[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. ]
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JEAN-LUC GODARD WAS CINEMA’S NORTH STAR  
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Richard Brody
September 13, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ 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. _

, Photograph by Richard Dumas / Agence VU / Redux

 

No one did more to make movies the art of youth than Jean-Luc Godard
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was born in 1930, in Paris, and died on Tuesday, at his home in Rolle,
Switzerland, by assisted suicide. Godard’s films of the
nineteen-sixties, starting with his first feature, “Breathless,”
inspired young people to make movies in the same spirit in which
others started a band. His works—political thrillers, musical
comedies, romantic melodramas, science fiction, often more than one
per year—moved at the speed of his thought, transformed familiar
genres into intimate confessions, and made film form into a wild
laboratory of aesthetic delight and sensory provocation. He put his
own intellectual world into his movies with a collage-like profusion
of quotes and allusions, and cast the people in his life as actors, as
stars, or as icons. Working fast, he alluded to current events while
they were still current. 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.
More than any other filmmaker, he made viewers feel as if anything
were possible in movies, and he made it their own urgent mission to
find out for themselves. Where Hollywood seemed like a distant,
cosseted, and disreputable dream, he made the firsthand cinema—the
personal and independent film—an urgent and accessible ideal.

[Godard looks into a camera in 1963.]

Jean-Luc Godard, filming “Le Mépris” in 1963. Photograph by
Jean-Louis Swiners  / Getty

[Godard with a statue in 1963.]

Godard on the set of “Le Mépris.”Photograph by Jean-Louis Swiners
/ Getty

Godard was also one of the crucial media artists of the sixties, who,
no less than the Beatles or Andy Warhol, recognized the echo effects
of celebrity and art, and united them in his cinematically and
socially transformative activities. (He confessed to likening his own
artistic and personal career arc to Bob Dylan’s
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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. He took drastic measures to escape from his legend
while pursuing and advancing his art in ways that baffled many of his
devotees and those in the press who awaited nothing more than his
comeback—especially to those styles and methods that had made him
famous. In the late sixties, he withdrew from the movie business under
the influence of leftist political ideology and activism. In the
seventies, he left Paris for Grenoble and then moved to the small
Swiss town of Rolle. When he returned to the industry, he did so by
way of exploring his personal life and the history of cinema together,
through an ever-more-audacious deployment and reconception of new
technologies. What he retained to the very end of his career (his
final feature, “The Image Book
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was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of
adventure. In his old age, he remained more playful, more provocative,
and simply more youthful in spirit than younger filmmakers.

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. 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’s name and work, of
course, are inextricable from the French New Wave, a group of
filmmakers who had got their start as critics in the fifties
(especially at _Cahiers du Cinéma,_ which was founded in 1951).
Rather than going to film school (such a thing did already exist in
France), they did their studying by watching movies—new ones at
movie theatres and in press screenings, and classics at the
Cinémathèque and in ciné-clubs in Paris. Godard, along with his
friends and colleagues François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude
Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer (who was also the group’s elder statesman)
shared a catholic love of movies. They recognized the genius of
filmmakers (such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks), who were then
often considered either anonymous craftsmen or vulgar showmen, largely
disdained or ignored by established critics. 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. Though all his prime New Wave
cohorts had been critics, Godard was the only one who overtly and
explicitly made his movies into living works of movie criticism—who
made his filmed fictions overlap with his theoretical inclinations and
viewing passions alike.

Many of the commonplaces of modern cinema bear the watermark of
Godard, starting with one that he himself had trouble living
down—the jump cut, which he used in “Breathless” when he had to
shorten it to ninety minutes. He preferred merely eliminating segments
of shots to eliminating whole scenes. Before Godard, the jump cut was
a mistake, a sign of amateurism; in his hands, it was a cymbal crash
announcing that the rules of cinema were meant to be broken. He gave
the collaborative cinema its modern imprimatur when he joined forces
with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the late sixties and then with his partner
(now his widow), Anne-Marie Miéville, in the seventies. Starting in
that same decade, he brought video into his movies, and, with
Miéville, he made two extensive television series then, too (one ran
about five hours, the other, about ten)—for which he invented
hybrid, essay-like forms that pushed the outer limits of creative
nonfiction. In his return to professional features, “Every Man for
Himself,” from 1980, he crafted a kind of analytical slow motion,
based on video methods, that he integrated into the filmed fiction.
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.

