An intellectual’s head, short-sighted eyes, a cigar, a radical and ardent vision of cinema, a loud thundering mouth. Jean-Luc Godard symbolized the 7e art for so many generations… Even his less unifying films could not tarnish his brilliant aura as on an icon. A living legend has just collapsed with the death of the emblematic filmmaker of the New Wave, on September 13, in his Swiss lair.
The influence he exerted on filmmakers and moviegoers was unheard of, in the 1960s to 1980s and well beyond. The one for whom traveling was a matter of morality considered cinema as a metaphor of the world and became its prophet. Huge reference, by its abundance, its diversity, its ability to think the 7e art (like burying it).
Sympathetic, Godard? Not that much. With his youthful propensity for kleptomania, his boorishness towards his peers, his misogyny, the stormy relationships maintained with the women in his life: muses, actresses and collaborators, from Anna Karina to Anne-Marie Miéville via Anne Wiazemsky. Its strike force was elsewhere. He knew how to stir the cage, impose languages, innovate, venerate the cinema like a madman by hypnotizing his admirers, who believed in new times taken from film.
This New Wave there, which had pushed the “young Turks”, often from the critics to the Cinema notebooks, jumping into the arena during the crazy 1960s, he dominated the movement. Seeking to throw overboard dad’s cinema with dusty codes, in 1960, his wonderful film Breathless, freed from the classic narrative, against a backdrop of love and betrayal, ignited the spirits. As Pierrot le fou (1965), unforgettable headlong rush and road movie on a hip line. Let’s add the delicious Keeping to himself (1964), attacking a youth that broke all molds and stuck its tongue out at institutions.
The god Godard
Director, filmmaker, often editor, at the wheel and the mill of his films, thinker of this art in motion. His immense, pivotal, protean, uneven work, and the new narrative structures he brought to the cinema, made him the champion of the 7e modernity art.
Enough to protest his legend. Godard acted astonished after forging his own crown. A journalist had launched in 2001 before his press conference in Cannes: “In the name “Godard”, there is the word “God”. This is to say the cult…
For a long time, he shot one film a year at full speed, touching on themes that were or were not related to social issues. Live your lifeabout a young prostitute, Contempt, with Bardot and after Moravia, which approaches the world of cinema. Always eclectic, pouring into anticipation (Alphaville) and the musical (A woman is a woman), he will have dabbled in many registers.
For a long time his works were commented on and sometimes demolished by hordes of passionate cinephiles. In May 1968, Godard will have been among the most bellicose filmmakers to bring down the chic Cannes meeting, in solidarity with the student tumult. However, this Swiss from a good family (born in Paris, tossed between his two homelands during the German invasion), rather on the right, had only turned to the left in 1967, from his film The Chinese, which speaks of a Maoist youth. He would then go on to militate with the revolutionary group Dziga Vertov, moving away from his base.
In 1980, his Save who can (life), striking cross portraits, brought him back into favor with the public. In addition, Name Carmen, a contemporary adaptation of Bizet’s opera, crowned with the Golden Lion of Venice in 1983. But its star wavered. Godard, who had had enough of his statue, however turned very quickly to the analysis of his own works as well as those of others, more and more memoirist. He only believed in yesterday’s cinema.
A “cousin of the NFB”
As early as 1988, his essays History(ies) of cinema pushed him to theorize, and often brilliantly. Subsequently, his unstructured works-poems, New wavewith Delon, in 1990, at Book image, in 2018, irritated many. “How I make my films, he explained to us at Cannes in 2001: I take bits of sentences, bits of novels, bits of painting, bits of landscape. His collages inspired us sometimes, not always. The general public turned away from it. Never mind…
In festivals, for a long time we threw ourselves on the press conferences of this great tribune, who chained shock sentences against TV, Hollywood and its decoys while throwing the anathema on the other filmmakers, scratched by him until the blood. Even his former combat companion, François Truffaut, ends up tired of slamming his door, after strings of insults.
Yet Godard, sometimes faithful, liked to recall his time in Quebec, his friendships with Jean-Claude Labrecque, Pierre Perrault, Gilles Groulx. “I was a cousin of the ONF,” he confided to his biographer Antoine de Baecque. Coming to Abitibi in 1968, dissuaded by the cold, he returned 10 years later, at the invitation of Serge Losique. His series of 14 lectures on the history of cinema and on his own career, offered at the Conservatoire d’art c cinématmatique de Montréal, caused a sensation. It is not forgotten.
Godard was part of the landscape like the sand and the bay in Cannes, then cut the cord in the last decade. His health, his misanthropy, all that… In 2014, it was in absentia that he won the jury prize for his poetics on the Croisette Farewell to languagetied with Xavier Dolan (Mommy).
Accessible or not, his recent films were uncompromising. In its constant attempt to reinvent the language of cinema, “JLG” will always have put itself in danger. Courageous to the point of hermeticism, taxing those who dared to hope for commercial success as sold. It remains that he himself no longer made a recipe.
A bitter old lion or a misunderstood visionary, here he is reclaiming his title of pope of cinema after having bowed out. French President Emmanuel Macron called him a national treasure on Tuesday, forgetting that the missing man was above all Swiss. Everyone wants to have it back in their yard. On the Godardian legend side, here we go again for a great tour!