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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2022/09/13/jean-luc-godard-legendary-french-film-director-dies-aged-91_5996746_15.html

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* Obituaries
* Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard, legendary film director, dies aged 91

From the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard was among those who pushed cinema's
aesthetic and narrative limits while embodying the New Wave. The
French-Swiss filmmaker died on September 13.

By Jacques Mandelbaum

Published on September 13, 2022 at 10h49, updated at 15h49 on
September 13, 2022

Time to 16 min.

Lire en francais

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Jean-Luc Godard in 1987. Jean-Luc Godard in 1987. Jean-Luc Godard in
1987. PASCAL VICTOR/ARTCOMPRESS VIA LEEMAGE

Born on December 3, 1930 in Paris, the most illustrious of
French-Swiss film artists died on September 13, Le Monde learned,
confirming an earlier report by Liberation. During the course of a
career spanning over 60 years, Godard left behind more than 100
films. But he did not leave empty-handed. Like all exceptional
creative figures, he takes with him something that has been torn from
the collective consciousness.

First, there is the loss of one of the greatest filmmakers of all
time, the electroshocks of images and sounds that his work rekindles
in the memory of his contemporaries around the world and with a
sphere of influence that very few French filmmakers ever reached.

Then there is the last roll of the New Wave, since Godard so
personified it. A symbolic moment finally relegating what was dubbed
"cinematographic modernity," alive while Godard still was, into a
chapter in the great book of cinema.

This creative rupture of modernity born with Italian neo-realism from
the disaster of the Second World War is what Godard embodied more
passionately, violently and painfully than many others, including his
former New Wave companions. So much so that he immediately became the
movement's standard-bearer all over the world, an example followed
and admired by all those who thought cinema was created to change the
world.

An artist with a romantic temperament, an inventor of beauty like no
other, a genius of provocation and a furious self-destructing
personality, Godard delivered as many blows as he received. A
filmmaker at turns adored and hated, Godard demands to be placed as
high on the cross of modern cinema's tortured gods as Michelangelo
Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. They both preceded him into the grave
on the same day, July 30, 2007. These three film icons engraved the
modern odyssey of love's disarray and the torture of couples in
Celluloid's inflammable marble.

A dazzling surprise

It would be an exaggeration to claim that it only took one film for
Godard to rise to this level. Yet A bout de souffle (Breathless), his
first feature film made in 1960, was an unrivaled lightning strike,
including the rest of its creator's career. A dazzling surprise, a
stroke of genius, an instant public and critical success, an
aesthetic shock and influence for many future filmmakers, A bout de
souffle remains part of the short list of films that have changed the
history of cinema. Even so, its plot is startling in its banality: a
young thug named Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) falls in love
with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student living in
Paris. The boy dreams of the impossible; the girl prefers to deal
with the possible. She betrays him; he is shot by the police. While
dying, he describes what happened as "degueulasse" (disgusting), a
word that his fiancee neither wants nor can understand.

Jean-Luc Godard, on the set of the film 'Breathless' (1960), with his
chief operator Raoul Coutard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, rue
Campagne-Premiere, in Paris. Jean-Luc Godard, on the set of the film
'Breathless' (1960), with his chief operator Raoul Coutard, Jean
Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, rue Campagne-Premiere, in Paris.
Jean-Luc Godard, on the set of the film 'Breathless' (1960), with his
chief operator Raoul Coutard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, rue
Campagne-Premiere, in Paris. RAYMOND CAUCHETIER

What really matters in this film lies elsewhere: In the film's
emotional editing, in the sense of rediscovered freedom by bodies,
language and spirits, in the proud allure of a cobbled-together and
inspired cinema that in a single day seemed to have become a hundred
years younger. It is also in this distillation of cinephilic material
that extracts an equally singular essence from the mixed influences
of Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Jean Rouch and Ingmar Bergman.
More than Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows,
1959) which preceded it, A bout de souffle was the New Wave's
inaugural film because it invented the form that best corresponded to
the movement's innovative spirit and because it celebrated the coming
of age of a generation discovering itself and imposing its values on
French society.

The recognition of this film was a moment of precarious grace in
Godard's life and career, which was marked by the all-consuming
permanent revolution. This began very early on within his family
circle. This scion of the Franco-Swiss Protestant upper middle class
lived through the horrors of the Second World War in the cocoon of
the privilege afforded by his birth and his young age. The post-war
period, during which he discovered his grandfather's collaborationist
affinities, served as a repellent. His increasing misbehavior led him
to fall out with his family, who forbade him to attend his mother's
funeral in 1954.

