Jean-Luc Godard, 1930-2022 | Become immortal, then die

” In Godard, there’s God ! “The formula of the moderator of Jean-Luc Godard’s press conference had made more than one sigh by its swelling, its deference and its obsequiousness, twenty years ago, at the Cannes Film Festival. I think back on it and I tell myself that it was perhaps not so exaggerated.

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91, resorted to assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland. He was and will remain a god of cinema. Adored and hated, misunderstood and incomprehensible, the enfant terrible of the seventh art embodied the best and the worst of what it has to offer.

He was a being of multiple paradoxes. An artist as unavoidable as he is elusive, avant-garde as he is pretentious, brilliant as he is unbearable. In the image, yes, of his films, sometimes off-putting, sometimes irresistible.

A learned iconoclast, with a cigar in his mouth, a chain seducer with hints of misogynism, a non-conformist moralist with a mischievous gaze hidden behind his dark glasses.

Born on December 3, 1930 in Paris, in a bourgeois environment, then raised between France and Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard experienced a difficult youth, found refuge in sport, and came late to cinephilia. The thunderbolt is intense. Unconditional of Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, of Bergman and Bresson, he became a critic for the magazine Arts and to Cinema notebooksunder the pseudonym of Hans Lucas, while working as a press secretary for Fox studios.

His taste for formula, aphorisms and reversals (“All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend towards fiction”; “It’s not a fair image, it’s just a “) earned him the recognition of his peers.

Like the other “Young Turks” of Notebooks – Rivette, Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer – he campaigns for a revolution in the seventh art and dreams of making cinema differently. With Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, who died a year ago almost to the day, Godard is shooting his first feature film, Breathless, based on a screenplay by François Truffaut. The film, which will remain his greatest critical and popular success, marks with a white stone in 1960 the arrival of a “new French cinema”. Godard is not 30 years old and he is, with Truffaut, the herald of the New Wave.

It is with Belmondo again that JLG realizes the sentimental comedy A woman is a woman in 1960. It was also to him that he entrusted, in 1965, the main role of his masterpiece Pierrot le fouan incredible love story also starring his companion and muse Anna Karina (with whom Godard had a stormy breakup the same year).

In 1963, Godard shoots in Capri Contempt, with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, in her most outstanding role. The following year, he found Jean-Claude Brialy, actor of his first short films, in Keeping to himself. In 1965, Alphaville wins the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

In five years, JLG has already revolutionized cinema. He signs Male Femalewith Jean-Pierre Léaud, “in shared custody” with Truffaut, then in 1967, at the height of his glory, he shot The Chinese with Anne Wiazemsky, who would soon become his wife.

The reception given to this Maoist pamphlet provoked in Godard a deep questioning of his work and his role as an artist, exacerbated by the events of May 68. With Truffaut, he demanded and obtained the suspension of the Cannes Film Festival. “I am talking to you about solidarity with students and workers and you are talking to me about traveling shots and close-ups! You are jerks! “, he launches to the organizers of the Festival.

A few months later, in December 1968, Godard shot the documentary in New York One plus Onewhich juxtaposes interviews with the leaders of the Black Panthers and images of the Rolling Stones, in full recording of the classic Sympathy for the Devil.

He took the opportunity to go to Abitibi, where he stormed a Rouyn-Noranda television station in the company of his team and a few Quebec collaborators – including Pierre Harel – in order to carry out a “revolutionary experiment” in citizen television, which should last 10 days. It only lasts 30 minutes.

Chilled, Godard left Abitibi without telling his hosts, promising to write “a book on the links between Maoism and the climate”. Quebec filmmaker Éric Morin was inspired by this historical anecdote for his first feature film Abbittibbi Godard hunt in 2013. Documentary filmmaker Julie Perron made a short film from it in 2000, May in December (Godard in Abitibi).

It was following the events of May 68 that Godard broke with his “big brother” Truffaut. Their friendship did not survive the 180 degree turn of JLG, which wiped the slate clean of this New Wave that they created together a decade earlier.

Godard dives into a counter-current, militant and revolutionary cinema of the far left, directs east wind with the radical Dziga-Vertov group, and applies himself relentlessly to debunking, not to say dynamiting, his own myth, sabotaging a number of projects and friendships.

He became “a shitty human being on a shitty base”, writes François Truffaut to him in a famous correspondence.

Its popular revival of the turn of the 1980s, with Save who can (life) and Name Carmen – which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1983 – was short-lived. The following year, he caused a scandal by staging the naked Blessed Virgin in I salute you marie, which reveals Juliette Binoche. Since the 1990s, his work, which has become more and more experimental and hermetic (with in particular his long-time partner, the filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville), has only been followed by a handful of irreducible people.

Snubbed until 1980 by the Cannes Film Festival, he returned to the official selection in 2000, with a short film, The origin of the XXI^e century, presented just before the opening film. I still remember the grimaces of the festival-goers, discovering without warning the images of five men hanging from a tree and another who urinates in the mouth of a girl…

He has shot some 125 films, feature and short films, documentaries or fiction. His most recent films – socialism movie, Farewell to language (which won him the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2014, tied with Mommy by Xavier Dolan) – were messy, provocative, subversive, enigmatic. In the image, yes, of their author.

“Godard had many lives. He’s an agitator. He is very fascinating. He is colossal. You can’t make movies without at some point having to deal with his work, “said Louis Garrel of him, in 2017, at the Cannes Film Festival, after having played JLG in Michel Hazanavicius’ film, Formidablethe adaptation of Anne Wiazemsky’s book about her life with the filmmaker.

This can be seen by reading the fascinating (unauthorized) 900-page biography devoted to him by New Wave exegete Antoine De Baecque in Grasset: Godard the man was at once funny, brilliant, stupid and wicked. A born provocateur, a megalomaniac dandy, acid and narcissistic, often execrable, especially with those close to him. His life, marked by self-destructive and masochistic outbursts, writes De Baecque, is a succession of broken loves and friendships (personal and professional).

At the end of the documentary she made in 2017 with visual artist JR, Faces, towns, his old accomplice Agnès Varda will bump into this irascible hermit in Switzerland. Godard, who had a small role in Cleo from 5 to 7don’t even open the door for him.

He was not an affable man, but he was an immense artist. “He’s the biggest terrorist in cinema”, said documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins ​​with admiration (The Story of Film). Cinema would certainly not be the same today without him.

“What is your biggest ambition in life? asks the character of Jean Seberg to a writer played by the great filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville in Breathless. “Become immortal, and then die. ” Mission accomplished.