From early on, Godard’s work was politically engaged; his second
feature, “Le Petit Soldat
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from 1960, about espionage battles amid France’s Algerian War, was
banned by France. Even after abandoning the Marxist orthodoxies of his
work in the late sixties and early seventies, he never left politics
behind: his “King Lear,” from 1987, is rooted in the Chernobyl
disaster; his 1996 film “For Ever Mozart” dramatizes the civil war
in the former Yugoslavia; and his 2010 feature is titled “Film
Socialisme.” Nonetheless, having jumped off the speeding train of
the sixties, Godard never quite got back into the center of the times.
His later films are, to my mind, even more innovative, even more
original than the ones that made his name. They’re also more
defiant. If his earlier films signify that anything is possible, his
later ones push possibilities so far that they virtually defy younger
filmmakers to even try. His way of sustaining his own cinematic youth
was largely to overwhelm the new generation of young filmmakers with
his own artistic power. There’s a sublime spite in his later work
that emerges similarly in interviews (of which he was a deft
dialectical master, throughout his career). It comes off not as a
cantankerous old man’s rejection of his successors but as an eternal
youth’s fight for a place in the world and a chance to make it a
little better than he found it. Having moved to the margins, he made
himself an outsider again and lived and worked—and struggled—like
one. 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.

[Still from “King Lear” 1987.]

A production still from Godard’s “King Lear,” 1987.Photograph
from Cannon Films / Everett

For me, Godard’s passing is personal. A viewing of “Breathless”
at seventeen, in 1975, transformed me—made me instantly certain that
my life would be centered on movies. I had the benefit of ignorance: I
knew nothing of classic Hollywood, nothing of art cinema, and nothing
of Godard. 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.
It was then his criticism (collected, along with his interviews and
other writings, in a book called “Godard on Godard
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translated by Tom Milne) that guided me into movie-viewing. His
films—including those of the seventies, largely under the
journalistic radar—have remained my cinematic North Star.

[JeanPaul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in “Breathless.”]

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Godard’s “Breathless.”

[Jean Seberg kissing JeanPaul Belmondos cheek from “Breathless.”]

A scene from “Breathless.”

I had the honor of meeting Godard, in his office in Rolle, in 2000,
for a Profile of him
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I wrote for _The New Yorker_. His later work seemed as vital to me as
ever, but it was hardly seen in the U.S. People I knew were surprised
to learn that he was still alive. At sixty-nine, he was vigorous and
active (and completing one of his greatest films, “In Praise of
Love”). He spoke to me in his office for three hours, he showed me
some new work, he stood around casually chatting with me about it, and
he invited me to dinner. 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. When I learned of Godard’s death,
it wasn’t the movies or the celebrity but the man across the table,
jocular and reflective and bracingly candid, who came to mind.

He filmed with small crews, often doing camerawork hands on, editing
at home; in leaving Paris for Rolle, he turned a small Swiss town on
Lake Geneva into his own plein-air studio. (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. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with
his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. The best
of recent movies are both personal and grand, innovative and
political, engaged with the overt crises of the moment and with the
submerged ones of the history of the art, and they’re as
insubordinate regarding expectations and conventions as they are
contentious in their emotional life. Godard achieved his goal: leaving
his legend behind, his work has become, very simply, the central
reality of the modern cinema. In his office, Godard told me that he
thought the cinema was nearly over: “When I die, it will be the
end.” He was wrong—and it’s his own fault. ♦

[Still of body of water from “The Image Book” 2018.]

A still from “The Image Book,” Godard’s final feature, released
in 2018.Photograph from Kino Lorber / Everett

_Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999 and has
contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut
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Godard
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and Wes Anderson
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2005, he has been the movie-listings editor at the magazine; he writes
film reviews and a blog about movies
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the book “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard
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and is at work on a book about the lasting influence of the French New
Wave._

* Jean-Luc Godard
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* movies
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* Obituary
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