Godard

The radical filmmaker upended conventions with art-house classics like "Breathless" and "Alphaville."

He started out as a critic at the 1950s. In recent years, Godard continued to work steadily, exploring the new possibilities of digital technology in artistically rigorous works like "Film Socialisme" (2010), "Goodbye to Language" (2014) and "The Image Book" (2018). Jean-Luc Godard, the iconoclastic and stylistically adventurous filmmaking giant who rose to prominence as part of the French New Wave movement in the 1960s, has died.

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. In 1988, he began one of his most ambitious projects, a seven-part series on the history of film, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which he completed in 1998. After a pair of aggressively didactic films, “Un Film Comme les Autres” (1968) and “Le Gai Savoir” (1969), and an abortive project with the Rolling Stones, released against Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard directed a candy-colored, wide-screen homage to the Hollywood musical “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), starring Ms. Belmondo’s central character in “Breathless,” a petty criminal who himself identified with the doomed romanticism of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the American films that Mr. And covering a 2000 revival screening of “Breathless,” the essayist and novelist Philip Lopate said he felt as exhilarated by the film as when he first saw it 40 years before. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Truffaut. Godard remained best known for “Breathless” and about a dozen films he made in quick succession afterward, ending with “Weekend” in 1967.University audiences identified with the doomed romanticism of Mr. Godard once observed, “A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

With “Breathless” in 1960, the filmmaker rode the crest of the French New Wave movement to liberate a hidebound movie industry.

Mr. One of Mr. Reemerging in the 1980s based in Rolle, Mr. In the meantime, Mr. “Breathless,” one of Mr. At his best, Mr. Much of “Breathless,” made on a shoestring budget, was filmed by handheld camera on the streets of Paris. The award revived a long-standing debate about whether Mr. Sontag wrote that Mr. Hollywood studios tended to look on movies as a collaborative effort organized by a producer, but Mr. Where a playfulness and exuberance pervaded his early films, Mr. These techniques and motifs set a template for much of his later work, with characters who stepped out of character to wink, wave and mug at the camera.

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard -- a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s and 60s ...

"It was like an apparition in French cinema," Macron tweeted. Godard's first feature film, "À bout de souffle" ("Breathless") in 1960, was a celebration of the nonchalant improvisational cinematography that became synonymous with his style. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave directors, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art.

Swiss news agency ATS quoted Godard's partner, Anne-Marie Mieville, and her producers as saying he died peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones at his home ...

Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 “Operation Concrete,” a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. He later started a relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965. Godard married his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrest of May 1968. Godard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina in 1961. His work turned more starkly political by the late 1960s. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema. He rewrote the rules for camera, sound and narrative. Godard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979, after he had moved with Mieville to the Swiss municipality of Rolle, where he lived with her for the rest of his life. He worked with some of the best-known actors in French cinema, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was propelled to stardom through Godard films, and Brigitte Bardot, who starred in his acclaimed 1963 work “Contempt.”

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

Mr. He and Mr. “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard joined with Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Mr. Truffaut, Mr. Rohmer and Mr. For Mr. A decade later, Mr. As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

When a figure as titanic as Jean-Luc Godard dies in the middle of a film festival like Toronto, it feels like the world should just stop.

They’re too old to kick their legs up the way they did, but they dance with abandon and good cheer, in a way the real Varda and Godard never got to. [break into a dance called the Madison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61H_xl9dzgI). Faces Places didn’t turn out to be Varda’s final film—that ended up being 2019’s Varda by Agnès, a sort of self-curated retrospective of a career that only received its proper reverence in her last years—but it has the feeling of one, not least because one of its subjects is how Varda’s failing eyesight makes it increasingly difficult to make movies. The two were early allies, although Varda made her first movie while Godard was still an aspiring critic, and Godard appears in a film within Varda’s breakthrough feature, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7, starring in a short silent-film pastiche which the movie’s protagonist watches during the titular timespan. [Agnès Varda](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/oscars-honoree-agnes-varda-is-a-documentary-giant.html) and [Documentary Now!](https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/documentary-now-season-3-review-cate-blanchett-bill-hader.html), the news that the latter would be devoting an episode to parodying the former took me to the happiest of places. [pointed out Tuesday morning](https://twitter.com/cameron_tiff/status/1569655393399209984) after the news broke, Godard had hardened into such an anti-sentimental crank that he might have taken an outpouring of flowery postmortem sentiment as an affront.

After Fifty years of pedestrian writing, Vidyarthy Chatterjee wrote his first book and he had sent it across by courier to Switzerland,only to hear back from ...

