romantic comedy, it’s also as restlessly satirical as any Godard film: He wanted to call “Masculin Feminin” “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” which is actually one of the chapter titles of the movie, and that’s a fitting descriptor for his portrait of youth culture that’s funny, sweetly romantic, and rigorously intellectual all at once. Really, it’s his mockery of the 3D process, but still “Goodbye to Language” feels almost “Man with a Movie Camera”-esque, like you’re seeing movies for the first time, in its complete erosion of film grammar. “Pierrot le fou” announced that in this advertising-soaked culture we were now living in “the age of the ass.” “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” tells us that age is here to stay.—CB Jean-Luc Godard radically redefined the 3D moviegoing experience with “Goodbye to Language,” the 42nd film in the iconoclast’s long and winding career. And the other thing is for its final shot, a title card simply saying “Fin de Cinema.” Not just of the movie, but of cinema as a whole.—CB “Film Socialisme” itself seemed like a prophecy then — that that would be the ship Godard would choose for his diagnostic study of Europe’s capitalist malaise, of all things. But the movie is really about the journey to get to her parents’ home, a cross-country panorama that’s like “The Odyssey” as told by the Hells Angels. Deeper cuts should then follow: “Nouvelle Vague,” “Le Petit Soldat,” “Passion,” “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” “In Praise of Love.” But these movies that follow are the introduction to his work you need. The Swiss-born filmmaker stripped cinema down to its essence — all you need to tell a story on film is “a girl and a gun” he famously said — with a run-and-gun guerrilla style that eventually flowered into a finely wrought formalism.

When a figure as titanic as Jean-Luc Godard dies in the middle of a film festival like Toronto, it feels like the world should just stop.

They’re too old to kick their legs up the way they did, but they dance with abandon and good cheer, in a way the real Varda and Godard never got to. [break into a dance called the Madison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61H_xl9dzgI). Faces Places didn’t turn out to be Varda’s final film—that ended up being 2019’s Varda by Agnès, a sort of self-curated retrospective of a career that only received its proper reverence in her last years—but it has the feeling of one, not least because one of its subjects is how Varda’s failing eyesight makes it increasingly difficult to make movies. The two were early allies, although Varda made her first movie while Godard was still an aspiring critic, and Godard appears in a film within Varda’s breakthrough feature, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7, starring in a short silent-film pastiche which the movie’s protagonist watches during the titular timespan. [Agnès Varda](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/oscars-honoree-agnes-varda-is-a-documentary-giant.html) and [Documentary Now!](https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/documentary-now-season-3-review-cate-blanchett-bill-hader.html), the news that the latter would be devoting an episode to parodying the former took me to the happiest of places. [pointed out Tuesday morning](https://twitter.com/cameron_tiff/status/1569655393399209984) after the news broke, Godard had hardened into such an anti-sentimental crank that he might have taken an outpouring of flowery postmortem sentiment as an affront.