JEAN-LUC GODARD was one of the most revered figures in world cinema, and one of the most irreverent. The French-Swiss writer-director, who died on September 13th, aged 91, had a deep knowledge and love of other directors’ work, yet he was driven to experiment with the medium in ways that no one had ever tried before.
He started out as a firebrand critic in Paris at a time when, as he put it, “cinema was as important as bread”. From 1952 onwards, his furious, hyperbolic essays in Cahiers du Cinema, a magazine, poured scorn on France’s stuffy period dramas, preferring to praise the gangster movies and melodramas made under Hollywood’s studio system. He turned to film-making in the mid-1950s, starting with shorts, but felt he retained a literary sensibility. “I consider myself an essayist, I do essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays,” he said. “I simply film them instead of writing them.”
He made his first groundbreaking fiction feature, “À bout de souffle” (“Breathless”), in 1960, when he was 29. The crime drama would soon be acclaimed as one of the defining films of the French New Wave, and of cinema in general. Budding cinephiles and Francophiles everywhere have since bought posters featuring the romantic image of its stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, strolling down the Champs-Élysées—she in a pixie cut and a New York Herald Tribune T-shirt, he in a fedora and broad-shouldered jacket.
Mr Godard’s affection for Hollywood is obvious in “Breathless”: Belmondo’s small-time crook models himself on Humphrey Bogart. But no one would mistake it for a Hollywood movie—even if it was eventually remade in Tinseltown with Richard Gere in the lead role. Mr Godard shot the film on the streets of Paris, in black and white, with a handheld camera and a script which he wrote as he went along. The editing and music were jarring and there were references to Mr Godard’s favourite films and books throughout. “Breathless” seemed spontaneous and contemporary, youthful and playful, and it gave generations of aspiring directors a template for their own low-budget, independent guerrilla films.
It also gave them the liberating feeling that there was nothing a film wasn’t allowed to do—a feeling offered again and again by Mr Godard’s work. In “Vivre sa vie” (“My Life to Live”, 1962) the heroine writes a long letter and the whole letter-writing process is shown from beginning to end. The opening scene of “Week-end” (1967) is one unbroken, seven-minute tracking shot of a disastrous traffic jam.
In “Bande à part” (“Band of Outsiders”, 1964) three young would-be burglars are in a café when they casually commence a perfectly choreographed dance routine, clapping and clicking their fingers while the waiters and other patrons ignore them. A further post-modern twist comes when the groovy instrumental music drops out of the soundtrack to be replaced by a sombre voice-over. This endlessly imitated scene doesn’t advance the heist plot, but it is the film’s joyous centrepiece. It makes the characters seem at once more real and less real. It is easy to see why Quentin Tarantino named his production company “A Band Apart” in homage; Mr Godard quipped that Mr Tarantino should have sent him some money instead.
This lofty dismissal was typical of an artist who had no interest in mainstream acceptance. His most esteemed work dates back to the 1960s, when he was making such must-see films as “Le Mépris” (“Contempt”) and “Pierrot le Fou” (“Pierrot the Fool”) at the dizzying pace of someone jotting in a notebook. But in the following decades, he never stopped pushing cinema to new limits. His style grew ever more avant-garde, melting the boundaries between fiction, documentary and art installation. His anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois messages became ever more strident, his explorations of language ever more demanding, his embrace of new technology ever more passionate. Even in his eighties, he was making radical works that befuddled and delighted his admirers: “Le Livre d’image” (“The Image Book”) was awarded the first “Special Palme d’Or” at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018.
Ever the provocateur and the outsider, he was as cool in his final years as he had been at the height of the New Wave, when he proved that directors could be hip, young rebels. They could have cleft chins and sunglasses and cigarettes hanging from their mouths; they could hold forth on Hollywood B-movies and revolutionary politics with the same blazing conviction. This chic image was almost as influential as any in his films. Mr Godard showed the world what cinema could be—and what a director might be, too.