I hope you will have the time and the energy to go through the book which relates to three long docu- fiction ‘acts’ to do with both the visible md hidden life of a great, dark city and its people in various states of hope md the lack of it. Please be good enough to accept my book — my first book written at age 74, as a humble gift from a long-time admirer of your phenomenal output of films and other interventions on behalf of the wretched of the earth. Allow me to say that the documents trilogy by the Calcutta documentarist, Joshy Joseph, perhaps needs to be seen to enter the book.

The late filmmaker not only helped kick off the New Wave, he changed the language of cinema forever.

“Pierrot le fou” is one of the most beautiful works of art of the 20th century. But it’s the writing and the quotability of “Breathless” that may really cause it to lodge in people’s brains the way it does. Godard amusingly took to promoting the film on “The Dick Cavett Show” and said this was his “second first film.”—RL While the film has elements of romantic comedy, it’s also as restlessly satirical as any Godard film: He wanted to call “Masculin Feminin” “The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” which is actually one of the chapter titles of the movie, and that’s a fitting descriptor for his portrait of youth culture that’s funny, sweetly romantic, and rigorously intellectual all at once. Really, it’s his mockery of the 3D process, but still “Goodbye to Language” feels almost “Man with a Movie Camera”-esque, like you’re seeing movies for the first time, in its complete erosion of film grammar. “Pierrot le fou” announced that in this advertising-soaked culture we were now living in “the age of the ass.” “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” tells us that age is here to stay.—CB Jean-Luc Godard radically redefined the 3D moviegoing experience with “Goodbye to Language,” the 42nd film in the iconoclast’s long and winding career. And the other thing is for its final shot, a title card simply saying “Fin de Cinema.” Not just of the movie, but of cinema as a whole.—CB “Film Socialisme” itself seemed like a prophecy then — that that would be the ship Godard would choose for his diagnostic study of Europe’s capitalist malaise, of all things. But the movie is really about the journey to get to her parents’ home, a cross-country panorama that’s like “The Odyssey” as told by the Hells Angels. Deeper cuts should then follow: “Nouvelle Vague,” “Le Petit Soldat,” “Passion,” “Histoire(s) du Cinema,” “In Praise of Love.” But these movies that follow are the introduction to his work you need. The Swiss-born filmmaker stripped cinema down to its essence — all you need to tell a story on film is “a girl and a gun” he famously said — with a run-and-gun guerrilla style that eventually flowered into a finely wrought formalism.

From the youthful New Wave excitement of “Breathless” to the experimental works of his old age, Godard changed cinema.

One of Godard’s final films takes a slim story about a bickering couple and threads it through a succession of academic discussions about semantics. Hardly anti-religion, this picture is primarily a meditation on miracles, as they appear in nature and in human interactions. An atypical exercise in adaptation, 1983’s “First Name: Carmen” turns Georges Bizet’s opera into the erotically charged tale of a revolutionary and the soldier she bewitches. After “Weekend,” Godard’s frustration with cinema — even his boundary-less variety — reached a peak. Altogether, this movie is one long howl of disgust, delivered with enough energy and humor to be gripping. “Alphaville” puts a rumpled, noir-ready secret agent against a backdrop of mid-20th-century modernism, and lets the visual clash between the character and his habitat reflect the artist’s own dim view of how technology strangles the life out of humanity. Leaving aside the self-reference and winks at the audience, the director instead tells this highly metafictional story in a dozen docu-realistic vignettes, revealing the alienation of urban life and the cruelty of men. “My Life to Live”). Godard’s feature-length debut is as startlingly radical now as it was back in 1960. Stream it on Between 1960 and 1967, the prolific Godard made over a dozen feature films in a multiplicity of styles — presented with exuberance and wit — creating a body of work that later directors would draw on for inspiration. One of the pioneers of the French New Wave, Godard and his movie-mad contemporaries rebelled against the square cinematic conventions of the 1950s.

Jean-Luc Godard was a prophet of film's future as an art form, layering images and sound that the body could sink into and the mind could puzzle through.

