PAIRS —
Jean-Luc Godard — who has died at 91 — was the rebel spirit who drove the French
New Wave, firing out a volley of films in the 1960s that rewrote the rules of
cinema.
اضافة اعلان
Between
“
Breathless” (“A Bout de Souffle”) in 1960 and the student protests of 1968,
Godard exhilarated audiences as he shook the film world with his technical innovations
and savage, occasionally lyrical, satires.
Sometimes working
on two movies at the same time, he ranged over crime, politics, and
prostitution in a burst of creative energy that would inspire two generations
of directors.
Godard’s witty
aphorisms like “a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end — but not
necessarily in that order”, became lodestars for filmmakers from Robert Altman
and Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.
But the flame that
had burned so bright in the 1960s veered off into revolutionary politics and
Maoist obscurantism in the 1970s, and he came to be seen almost as a tragicomic
figure.
Godard spent
several years experimenting with video before returning to commercial
filmmaking — of a kind — in 1979.
Modern prophet
But the freshness was gone, and critics accused him of becoming too
elliptical, with some branding his early films misogynist.
Yet the
increasingly reclusive Godard persevered down his singular path, before
reinventing himself in his later years as a gnomic cigar-chomping prophet.
He shot his
critically acclaimed “Film Socialisme” on board the
Costa Concordia cruise ship
in 2009, declaring that capitalism was heading for the rocks. When the ship ran
aground three years later, it was not just his small band of disciples who
treated him as a visionary.
Born in Paris into
a well-to-do Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930, Godard was lucky enough
to spend World War II at Nyons in neutral Switzerland, returning to the French
capital in 1949 to study ethnology at the Sorbonne.
But his real
education was in the little cinemas of the Latin Quarter where he first ran
into Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer, all future luminaries
of the French cinema.
He fell in love
with American action cinema and began writing criticism under the pseudonym
“Hans Lucas” with Truffaut, Rivette, and Rohmer for small magazines like the
“Cahiers du Cinema”, where they plotted to revolutionize the art.
Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard gives a press conference for the presentation of his film “Detective” during the 38th Cannes International Film Festival in Cannes on May 10, 1985.
After a failed
attempt to make his first film in America, he went to work on a dam in
Switzerland and saved enough money to make a film about it, “Operation
Concrete” (1954).
It helped lay the
foundation for his rapid ascent that would see him hailed as the leader of the
French New Wave when “Breathless” was released in 1960.
‘The Picasso of
cinema’
That swaggering story of a small-time crook on the run who romances a
young American in Paris was a major landmark in French cinema, heralding the
arrival of a generation of irreverent young filmmakers determined to break with
the past.
So big was its
impact that Truffaut called Godard cinema’s
Picasso, someone who had “sown
chaos ... and made everything possible”. As often with Godard, their friendship
later turned sour, with Truffaut branding him a “sh*t” after the pair fell out
in 1973.
By shooting on the
fly in outdoor locations and improvising endlessly, Godard rewrote the rulebook
and helped popularize the idea of the director as “auteur”, the creative force
behind everything on the screen.
“Breathless” also
gave the first big break to Jean-Paul Belmondo, who would later star in
Godard’s masterpiece and most personal film “Pierrot le Fou” (1965), which
explored the pain of his break-up with the Danish actress Anna Karina.
From the start,
Godard’s career was dogged by controversy. “Le Petit Soldat” (1960), with its
references to the Algerian war, was banned by the French authorities for three
years, and “Une Femme Mariee” (A married woman, 1964) had its title changed
from “La Femme Mariee” by censors concerned that its adulterous heroine might
be taken for the typical French wife.
But after “Weekend”
(1967), a gory examination of the obsession with cars scattered with
surrealistic traffic accidents, his work too often appeared self-indulgent.
Indeed, Godard
became something of an intellectual oddity, emerging every few years from his
bolthole in Rolle on the shores of Lake Geneva to lob a verbal grenade or two.
It was this tragic,
cartoonish Godard on the slide who features in “Godard Mon Amour”, the 2017 comedy
about him by Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning maker of “The Artist”.
But by then, Godard
was having the last laugh, with his reputation somewhat restored by a series of
low-budget metaphorical films that questioned our image-saturated world.
“Film is over,” he
told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2011, recanting his oft-quoted maxim
that “photography is truth, and the cinema is truth 24 times per second”.
“With mobile phones, everyone is now an auteur,” he said.