In the meantime, the young outlaw had found a second family under the
auspices of the ogre Henri Langlois, director of the Cinematheque
francaise, and the critic Andre Bazin and his Cahiers du Cinema
comrades. They were preparing their invasion on the cinematographic
scene by proclaiming their love of American genre cinema, their
auteur policy and their detestation of a French corporation they
considered prodigiously sclerotic. The New Wave itself, a movement of
rebellious sons searching for freely chosen fathers, became the
pursuit of an aesthetic genealogy. Yet this second family also
fizzled out in the mid-1960s.

Permanent revolution

The price to pay for the New Wave's undeniable artistic and
ideological victory in the long run was its failure in terms of box
office receipts and the group's splintering into the many
individualities composing it. Compared to the reformism of Truffaut
and Chabrol, and the strategic withdrawal of Rohmer and Rivette,
Godard became the one who kept the sacred fire of permanent
revolution alive at the risk of a permanent rupture. This was a
dangerous approach, combining the explosion of a genius mind and the
temptation of a scorched earth policy, the dream of collective
solidarity and a sinking into solitude. This was to be Godard's
destiny: furious victories and bitter disappointments, magnificent
utopias and doubtful stumbles. His was the story of a man who never
stopped wanting to recreate a family while ensuring that no one could
ever fulfill this desire.

Godard became the one who maintained the sacred fire of permanent
revolution, at the risk of permanent rupture.

His work devoted to this ambiguous quest traces a long and winding
path -more than one hundred films in a career spanning some sixty
years and marked by several major cinematic periods. The first one
sees an insolent young creator full of talent establishing himself in
a few years as a great artist despite censorship for his film on
Algeria (Le Petit Soldat, "The Little Soldier," 1963) and the bitter
failure of his attempt at fierce Brechtism (Les Carabiniers, "The
Carabineers," 1963). A string of successive titles reminded us of his
ironic and graceful genius, so typical of Godard, who melted in the
crucible of cinema lightness and melancholy, puns and revolt, the
ambition of thought and the lyrical trembling of emotions, quotations
and inventions, dazibao and song, love of genres and the poetic
freedom to betray them, the chronicle of his loves and the acute
intuition of the social issues of his time. All this and so much more
is on display in Une Femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961),
Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux ("My Life to Live," 1962), Bande
a Part (1964, and Masculin feminin ("Masculine feminine," 1966).

Jean-Luc Godard with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot during the
filming of 'Contempt' in Italy in 1963. Jean-Luc Godard with Michel
Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot during the filming of 'Contempt' in Italy
in 1963. Jean-Luc Godard with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot
during the filming of 'Contempt' in Italy in 1963. JEAN-LOUIS SWINERS
/GAMMA-RAPHO

Le Mepris (Contempt) (1963), a haughty and torrid meditation on
cinema with Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, and then Pierrot le
fou ("Pierrot the madman,"1965), a Rimbaudian road movie about a
couple on the run with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina - the woman
Godard was separating from - were the touchstones of his artistic
elevation, sanctioned by Aragon in the magazine Les Lettres
francaises: "What is art? I have been struggling with this question
ever since I saw Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, where the sphinx
Belmondo asks an American producer the question: 'What is cinema?'
There is one thing I am sure of, so may I at least begin all stands
before me and frightens me with an assertion, like a solid stilt in
the middle of the swamp: art today is Jean-Luc Godard." Thus begins
the article "Qu'est-ce que l'Art, Jean-Luc Godard ?" (What is art,
Jean-Luc Godard ?), the poet's eloquent praise for a young filmmaker
who he celebrated as an avatar of modern painting's inventors.

Read more Subscribers only Jean-Luc Godard: 'Everyone is equal before
images'

Openly militant

As soon as he acquired this status of acclaimed artist, Godard
undertook to undermine and destroy it. All without sacrificing Marina
Vlady's melancholic beauty or Anne Wiazemsky's disarming candor, the
educated investigator of capitalist inhumanity (Two or Three Things I
Know About Her, 1967) and the critical companion of the young Maoists
of Nanterre (La Chinoise, "The Chinese woman," 1967), the grotesque
May 68 prophesier (Weekend, 1967).