At one point, they appear next to a red car and I flashed on all the cars and colors in his movies. The reason I fell in love with his 1966 film “Masculin Féminin” when I first saw it wasn’t because he described his characters as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” — I fell in love because I too was young and it was beautiful and it broke my heart. Varda was a woman in a man’s world and she learned how to work the room, a habit — and burden — that wasn’t necessary for Godard, the onetime enfant terrible, the former bad-boy genius of cinema who faded into a caricature of himself, almost Lear-like: “A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.” Godard played with that image of the gruff, cranky, cigar-chomping guru of cinema’s past while in reality he remained a prophet for its still-unrealized future. He insisted that we come to him, that we navigate the densities of his thought, decipher his epigrams and learn a new language: his. One of the things I find most moving about Godard is that even as movies changed, he did, too. Watching it at Cannes, where attendees cheered and nearly levitated out of their seats, remains one of the great experiences of my moviegoing life. It invited us in with a smile and instructed us to enjoy the show, and then come back for more of the same the next week. As he pushed and pulled, he challenged viewers and occasionally assaulted them. An early exposure to avant-garde cinema helped me in this simply because by the time I started digging into Godard’s work, I already knew that movies didn’t necessarily have to be obvious. He was a phantom of cinema long before his death, and he will haunt us. What I also didn’t understand is that I had just watched another way of making — and seeing — film. And now that he’s gone it feels impossible to articulate the immensity of his impact on cinema, an art that he changed more than most.

The master stylist and provocateur behind 'Breathless,' 'Alphaville,' and 'Goodbye to Language' broke every cinematic rule he could find for six decades.

His first feature as a director, 1960’s Breathless, has the energy of a young genius braying, “don’t tell me what to do!” in the face of decades of film “rules.” Shooting quickly and with a low budget, rather than try to hide edits that don’t quite match (typically the mark of a “mistake”), Godard leaned into it with noticeable jump cuts, giving his film about lovers and criminals a jazzy, unpredictable feel. Of this wave, no one’s work felt more “new” than Godard’s. Jean-Luc Godard, the Franco-Swiss film critic turned director and lynchpin of the French New Wave, has died.

Swiss news agency ATS quoted Godard's partner, Anne-Marie Mieville, and her producers as saying he died peacefully and surrounded by his loved ones at his ...

Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 “Operation Concrete,” a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. He later started a relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965. Godard married his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrest of May 1968. Godard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina in 1961. His work turned more starkly political by the late 1960s. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema. He rewrote the rules for camera, sound and narrative. Godard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979, after he had moved with Mieville to the Swiss municipality of Rolle, where he lived with her for the rest of his life. He worked with some of the best-known actors in French cinema, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was propelled to stardom through Godard films, and Brigitte Bardot, who starred in his acclaimed 1963 work “Contempt.”

The French director did more than transform the aesthetic and the practice of filmmaking—he turned the cinema into the central art form of his time.

To the end of his life, he was still fighting his way up and in, even from the heights of cinematic history that he had scaled. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. (I interviewed Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who called the town Rollywood.) Godard made his domestic activities and local observations converge with the history of the cinema and the grand-scale politics of his era. At the restaurant where we ate, he was voluble, and his conversation was wide-ranging, embracing Shakespeare (we discussed “Coriolanus”) and “Schindler’s List,” the Second World War and the later films of classic Hollywood directors and aspects of his own youth (such as his avoidance of military service both in France and in Switzerland), and he talked of food (the coffee and the local fish), and made winking fun of the shirt that a man at another table was wearing. There was no legend to look up to, no dominant figure to inspire or overawe; I naïvely but sincerely saw the film face to face, so to speak, and saw him in it the same way, as a filmmaker virtually addressing his audience, across the decades, in real time. And, as prolific as he was during his first flush of artistic fervor, he was even more so at the time of his return—though he made fewer features (“only” eighteen from 1980 onward), he also created video essays, including the monumental “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that were crucibles, epilogues, and living notebooks for his features. He sought a culture of his own, and, with his largely autodidactic passion for movies, he found one that was resolutely modern—and that, with his intellectual fervor, he helped raise to equality with the classics. Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort and propriety—his father was a doctor, his mother was a medical assistant and the scion of a major banking family—and his artistic interests were encouraged, but his voyage into the cinema was a self-conscious revolt against his cultural heritage. At twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Cahiers, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of rigorously reasoned artistic freedom; at twenty-five, he wrote an instant-classic essay on film editing, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. What he retained to the very end of his career (his final feature, “ [The Image Book](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-image-book-reviewed-jean-luc-godard-confronts-cinemas-depiction-of-the-arab-world),” was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of adventure. [to Bob Dylan’s](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bob-dylan-in-correspondence).) Yet, like many artistic heroes of the sixties, Godard found that his public image and his private life, his fame and his ambitions, came into conflict. But it wasn’t just the news that made his films feel like the embodiment of their times—it was Godard’s insolence, his defiance, his derisive humor, his sense of freedom.

