Jean-Luc Godard

French filmmaker

• Born: December 3, 1930
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: September 13, 2022
• Place of death: Rolle, Switzerland

Godard, along with his colleagues in the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, of postwar French film, expanded the possibilities of cinematic expression so that traditional narrative patterns could no longer be regarded as limits. New Wave filmmaking was instrumental in locating film at the center of postmodern aesthetics, establishing the cinema as the equal of any form of artistic expression.

Early Life

Jean-Luc Godard (zhahn-lewk goh-dahr) was born in Paris to Paul Godard, a prosperous doctor, and Odile Monod, the daughter of a family that had been established in the banking profession in Switzerland for generations. The Godard family moved to Switzerland in 1940 to escape World War II and lived in Nyon until 1945. After the war, they returned to Paris, where Godard continued his education at the prestigious Lycée Buffon, a school specializing in the physical and biological sciences. After his parents were divorced in 1946, Godard moved into a hotel room a few blocks from the center of Montparnasse, one of the artists’ quarters of the city.

Godard described himself as a casual filmgoer until 1948, but in that year he discovered Travail et Culture, a Left Bank film club run by the distinguished film theorist André Bazin, and he also attended lectures at the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, where he met Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut, soon to be fellow members of the New Wave. Godard enrolled in the Sorbonne in 1950 and worked toward a degree in ethnology, attending lectures by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of semiology, and received a certificate in 1952.

Godard recalled that between 1949 and 1951 he “saw every film” he could and, although he was planning to become a journalist—drawn to writing partly by the prestige that the word carried in the existential ethos of Paris in the 1950s—he was already committed to film as a means of exploring and expressing his creative impulses. In 1954, he returned to Switzerland to work briefly as a construction laborer and made his first 35-mm film, Opération Béton, a twenty-minute documentary on the building of the Grande Dixence dam, on which he worked. Godard had been writing essays on film since 1950, when he, Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette founded La Gazette du cinéma (five issues published). In April, 1951, Bazin founded Cahiers du cinéma, a journal that became the most influential film magazine in the world; Godard began to publish essays in this journal as well.

By 1956, Godard was assisting Rohmer and Rivette on their early productions. He also was beginning to think of himself as a film artist who could comment on films by making films. In 1957 he began to write film scripts, discussing his work with producers as well as working as a publicist for Twentieth Century-Fox studios. Pierre Braunberger, a producer of shorts, commissioned Godard to direct Tous les Garçons s’appellent Patrick (1957; All the Boys Are Called Patrick), another twenty-minute short. The discursive nature of the narration, the verbal density of its texture, and Godard’s postproduction dubbing of the main character’s voice are all characteristics of Godard’s work. Although the film was rejected by the Tours Festival for “nonprofessionalism,” Godard dismissed these critics as people “for whom the cinema is comprehended only by its past.”

Life’s Work

As the sixth decade of the twentieth century drew to a close, the motion picture industry was relatively moribund and static throughout the Western world. American studio films were increasingly formulaic, and European productions were generally also confined by conventions and expectations. The relative tranquillity of the 1950s and the caution induced by the Cold War and the fear of nuclear destruction were about to be shattered by the explosion of the suppressed energy of the next decade.

Godard’s first feature film, À bout de souffle (1960; Breathless ), both reflected and directed many of that decade’s most characteristic patterns. It is a story about a girl studying at the Sorbonne and her relationship with a young gangster who has adopted a style fashioned after American film heroes, particularly Humphrey Bogart. The film is presented with a dazzling, innovative structure and creative editing, which projected the rhythms of an emerging generation. The lack of traditional linear connections, the self-referential nature of the narration, the anarchic and almost nihilistic attitude of the street-smart young man, and the feeling of spontaneity that the film expressed had an enormous impact on filmgoers and filmmakers.

