JEAN-LUC GODARD
French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard died at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, aged 91. His long-time legal adviser, Patrick Jeanneret, said Godard departed by assisted dying, having suffered from “multiple disabling pathologies”. A key figure in the French New Wave, Godard, like fellow Nouvelle Vague luminaries Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, contributed film essays to Cahiers Du Cinéma before moving into directing.
His feature debut, Breathless (1960), arrived after Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows, but cemented the movement’s ethos as to how new modes of storytelling must introduce vigour and spontaneity to divorce the stagnant medium from the “tradition of quality”. Cinema, like literature, must have an authorial voice.
Breathless drew on US gangster movies and film noir for its tale of a Humphrey Bogart-fixated thug (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who attempts to persuade his American love interest (Jean Seberg) to go on the lam with him after he’s stolen a car and killed a cop. Shot on the streets of Paris using natural light, handheld cameras and direct sound recording, Breathless’ free-wheeling style, including elliptical jump cuts, influenced ‘movie brats’ Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. As did its quoting of other movies. “Modern movies begin here. No film debut since Citizen Kane… has been as influential,” wrote
Chicago Sun-Times critic Robert Ebert. Film historian David Thomson said, “Godard is the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject.”
In the ’60s, Godard unleashed a string of electrifying classics, including Contempt, Bande À Part (from which Quentin Tarantino took the name of his production company, A Band Apart, and inspiration for Pulp Fiction’s dance scene), Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou and Week End. Many of his films in this most fertile of periods starred the Danish model Anna Karina, whom he married in 1961; they divorced in 1965. His second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, starred in Godard’s La Chinoise, Week End (both 1967) and One Plus One (1968). She was his partner as his films became more political, didactic and experimental in the 1970s.
Godard remained prolific right up until his final essay movie, The Image Book, competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. For six decades he tirelessly rewrote the language of cinema and ceaselessly explored its subversive possibilities. Ever the iconoclast, he received an Honorary Oscar from the Academy in 2010 and, asked what it meant to him, replied, “Nothing.”
Godard is survived by Swiss multimedia artist Anne-Marie Miéville, his partner of more than 40 years.