'The Chinese' (1967), with Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky, Michel
Semeniako and Jean-Pierre Leaud. 'The Chinese' (1967), with Juliet
Berto, Anne Wiazemsky, Michel Semeniako and Jean-Pierre Leaud. 'The
Chinese' (1967), with Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky, Michel Semeniako
and Jean-Pierre Leaud. RUE DES ARCHIVES/COLLECTION CSF

This era, while promoting the liberation of individual desire, also
celebrated the dissolution of the individual in collective action.
This galvanized Jean-Luc Godard, who contributed to the collective
film Loin de Vietnam ("Far from Vietnam,"1967), supported the
workers' strike at the Rhodiaceta in Besancon, seized cinema's means
of production under the name "Medvedkine groups" (1967), marched in
support of Henri Langlois who was threatened with dismissal (February
1968), hung from a curtain of the Palais to interrupt the Cannes
Festival in solidarity with the student revolt (May 1968).

He was also the anonymous director of "cinetracts" inspired by the
Situationist International during the protests of May 1968, and then
of a provisional assessment of the movement in Un film comme les
autres ("A Film Like Any Other," June 1968), shot in Flins - the last
and bloody bastion of the revolt where high school student Gilles
Tautin was killed - where he recorded the words of the Renault
factory workers.

The failure of the May 68 movement radicalized his approach,
prompting the director to refuse to make cinema according to the
industry's rules. He still managed to get movies made on the strength
of his name alone and went so far as to sabotage the "Jean-Luc
Godard" name by creating the Dziga-Vertov group (a pioneer of Soviet
cinema), a cinematographic-revolutionary phalanstery created with
Jean-Pierre Gorin, a young journalist from Le Monde who introduced
him to Maoist circles and who, for five years, formed with him a
symbiotic couple. This led to the release of several hot-button films
in which dogmatism competed with grace, such as the Marxist-Leninist
western Le vent d'est ("Wind from the East," 1970). Disappearing into
the folds of the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard became absent (a
longstanding temptation) while becoming more international. Pravda
(1969) was shot on the Czechoslovak front, Luttes en italie
("Struggles in Italy") in the Italian peninsula (1970) and Jusqu'a la
Victoire ("Until Victory," unfinished) in Jordan alongside Fatah.

Disappearing into the Dziga-Vertov group, Godard is absent (a
longstanding temptation) while becoming more international.

Godard had, not without courage, burned his own boats, but these
films, usually refused by the television networks that also produced
them, were barely seen. He had a falling out with many of his
friends; Wiazemski left him, he attempted several times to kill
himself and his reputation in the profession faded. In one of his
last and rare interviews (Les Cahiers du Cinema, October 2019), the
filmmaker summed up his situation with the hindsight of his 88 years
of age and a touch of Swiss placidity: "I am in favor of
disobedience, but I remain in cinema. At one point, I thought I could
be involved in world affairs. When Anne-Marie (Mieville) yells at me,
she tells me: 'Go out into the world and make your revolution, but
then no coffee today!'"

'Politically' making movies

Before reaching this level of wisdom, the failure of the
revolutionary form of cinema he dreamed about, combined with a
serious motorcycle accident, led the filmmaker to go underground.
Solicited by the young and glittering producer Jean-Pierre Rassam,
who suggested the idea, he returned to the center stage with the
humorously titled Tout va bien ("All is Well," 1972), in which two
stars, Yves Montand and Jane Fonda, are kidnapped by striking
workers. The film signed, in a sense, the death certificate of
leftism in France.

More specifically, it deconstructed this moment of the Godardian
dialectic, marked by the mourning of the Dziga-Vertov utopia (his
separation from Gorin was brutal) but without giving up on
"politically" making movies, to repeat one of his mantras. His
attention to the conditions of production and distribution, his deep
technical knowledge and his great care to measure the ideological
repercussions in his own way of making cinema proved it. Godard never
regained the status he once had with the public, however. Besides, it
is not clear that it was something he actually cared about, even if
he often did complain about it.

The filmmaker did not give up his taste for experimentation. During
this third period of his career, he frequently took part in
criticizing the media (in the monthly magazine of the proletarian
left J'accuse), created a real audiovisual laboratory (Sonimage), was
a pioneer in video's plastic and critical possibilities (Ici et
ailleurs, "Here and Elsewhere," 1976) and tried to confront
television on its own ground by proposing two monuments of
alternative information (Six Fois Deux, "Six Times Two", in 1976 and
France/tour/detour/deux enfants, "France/tour/detour/two children" in
1977-1978).