Stubborn and iconoclastic as always, Jean-Luc Godard has passed to another realm--and by his own choice-- at age 91.

As is documented in one of her last personal documentaries, Varda traveled to Switzerland to see Godard and presumably have a meal with him. [Jean-Luc Godard Tributes Pour In From The World Of Cinema And Beyond: “National Treasure”](https://deadline.com/2022/09/jean-luc-godard-tributes-1235117228/) And how many of you ever saw the utterly eccentric 1989 version of King Lear Godard made for none other than Menachem Golan; Norman Mailer was the original writer—I visited with him in San Francisco when he was working on it—and Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy ultimately saw it through. By this time, Godard had fully entered his Maoist, hyper-revolutionary period, and I first met him when Tom Luddy, who was based in Berkeley and a few years later co-founded the Telluride Film Festival, was showing him around San Francisco. Ever-iconoclastic, impudent and exasperating, forever pushing boundaries but remaining elusive, and an artist in every fiber of his being, Godard always did exactly what he wanted to do; for a few years many followed him ardently, and for lots of us in the 1960s he led the way into a vastly exciting and personal form of cinema. Although Godard consumed and brilliantly wrote about the existing cinema as a young critic, he never followed the accepted rules of the game creatively.

THR's Paris-based film critic chooses his five favorite works by the bold and brilliant auteur.

Blossoms in Sumptuous but Shaky Biopic of a Classical Violinist](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/chevalier-kelvin-harrison-jr-stephen-williams-1235218307/) This ruminative documentary is arguably Godard’s most personal work, starring the director, in his early 60s at the time, as himself with his home in Rolle, Switzerland, as the main setting. This collage-like fiction was made with two other movies, La Chinoise and Weekend, in a year that saw Godard transform from a New Wave director experimenting with genre and form to an overtly political filmmaker who would engage in the uprisings of May 1968 the year after. With a mix of melancholic humor and dialectical genius, Godard reflects on his career and the cinema in general, finding poetry in the simple things that surround him: a favorite movie playing on television, a painting on the wall or a brisk walk around Lake Geneva. In the end, The Odyssey that Lang is adapting onscreen only serves as a backdrop to the battles, both personal and professional, that happen behind the camera. One of the director’s strongest collaborations with his then wife and muse Anna Karina, the film is both a cruel, almost documentary-like portrayal of a girl who descends into poverty and prostitution after leaving family life behind, and a tragic tale of freedom curtailed that nonetheless offers its shred of hope and the sublime. Not only does it mark the first time he worked with Anna Karina, who is filmed with as much rapture as Jean Seberg was in Breathless, but it foreshadows the murky and controversial political battles — in this case, those surrounding the Algerian War — that the director would wage throughout much of his career. Adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel, Contempt is one of Godard’s most celebrated movies and perhaps the closest he ever came to making an epic Hollywood feature. But the director’s second feature, made the year after his groundbreaking debut but released only in 1963 after being censored by the French government, is, at least for this critic, the more memorable of the two — and certainly one of Godard’s greatest achievements. It’s a work inspired by both Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is seen playing in a movie theatre, and Jean Renoir’s Émile Zola adaptation, Nana, whom the main character is named after. Odds are most people remember the latter two over the Hawks film, which goes to show that any list is entirely subjective and should be taken with a grain of salt — or, to cite a Godardian staple, an unfiltered Gauloises cigarette. Some Godard enthusiasts think that everything he made was genius, to the point that any ranking of his oeuvre will immediately bring its share of haters and snobs.

A source close to Jean-Luc Godard confirmed to Deadline that the director died aged 91.

It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting… Nous perdons un trésor national, un regard de génie. Adieu to a giant of cinema who ripped up the rule book. Depuis sa 1ère apparition au Festival dans Cleo de 5 à 7 en 1962, 21 films de Jean-Luc Godard ont été projetés à Cannes. Jean-Luc Godard laisse derrière lui 100 films dont presque tout autant de chefs d'oeuvre en 60 ans de carrière. That scene between them in the hotel: how many other directors could have managed that in so small a space and made it so captivating? It still leaps off the screen like few movies. [September 13, 2022] Jean-Luc Godard did not make cinema. Remarking on Godard’s radical and passionate approach to cinema, British director “To this day, Jean-Luc Godard inspires filmmakers worldwide.” Speaking on France Info radio shortly after the news broke, Jack Lang, former Culture Minister of France, said Godard was “unique, absolutely unique…