Jean-Luc Godard

Godard's political ardour fuelled by the May 68 upheaval in France led to the shutting down of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students ...

His political ardour, fuelled by the May ‘68 upheavals in France, would culminate in protest, co-organised by François Truffaut, that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Being an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy, the intellectual penchants resound in his moving images that often touch upon socio-political issues. He threw down the gauntlet to mainstream French cinema's “Tradition of Quality”, which enshrined established convention rather than innovation and experimentation.

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.

Godard revolutionised popular cinema in 1960 with his debut feature Breathless and stood for years as one of the world's most vital and provocative ...

In December 2007 he was honoured by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrests of May 1968. Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. 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. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

Godard, the "enfant terrible" of the French New Wave who revolutionized popular cinema in 1960 with his debut feature Breathless, stood for years as one of ...

In December 2007 he was honored by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrests of May 1968. Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. 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. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

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.

Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave cinema who pushed cinematic boundaries and inspired iconoclastic directors decades after ...

He switched to directing films steeped in leftist, anti-war politics through the 1970s before returning to a more commercial mainstream. "We use to see him almost every week, he came to buy a cookie," said Nadine von Wattenwyl, who runs a grocery store. "It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio filmmaking system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting..." Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930 in Paris's plush Seventh Arrondissement. "Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic filmmaker of the New Wave, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. "Jean-Luc Godard died peacefully at his home surrounded by loved ones," his wife Anne-Marie Mieville and producers said in a statement published by several French media.

The titan of French film has died, aged 91. His was a career of immense creativity, which redefined the grammar of cinema.

His response: “to become immortal…and then die”. But the intellect as sharp as ever. Quentin Tarantino called his production house A Band Apart in homage to Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. The hands frail. As a young man, Godard had tremendous reverence for the American studio system. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. He’d leave in mistakes – like actors forgetting their lines – to remind viewers that all cinema was essentially fake. He dabbled with anthropology as a student, but his great love was cinema, and in particular American B-movies directed by Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and his idol Howard Hawks. The voice was raspy. Conventional, “invisible” editing was replaced by abrupt jump cuts; smooth long shots alternated with unsettling montages and rapid close-ups; characters broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience. [Agnès Varda, a pioneering artist who saw the extraordinary in the ordinary](https://theconversation.com/agnes-varda-a-pioneering-artist-who-saw-the-extraordinary-in-the-ordinary-115437) [From Nazis to Netflix, the controversies and contradictions of Cannes](https://theconversation.com/from-nazis-to-netflix-the-controversies-and-contradictions-of-cannes-77655)

He was the explosively talented film-maker who tore up the movie rulebook. But what did other directing giants make of this cinema legend – and did they ...

He was at his best when talking film rather than making them but he was a great innovator and stretched the art of film to its limits and beyond. By the time the movie finished, I was aware for the first time of what a film director was, and how most movies had rules that this film just exploded to glorious effect. I once worked with Caroline Champetier, a director of photography who was a Godard regular in the 80s and 90s. And I came out of the cinema into the rain muttering to myself: “That’s what I want to do. It was passionate and romantic, cynical and sly and heartfelt all at the same time. I started making films in 1967 when I was 16 and soon discovered they made movies outside of Hollywood. I was 23 and my cinema knowledge was scant. His films gave a belief not in cinema – for I was already a believer – but in how I had to find my own path, even with my extremely small gifts. The sublime power of the name Jean-Luc Godard, or I should say of the forever legendary acronym JLG, came into my consciousness when I was 14. I have said to friends that I couldn’t imagine a world in which I was alive but Jean-Luc was gone. It was 1960 and Breathless exploded on to the screen at the precise moment I arrived in London, a film-obsessed 17-year-old from Salford, who had never seen a movie that wasn’t in English, British and Hollywood fare being my sole diet. He delivered a new piece every year, and I and my cinephile comrades embraced them all hungrily, never failing to argue late into the night about each new offering.

Jean-Luc Godard, the visionary film director who shaped cinematic history with his provocative contributions to the French New Wave, died on Tuesday at the ...

Times](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead) in 2006. Godard’s 2001 film [In Praise of Love](https://www.imdb.com/video/vi4015915545/?playlistId=tt0181912&ref_=tt_ov_vi) features representatives of the Spielberg company trying to buy the memories of Holocaust survivors, among other jabs at the director—attacks that Ebert [deemed](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/in-praise-of-love-2002) “painful and unfair.” The film was remarkable for its use of hand-held cameras, natural light and jump cuts that marked abrupt transitions in the narrative, writes the [Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead)’ Dennis McLellan. In 1952, according to Jamey Keaten and Thomas Adamson of the [Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/jean-luc-godard-dead-ab2fc0cb0e83666334720f0fd392fcd0) (AP), Godard began writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. [Marsha Kinder](https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/Marsha-Kinder), a film scholar at the University of Southern California, told the [L.A. Soon after, he released the short film [All the Boys Are Called Patrick](https://www.shortfilmwindow.com/allboy-cp_gems/), which follows a man who makes dates with two college students on the same day, not realizing that they are friends. And yet, for those who know and love Godard’s work, the power of his vision is undeniable. [Operation Concrete](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047306/), a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. Godard returned to Paris after the liberation of France to attend secondary school, and later enrolled in the Sorbonne with the intention of studying ethnology—though he ultimately found the film societies that were flourishing in the city’s Latin Quarter more enticing. “I had no choice,” Godard told the [spanned more than six decades](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead), Godard changed the course of modern cinema with his spontaneous style of filmmaking. “We have lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius.”