Dialectics of the old and the new

Yet it was not until the late 1970s that he reentered cinema's
traditional system with a series of fictions more disconcerting than
ever. This comeback, not by chance inaugurated by a film entitled
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself), was afforded to him
by film producer Marin Karmitz and Alain Sarde, who became his
regular producer. A new Godardian vein was discovered in this film
whose characters are dazedly trying to escape from an impasse, a
deadly circle. It is permeated with beauty, breathing in large
breaths, tending towards an unprecedented harmony, although deceptive
if we conclude from it that Godard has shelved his own restlessness.
Now in his fifties, Godard's epiphany was accompanied by a deliberate
slowing down, a hunger for air and light and an incessant variation
on the ideas of resurrection and duality. It was as if he had
rediscovered the taste for filming the world as it is, without
betraying his desire to strain towards the world as it should be.

Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle and
Roman Polanski at the Cannes Film Festival, 1968. Claude Lelouch,
Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle and Roman Polanski at
the Cannes Film Festival, 1968. Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard,
Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle and Roman Polanski at the Cannes Film
Festival, 1968. TOURTE/STILLS/GAMMA

This kind of religion of images as a place of mystery and freedom,
whose genealogy lies in the history of Western art, succeeded the
dogmatic temptation of a word that was now disqualified, much like
the Dziga-Vertov period wanted to do away with the famous "auteur
policy." Each Godardian period was thus both a self-criticism of the
previous one and a rebirth. Were his dialectics of the old and the
new - his role in the New Wave, his interest in history and each of
his films taken separately - not always his beautiful and perhaps his
only concern?

'I try to risk the death of what I know how to do as the only
possibility of survival'

Godard provided a summary, perfect as often, of himself in an
interview with the Nouvel Observateur in 1980: "I try to risk the
death of what I know how to do as the only possibility of survival."
From Sauve qui peut (la vie)(1980) to Nouvelle Vague (New Wave,
1990), Prenom Carmen (First Name: Carmen, 1983) and Je vous salue,
Marie (Hail Mary, 1985), this would be his creed, one based on
Christian theology, particularly his belief in the redemptive role of
images in the economy of salvation. Yet this celebration was truly
pantheistic, extending to the splendor of the world, the vibrant
bodies of young women (Maruschka Detmers as Carmen, Myriem Roussel as
Mary) and art as a whole. The films of this period abound with many
joyfully irreverent references to music, painting and sculpture.

Increasingly alone

From Isabelle Huppert to Nathalie Baye, from Jacques Dutronc to Alain
Delon, it also marked the grand return of movie stars in his films,
unwillingly put at the service of Godard's scathing contempt for the
materialism and cynicism of the 1980s. Godard's real star, the one
who accompanied him from now on in his life, his thought and his art,
was Anne-Marie Mieville, a photographer he met in 1971 and who became
the privileged partner of his mature years. She was his third "Anne,"
after the fiery Karina and the youthful Wiazemsky.

In his fourth and final act, as death - a faithful companion in his
films - crept closer, the impression Godard gave was of a man
increasingly alone. His work was now part of a genre, the
cinematographic essay, to which he lent prestige along with Chris
Marker. It is evident that nothing in Godardian work, not even
fiction, is foreign to this genre. The art of editing and the
analysis of the relationship between images were always at the
forefront. The great Godardian figure was now a meditative and
melancholic look back on things, from his Swiss retreat in Rolle on
Lake Geneva. In other words, from the very location of his own
childhood.

He kept looking back. On himself with JLG/JLG (1994), a deeply moving
diary in which this offspring of a Protestant lineage went as far as
he could to reveal himself. And on his art and its relationship with
history with the monumental video essay Histoire(s) du Cinema (Story/
Stories of Cinema)(1989-1999). A colossal project which aired in
eight episodes on Canal+ in 1998, this video montage chronicling the
history of cinema bristled with flashes of brilliance and was steeped
in mad erudition as it presented cinema, a great hypnotic power
watching over the ghosts of history, as the ultimate chapter in the
history of Western art.

The miracle he performed was that these general and interdependent
Histoire(s), as well as all the diverse materials (films,
documentaries, fictions, videography, drawings, engravings,
paintings), infused, through the supreme art of reference, a creation
as personal and sensitive as this one. It also conveyed the idea,
developed by the critic Serge Daney, of the death of cinema itself,
or at least of the idea of cinema as conceived by a certain
cinephilia.

