Happy 90th Birthday, Jean-Luc Godard! Born today in 1930, this French-Swiss film critic, screenwriter and film director rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement, and is arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.
Known for stylistic innovations that challenged the conventions of Hollywood cinema, Godard is universally recognized as the most audacious, radical, as well as the most influential of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers.
His work reflects a fervent knowledge of film history, a comprehensive understanding of existential and Marxist philosophy, and a profound insight into the fragility of human relationships.
By beginning with his feature debut, Godard had revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound and camera work.
Few filmmakers had so profound an effect on the development of cinema as Godard, certainly one of the most important and influential directors worldwide to have emerged since the end of World War II.
In May 1950, Godard and three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas.
In January 1952, Godard began writing for the massively influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. However, Godard's first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief.
From his early days as a critic and thinker in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma, through the great age of the French New Wave of the 1960s, he redefined the way we look at film.
An essayist and poet of the cinema, he made the language of film a real part of his narratives.
Godard’s career has spanned over half a century with the one constant in his work being that each new movie is primarily a study of form in relation to an idea. The forms evolved and the ideas changed, but his exploration of the relatedness of the two remained the same.
Despite his achievements, Godard remains a controversial figure who divides both critics and audiences alike.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Godard, along with a small group of French filmmakers, turned cinema on its head. The Nouvelle Vague, (or French New Wave), broke all of the established rules of filmmaking and rewrote them.
During this time, he married his first wife in 1961. This was Danish-French film avant-garde actress, director, writer, and singer Anna Karina. She was Godard's collaborator in the 1960s, performing in several of his films.
Most notably, these included 'Vivre Sa Vie' ('My Life to Live') (1962), 'Alphaville' (1965), and 'Pierrot le Fou'(1965).
In 1964, Godard described his and his colleagues' impact: "We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV."
Later in his career, Godard also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film as an astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed.
And after half a century, Godard's 1960 French black and white crime/drama film 'À bout de souffle' ('Breathless') still defies conventional expectations about what a film should be.
Five years later, Godard and Karina were divorced. However, it was also that same year in which Godard married his second and final wife. This was French actress and novelist Anne Wiazemsky.
Like Karina, Wiazemsky also went onto appear in several of Godard's films. These included 'La Chinoise'(1967), 'Week End' (1967), (most notably but uncredited)) and 'One Plus One' (1968). In 1979, Godard and Wiazemsky were divorced.
In April 1969, Roger Ebert wrote of the filmmaker: “The films of Jean-Luc Godard have fascinated and enraged moviegoers for a decade now. The simple fact is: This most brilliant of all modern directors is heartily disliked by a great many people who pay to see his movies.
No wonder. Godard is a perverse and difficult director who is deeply into his own universe. He couldn't care less about making a traditional movie with a story line.
His films require active participation and imagination by the audience, and most movie audiences are lazy.
The film medium, above all others, encourages a passive response. All you have to do is sit back and let the images wash across your eyeballs and listen to the words. The movie does the rest.
Godard is a director of the very first rank; no other director in the 1960s has had more influence on the development of the feature-length film.
Like Joyce in fiction or Beckett in theater, he is a pioneer whose present work is not acceptable to present audiences. [...]
But his influence on other directors is gradually creating and educating an audience that will, perhaps in the next generation, be able to look back at his films and see that this is where their cinema began.”
Godard is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s; his approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him arguably the most influential director of the French New Wave.
Godard was one of the leading lights of this new style of cinema. Critics continue to rate him among the top ten directors of all time.
It had been Godard of whom has had an influence on a handful of filmmakers all over the world.
These included Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian De Palma, Jim Jarmusch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and American documentary filmmaker and direct cinema pioneer D. A. Pennebaker.
A Band Apart Films was a production company founded by Quentin Tarantino, American producer Michael Bodnarchek, and American film producer Lawrence Bender that was active from 1991 to 2006. It was headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
The company's name is a play of Godard’s 1964 French black and white drama/crime film ‘Bande à part’ (‘Band of Outsiders’), whose work was highly influential on the work of the company's members.
In a 2002 poll for the British monthly film magazine Sight & Sound, Godard ranked third in the critics' top-ten directors of all time (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted).
Godard is said to have "created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century."
Godard and his work have been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary."
In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award at the 82nd Academy Awards in early March. However, he did not attend the ceremony.
Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality".
This had "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation." As a result of such argument, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films.
Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema.
Along with showing knowledge of film history through homages and references, several of his films expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy.
Since the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, and a Marxist perspective.
As a charter member of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard was also arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era.
While some await the arrival of each new film with excited anticipation and sympathetic engagement, others dismiss Godard's work as pretentious, inscrutable, boring and lacking in emotion.
Perhaps it is inevitable that an artist who has consistently sought to challenge audiences never rested on his laurels but continually looked for new means of expression.
This was while always remaining focused on his own personal obsessions, should he alienate those who might prefer a more predictable genius. But predictability is not and has never been a part of Godard’s make-up.
Driven by his keen intelligence, a love of spontaneity and a refusal to produce the straightforward narratives demanded by producers, Godard, in every way, fulfilled the promise and potential of the New Wave, revolutionizing cinema in the process.
He was not only a tireless experimenter with form and context, but also synonymous with the world.
Today, Godard is still recognized as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, but his political beliefs contributed to a difficult relationship with the film establishment.
Nonetheless, his filmmaking legacy both rejected and challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.
No one has influenced modern filmmaking more than this pioneer of the French New Wave, of whom remains our great lyricist on historical trauma, religion, and the legacy of cinema.
The filmography of Godard (over seventy works, from shorts and feature films to television series) will still continue to be studied, analyzed, loved, criticized, and appreciated for many generations to come.
Godard has been active from 1950–present.
"Film is truth twenty-four times a second, and every cut is a lie." ~Jean-Luc Godard
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