Godard immediately received fierce support as well as enraged condemnation from artists of every variety who now felt their creative opportunities expanded or demolished. Godard was too intent on making films to be especially concerned about the critical furor. His next film, Le Petit Soldat (1960; The Little Soldier ), was made “to catch up with the realism I had missed in Breathless.” The film was a meditation on the French colonial situation in Algeria, and Godard was interested in what he called the “moral repercussions” of war. The French government banned the film until 1963, but by then Godard had gone on to direct Une Femme est une femme (1961; A Woman Is a Woman), a comedy that Godard called “my first real film.” He also made Vivre sa vie (1962; My Life to Live), a twelve-part, protofeminist examination of prostitution, in which Godard attacked the use of people as products in a consumerist society.

Becoming steadily more specific about his politics, Godard then directed Les Carabiniers (1963; The Riflemen ), a consideration of the specific nature of war, which confounded most of the critics, who could not see Godard’s deconstruction of the standard presentation of warfare in films. Adverse critical reaction caused the film to be withdrawn. One of Godard’s favorite cinematic techniques was the Brechtian (after Bertolt Brecht) concept of alienation, in which audiences are compelled to recognize and regard their own responses to the action on the screen. While Godard purposely interrupted the expected course of the narrative with jump-cuts, asides, quotations, and shifts in time, he realized that he was progressively distancing himself from his characters as well.

Godard’s next film, Le Mépris (1963; Contempt ), was designed to restore what he called his “movie-loving attitude.” Using international stars such as Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot, and director Fritz Lang (as himself), the film was ostensibly about “men cut off from the gods, cut off from the world,” but the presence of Bardot in particular detracted from Godard’s attempt to render a Homeric conception in which the filmmaker was, like the poet in ancient Greece, a storehouse of the wisdom of the time.

Continuing to work so that he did not exclude “one aspect of the cinema in the name of another aspect of the cinema,” Godard followed Le Mépris with Une Femme Mariée (1964; The Married Woman), an examination of bourgeois expectations for a marriage shot in a pop-art, surface-against-surface approach. Next came Bande à Part (1964; Band of Outsiders), a romantic recollection of the moods of the American gangster film and a comment-analysis on the conventions of that genre. In 1965 came Alphaville, a vision of a postmodern world where a detective-hero carries his hard-boiled sensibility into a surrealistic, mechanized landscape in a clash of an outmoded past and an inhuman future. In Pierrot le fou (1965; Crazy Pete) and Masculin-Féminin (1966; Masculine-Feminine ), Godard moved closer to his own feelings, revealing some of his deepest personal responses through his characters. He even cast his own wife, Anna Karina, in Pierrot le Fou. In Masculine-Feminine, Godard attempted to come to terms with his own youth and with the excitement that he had felt in Paris as he learned about life in the city of light, about the art of film itself, and about the so-called mysterious nature of feminine reality. Although the film employs many of Godard’s now familiar devices (words dissected on the screen, interior monologues, interviews amid the narrative action, a randomness of sequences), there are many scenes of lyric intensity in which an emotional and subjective point of view transcends the witty social commentary.

Concluding a decade of exceptional cinematic activity, Godard directed Week-end (1967; Weekend), a raucous, explosive tableau of the modern world as a long, winding, insane highway replete with blatant sexual displays, comic violence, and people devoured by their own selfishness; Le Gai savoir (1968; The Joy of Knowledge), an examination of philosophic responses to contemporary situations; and One Plus One (released as Sympathy for the Devil in 1968), a quasi-documentary examination of pop culture including the band the Rolling Stones. Then, after a decade of influential and prolific filmmaking, Godard disappeared from view. This disappearance was actually a refusal to continue to make films and distribute them in the familiar manner of the film industry.

The political events of 1968 (assassinations and murders, the Vietnam War, the student revolts in Paris) led Godard to form a production group named for the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, in which he collaborated with the theorist Jean-Pierre Gorin on specifically ideological films, using politically oriented celebrities such as Yves Montand and Jane Fonda to try to mix commercial filmmaking and social criticism. In 1972, Godard shifted entirely into the realm of video technology to try to avoid completely the strictures of commercial control over his efforts, moving to Switzerland to set up a production facility in which he and Anne-Marie Miéville, his partner, could be fully responsible for their work. While the films and television features Godard made during this time have their admirers, many people believe that much of the work was largely inaccessible to all but the most dedicated film scholars.