Jean-Luc Godard, camera in hand, in the student demonstration in
Paris, May 13, 1968. Jean-Luc Godard, camera in hand, in the student
demonstration in Paris, May 13, 1968. Jean-Luc Godard, camera in
hand, in the student demonstration in Paris, May 13, 1968.
GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES

This was what haunted Godard in this project, adding to the
sepulchral consciousness of his own disappearance and, no doubt, of a
filial transmission that never occurred. Some letters, found in his
correspondence, discreetly revealed Godard's suffering on this point,
his acute and heartbreaking awareness of never having been able to be
anything other than a son of cinema.

Even his fictional movies now presented an increasingly ghostly
framework to his mortified consciousness of the world, from Allemagne
90 neuf zero (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991), an archaeological
project on German reunification, to Notre Musique ("Our Music,"
2004), in which he interwove dark meditation on the ex-Yugoslavian
and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. This last issue and all that
touches more widely on Judaism had thus far been, among many
impeccable intuitions, the blind spot of Godardian thought, to
characterize it with the utmost respect.

His ultimate film finally was released in 2010, or at least one
self-proclaimed as such and presented at the Cannes Film Festival
while its author was absent: Film socialisme (Film Socialism). It was
in truth a farewell to both cinema and socialism, two utopias
ridiculed by history.

Amid the global economic crisis, it was also the incrimination of a
system where, more than ever, injustice vied with cynicism. The film
represented it with a luxury cruise obliviously sailing towards
catastrophe.

Contradictions

Godard wanted to leave on this note, but he was neither the first nor
the last to postpone his departure. He kept filming. He shot at the
same time Adieu au Langage (Farewell to Language, 2014), a 3D movie
about a dog that speaks in place of its masters, a couple that has
lost all notion of a common language.

Back in official competition, where he had never won anything, at the
age of 83, the filmmaker used the film to express a strident whine, a
fluorescent cry, a chaotic recounting of the return to childhood and
humanity's illegible destiny, shot between his house and the shores
of Lake Geneva. The film earned him, jointly with the young Canadian
Xavier Dolan, the Jury Prize at Cannes, a symbolic award he obviously
did not come to pick up. An eight-minute video letter addressed to
Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux, president and delegate of the
Festival, beautifully justified this absence. In it, Godard said,
from his native land and in a voice more broken than ever before:
"Yes, from now on, I will go where I have stayed."

This did not prevent him from being back in the official competition
four years later with Le livre d'image (The Image Book, 2018) , a
montage film closed in on itself where he returned to the themes of
reflection and Godardian digression (war, the Middle East, art) with
a maelstrom of images borrowed from cinema, document and painting.

More than ever, the film opens itself up only to those who consent to
surrender to it. More than ever, Godard's voice and words resembled
those of God on Mount Sinai. Unlocatable, inappropriable,
unassimilable, addressed to the last Moses of the dark rooms capable
of transmitting his word. Once again, people waited for Godard in
Cannes and once again, the expectations of the cinephile crowd were
disappointed. It was an idiosyncratic way of managing his presence
through his absence. The film, in keeping with the director's wishes,
was not even commercially exploited, but it did benefit from
occasional screenings in good company, like at the Theatre des
Amandiers in Nanterre in October 1999.

Once again, people waited for Godard in Cannes and once again,
the expectations of the cinephile crowd were disappointed.

This ultimate contradiction crowned a thought process that was
continually fed by contradiction. Between the fervent defender of a
popular and minor cinema and the artist who rallied to the elitism of
high culture, between the right-wing dandy and the boiling leftist,
between the herald of auteur cinema and the filmmaker who condemned
bourgeois auteurism, between the man who considered himself a Jew of
cinema and the one who created collages between Golda Meir and Adolf
Hitler, to which of these Godards should we devote ourselves? Perhaps
to the one in the photograph opening JLG/JLG: Godard as a child
resembling Kafka, so sad, so proud and so alone, as described by the
adult he had become: "I was already in mourning for myself, my own
and only companion."

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During the burning last embers of his life, the filmmaker dreamed of
himself as a man without ancestry or descendants: the son of his
creations, identified with the total art of cinema. Failing to save
the world by using it, Godard said that he would simultaneously film
both its testament and his own. Is this to say that cinema has died
with Jean-Luc Godard? Of course not, but a certain history of cinema
may have. If it finds poetry in the Histoire(s) du cinema, the first
line had already been written as early as A bout de souffle, whose
novelty has long obscured its cruel endgame, as much regarding its
plot (death of the betrayed hero) as regarding cinema's (farewell to
classical cinema). Like any great melancholic artist, this never
prevented Godard from being the most alive of filmmakers.

Jacques Mandelbaum

Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr;
the publisher may only be liable for the French version.

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