Jean-Luc Godard

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand certainty of someone who had spent decades dismantling the very idea of storytelling, captures everything about why this French and Swiss director became one of the most argued-about figures in the history of cinema. He was born on the 3rd of December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, and he died on the 13th of September 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland, at the age of 91, in a country that permitted the assisted death he chose for himself. Between those two dates he wrote about film, argued about film, destroyed film conventions, rebuilt them, abandoned them again, and generated, according to critics, one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century. AllMovie credited his work with having "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. In a 2002 Sight and Sound poll, critics placed him third among all directors in history. Yet Ingmar Bergman called his films "completely dead." Orson Welles said his gifts as a director were enormous but that he could not take him seriously as a thinker. The contradictions go on. How did a wealthy Swiss Protestant boy with a failed baccalauréat exam become the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era? And what happened when that filmmaker decided cinema itself was not enough?

• 2. A Family of Founders

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  Paul Godard, Jean-Luc's father, was a Swiss physician, and the family's roots ran deep on both sides of the Franco-Swiss border. His mother Odile was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas, and the great-granddaughter of the theologian Adolphe Monod. The family tree also included the naturalist Theodore Monod, the composer Jacques-Louis Monod, and the pastor Frederic Monod. These were not ordinary Protestant bourgeois: they were, generation after generation, people who built things and named things. Four years after Jean-Luc was born, his father moved the family to Switzerland. When the Second World War began, Godard was in France and returned to Switzerland with difficulty, spending most of the war there, though his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva. He attended school in Nyon. He was not, by his own account, a frequent filmgoer. He traced his introduction to cinema not to a theatre but to a reading of Andre Malraux's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema and to a film journal called La Revue du cinema, relaunched in 1946. In 1946 he went to study at the Lycee Buffon in Paris, lodging with the writer Jean Schlumberger and mixing with members of the city's cultural elite through family connections. He failed his baccalaureat in 1948, returned to Switzerland, and ended up living with his parents as their marriage broke apart. In Geneva, he spent time with a group that included Roland Tolmatchoff, a film fanatic, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco. He returned to Paris in 1949 after passing the retest and registered at the Sorbonne for a certificate in anthropology. He did not attend class.

• 3. The Cine-Clubs and Cahiers

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  "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread," Godard said, looking back at the years just before 1950 when the Latin Quarter of Paris was alive with cine-clubs. He became a regular at several: the Cinematheque Francaise, founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936; the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, founded around 1947 or 1948 and led intellectually by Maurice Scherer; and Work and Culture, a workers' education group for which Andre Bazin had organized wartime film screenings. It was at these clubs that Godard met Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and others who would become the core of the French New Wave. "At the Cinematheque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer.... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs." His entry into writing about film was rapid. Along with Scherer, writing under the future pseudonym Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, he founded a short-lived film journal that published five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded Cahiers du Cinema in 1951, Godard was the first of the younger CCQL and Cinematheque group to be published there. The January 1952 issue carried his review of a Rudolph Mate melodrama, No Sad Songs for Me. By September 1952 he had published "Defence and Illustration of Classical Decoupage," attacking an earlier piece by Bazin and defending the shot-reverse shot technique, while praising Howard Hawks as "the greatest American artist." These critical battles were not academic diversions: they were rehearsals for the films he had not yet made. His aphorism that the critical dimension is "subsumed" in his filmmaking was rooted in exactly this period.

• 4. Learning on Concrete

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  In the fall of 1952, Godard left Paris for Switzerland and moved to Lausanne with his mother. He became friendly with her lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, a labourer on the Grande Dixence Dam, and through that connection secured work himself as a construction worker at the Plaz Fleuri work site. He saw the dam as a subject for documentary film. When his initial contract ended, he extended his stay by moving to the post of telephone switchboard operator. While on duty, in April 1954, he put through a call that relayed the news that his mother, Odile Monod, had died in a scooter accident. Swiss friends lent him a 35mm movie camera. He rewrote the commentary Laubscher had drafted, gave the film a rhyming title, Operaton Beton (Operation Concrete), and the company that administered the dam bought it for publicity purposes. Back in Paris by January 1956 and still writing for Cahiers, he made the 10-minute short Une femme coquette (1955) in Geneva. A plan for a feature adaptation of Goethe's Elective Affinities came to nothing. Collaborative projects with Truffaut stalled, including one based on a true-crime story about a petty criminal named Michel Portail who had shot a motorcycle policeman, and a comedy about a country girl arriving in Paris. His Swiss friend Roland Tolmatchoff later recalled: "In Paris he had a big Bogart poster on the wall and nothing else." By December 1958, at the Festival of Short Films in Tours, Godard was praising the work of Jacques Demy, Jacques Rozier and Agnes Varda and making clear he wanted to make a feature. He returned to the Portail story at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, asking Truffaut to let him use it. Financing came not from the producer Georges de Beauregard, who was in debt from two productions, but from a film distributor, Rene Pigneres.