A third phase of Godard’s career began in 1979, further confounding the critics who had dismissed him as a has-been. Still living in Switzerland, Godard directed Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980; Every Man for Himself ), an effort Godard called his “second first film.” In a story of three people, two women and a man, the characters’ lives connect, interact, and finally diverge. The film is another critique of modern society, and, while it tends to be episodic, the lives of the people the film follows are presented in powerful and sympathetic fashion. Although Godard does not quite connect everything, scene after scene resonates with his arresting use of the camera to direct the attention of viewers. This film was followed by others, including Je vous salue, Marie (1985; Hail Mary ), a bizarrely ironic recounting of the Nativity story, featuring a modern Virgin Mary appearing completely nude. Godard knew that the official religious publications would attack his work as blasphemous, but what interested him was trying to place the archetypal events in both a modern and unfamiliar context. Much of the film is obscure, but much of it is also witty and pointed, mixing the carnal with the spiritual in an unpredictable manner.

Also in 1985, Godard directed Détective, a reprise of 1940s film noir styles in a kind of comic murder mystery. In 1987, Godard produced his first film entirely in English, a very eccentric version of King Lear, featuring Norman Mailer, Woody Allen, Molly Ringwald, and Godard himself, a film arguably more interesting to discuss than to actually watch. Beginning with King Lear and concluding with For Ever Mozart (1996), Godard made more than twenty films of varying length, narrative complexity, and distinctive visual style in the Rolle region, all essentially on low budgets and with small crews.

From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, Godard’s primary interest was a massive multisection program for French television called Historire(s) du cinéma, in eight chapters. According to scholar Colin McCabe, this project had a long incubation dating from Godard’s first days as a critic. By 1998, he had completed a sufficient number of these videos and films to publish a four-volume print companion, reemphasizing his fascination with both the grammar and traditions of film and the intricacies of the printed and spoken word. In the printed set, the juxtaposition of visual images as an extension and an exploration of the possibilities of classic montage form the basis for Godard’s responses and comments on what he considers the most important elements of film. The deeply personal nature of his observations are characteristic of an artist whose individual psyche had been as much the subject of his films as their ostensible story.

One of the most touching moments of the project includes a recollection of Truffaut, whose combative relationship with Godard was amply documented by their often vitriolic correspondence. In addition to the ongoing Histoire(s) series, Godard continued his close collaboration with Miéville, making films and videos that were complements to those episodes, and also worked on retrospectives like his commission for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the documentary film The Old Place: Small Notes Regarding the Arts at Fall of Twentieth Century (1998).

In 2001, Godard’s first feature in four years, Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In spite of the venue, this was not a normal film. As Godard put it, “I wish I could do a normal picture, normally, but with me, I don’t know why, it is not possible.” His blend of video and film is designed as a comment on the past and future of cinema, a critique of the evolution of technology at the cost of human participation. In Praise of Love, as fresh and original in some ways as Godard’s early work, is not meant for the kind of commercial appeal that has always been an undeniable aspect of filmmaking but which has always both troubled and fascinated Godard at the same time. As he said at a press conference at Cannes, his and Miéville’s audience can be most accurately described as 100,000 friends around the world. In this sense, he was true to his muse throughout his filmmaking life.

Godard remained active after In Praise of Love, writing and directing Notre musique (2004), which analyzes war and is set in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. For the remainder of the first decade of the twenty-first century, he concentrated on short films and documentaries. Film Socialisme (2010), a film that comprising three parts and is partially set on cruise ship, premiered at Cannes and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Independent/Experimental Film and Video. In 2011, Godard was given an Honorary Award at the Academy Awards. Though he was not present to receive the honor, he has remained active into his eighties, with his film 3x3D premiering in 2013. His 2014 film Goodbye to Language was filmed in 3D.

Significance

It has been said that D. W. Griffith gave the cinema its alphabet, that Sergei Eisenstein gave the cinema its intellect, and that Charles Chaplin gave it its humanity. Perhaps it is a bit presumptuous to include Godard in this exalted pantheon, but it is not unreasonable to say that Godard, by subverting all of its conventions, gave the cinema its freedom. Even now that his work is relatively familiar, there is a bold, imaginative quality to a Godard film that is remarkably refreshing even when the director’s idiosyncrasies make the film frustrating in some ways. Specifically, Godard mixed various cinematic modes to arrive at new possibilities that work because he knew film history so well. His use of sight and sound is like a sensory assault that prevents viewers from watching with a mind on automatic pilot. Escape is impossible, engagement unavoidable. Godard took as his primary challenge the problem of how to communicate what is “real” when nothing is real except the projected celluloid on the screen at any given moment. His examination of shifting realities led him (and his audience) to a new understanding of the nature of perception itself, time and space ordered and reordered by the artist and the observer.

One of Godard’s primary fields of experimentation was in the area of editing, in which he deconstructs the classical theory of montage, commenting on and expanding into areas previously unexplored a classical technique still capable of innovative use. It is the excitement of discovery that makes Godard’s work so compelling, the singularity of his vision that makes it so provocative, and the demands that he makes on audiences that prevent his work from ever being ordinary cinema.

Bibliography

Brown, Royal S., ed. Focus on Godard. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Print. An anthology containing essays, reviews, and an interview with Godard covering his Dziga Vertov period. Includes a careful textual analysis of his early films by Marie-Claire Ropars.

Côté, Nicole, Douglas Morrey, and Christina Stojanova. The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print.

Dixon, Winston Wheeler. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: State U of New York P, 1997. Print. A thorough, detailed study of Godard’s films that is enthusiastic, sympathetic, and supportive of Godard’s efforts and intentions.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. 2d ed. Ed. and trans. Tom Milne. New York: Da Capo Press, 1989. Print. Godard’s comments on and responses to a wide range of films and filmmakers. A very good companion to the director’s own films, capturing the flavor and style of Godard’s wit and sensibility. Some critics feel that Milne’s translations are weaker on the subject of film theory.

Greene, Naomi. The French New Wave. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print. Ranging over the origins, evolution, and influences of a crucial component of the cinematic universe, Greene’s academic investigation focuses in considerable detail on Godard’s earlier work.

Kline, T. Jefferson. Companion to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Wiley, 2013. Print.

MacCabe, Colin. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Print. An intellectual and personal defense of the period when Godard removed himself from conventional film-distributing patterns. Detailed and analytical, with many illustrations, sketches, and photographs. Designed for the serious student but not inaccessible. Interviews with Godard follow each chapter.

---. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy. New York: Farrar, 2004. Print. Accurately described by historian David Thompson as more a provocative polemic than a rounded biography, MacCabe’s book is a knowledgeable, argumentative, and informative study of Godard’s entire life as a filmmaker. Written primarily for readers comfortable with film theory, it has a detailed filmography and a solid bibliography.

Morgan, Daniel. Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 2013.

Morrey, Douglas. Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print. Complete, comprehensive study of Godard’s life and work through the early twenty-first century, beginning with his years as a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma and then devoting a chapter to each major period of the director’s extremely varied career. Bibliographic references, filmography, and index.

Mussman, Toby. Jean-Luc Godard. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. A critical anthology containing some interesting interviews by Godard near the beginning of his career, critical essays on the first films, and some commentary by other filmmakers.

Pavsek, Christopher. The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.

Silverman, Kaja, and Harun Farocki. Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Discussions of eight films regarded as representative of Godard at his most accomplished. The close study in the form of a dialogue between two spectators offers a revealing view of the shots and sequences that comprise the cinematic syntax of Godard’s work. Includes a foreword by film scholar Constance Penley.

Temple, Michael, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt, eds. For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog, 2004. Compilation of essays by top film scholars including Raymond Bellour and Colin MacCabe examining Godard’s contributions to film theory and history. Bibliographic references and index.