• 5. Breathless and the New Wave

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  Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1960) starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, and it did not feel like any film that had come before it. Seberg had become famous in 1956 when Otto Preminger cast her as Joan of Arc in Saint Joan; The New York Times had called her a "misplaced amateur" in the follow-up Bonjour Tristesse. Godard and Truffaut disagreed. For Belmondo's role, Godard had written in Arts in 1958 that the actor was "the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow." The cameraman was Raoul Coutard, a choice of producer Beauregard, who had shot documentary footage for the French army's information service during the French-Indochina War. Tracking shots were captured with Coutard in a wheelchair pushed by Godard himself. Though Godard had prepared a traditional screenplay, he dispensed with it and wrote dialogue day by day. The film employed jump cuts that were traditionally considered amateurish, and broke the eyeline match in continuity editing. Characters addressed the audience directly. In January 1960, the film won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded "to encourage an auteur of the future." One reviewer cited Alexandre Astruc's prophecy of the caméra-stylo and called the film "the first work authentically written with a caméra-stylo." The critic Richard Brody later wrote: "After Breathless, anything artistic appeared possible in the cinema." Akira Kurosawa listed the film among his 100 favourite films. Four of Godard's films, including Breathless, would appear on the 2022 Sight and Sound list of the 100 Greatest Films, with Breathless placed 38th.

• 6. Anna Karina and Anouchka Films

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  In 1960, shooting Le petit soldat, Godard cast Anna Karina in the film when she had virtually no experience as an actress. He used her awkwardness as part of her performance. By the end of the shoot they were a couple. Filmmaker magazine would later call their collaborations "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema." The Independent described them as "one of the most celebrated pairings of the 1960s." Susan Sontag called Vivre sa vie (1962), in which Karina played an errant mother and aspiring actress drawn into street work, "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful and original works of art I know of." The film's popular success led Columbia Pictures to offer Godard $100,000 for a film, with complete artistic control. In 1964, Godard and Karina formed their own production company, Anouchka Films, through which he directed Bande a part, a film he described as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka." Their marriage lasted from 1961 to 1965. Karina later described Godard as a recluse and said that, in later life, the two no longer spoke. The relationship had been widely publicised while it lasted and fed directly into the films: A Woman Is a Woman (1961) revealed, in the words of those who studied it closely, "the confinement within the four walls of domestic life" and "the emotional and artistic fault lines that threatened their relationship." Godard's second marriage, to actress Anne Wiazemsky, ran from 1967 to 1979. It ended amid his disappointment with his Maoist ideals, and biographer Antoine de Baecque wrote that during this period Godard attempted suicide on two occasions.

• 7. Politics, the Dziga Vertov Group

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  The events of May 1968 in Paris marked a definitive rupture in Godard's career. Alongside Francois Truffaut, he led protests that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with students and workers, declaring that not a single film at the festival represented their causes. "Not one, whether by Milos, myself, Roman or Francois. There are none. We're behind the times." He became passionate about "making political films politically" and began working anonymously in collaboration with others to escape the cult of personality that had formed around him. His most notable collaborator was Jean-Pierre Gorin, a Maoist student of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, who later became a professor of Film Studies at the University of California at San Diego. Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin made five films together with strong Maoist messages. The group they formed, which adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group, drew its name from a Soviet filmmaker Godard admired for his radical documentary series "Kino Pravda" and the late silent-era film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Their most prominent collaboration was Tout Va Bien (1972), which starred Jane Fonda, at the height of her career after winning an Academy Award for Klute (1971), and the French actor and singer Yves Montand. A motorcycle accident severely incapacitated Godard during production, and Gorin directed most of the film. The pair followed it with Letter to Jane, a 50-minute "examination of a still" showing Fonda visiting North Vietnam, which was the last film they made together. In 1972, Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Mieville founded Sonimage, an alternative video production and distribution company based in Grenoble.

• 8. Late Work and Legacy

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  Between 1988 and 1998, Godard produced Histoire(s) du cinema, a multi-part series combining innovations from his video work with a passionate engagement in twentieth-century history and the history of film. The project was released on ECM Records as ECM NewSeries 1706, part of a long collaboration with Manfred Eicher, the founder and head of ECM Records, who also took over musical direction for several of Godard's later films including Allemagne 90 neuf zéro and For Ever Mozart. In 2010, Godard received an Academy Honorary Award, and in 2018, Le livre d'image received a Special Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a film he had been shooting for nearly two years in various Arab countries including Tunisia. His 2014 film Goodbye to Language won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, after Godard's 1964 film, and said: "To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music. They both revolutionized their forms." Roger Ebert compared his influence to that of James Joyce in fiction and Samuel Beckett in theatre. George Lucas, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Satyajit Ray all praised his work. Fritz Lang agreed to appear in Contempt specifically because of his admiration for Godard as a director. Godard died on the 13th of September 2022 in Rolle, by assisted suicide, legal under Swiss law; Mieville was by his side. His body was cremated and there was no funeral service. His final two posthumous shorts, including Scenarios, left unfinished at his death and completed by cinematographer Fabrice Aragno and Jean-Paul Battagia, were set for their world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.