Jean-Luc Godard

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. In 1988, he began one of his most ambitious projects, a seven-part series on the history of film, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which he completed in 1998. After a pair of aggressively didactic films, “Un Film Comme les Autres” (1968) and “Le Gai Savoir” (1969), and an abortive project with the Rolling Stones, released against Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard directed a candy-colored, wide-screen homage to the Hollywood musical “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), starring Ms. Belmondo’s central character in “Breathless,” a petty criminal who himself identified with the doomed romanticism of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the American films that Mr. And covering a 2000 revival screening of “Breathless,” the essayist and novelist Philip Lopate said he felt as exhilarated by the film as when he first saw it 40 years before. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Truffaut. Godard remained best known for “Breathless” and about a dozen films he made in quick succession afterward, ending with “Weekend” in 1967.University audiences identified with the doomed romanticism of Mr. Godard once observed, “A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

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. "It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making 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 home, surrounded by loved ones," his wife Anne-Marie Mieville and producers said in a statement published by several French media. "I've never gotten anything out of (Godard's) movies.

The director revolutionised cinema with New Wave films such as 'Breathless'

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PARIS: Film director Jean-Luc Godard, the godfather of France's New Wave cinema, died on Tuesday (Sep 13) aged 91, newspaper Liberation said, citing people ...

Godard was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on Dec 3, 1930, in Paris' plush Seventh Arrondissement. Godard was not everyone's idol. Advertisement

French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard -- a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film-making movement that revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s and 60s ...

"It was like an apparition in French cinema," Macron tweeted. Godard's first feature film, "À bout de souffle" ("Breathless") in 1960, was a celebration of the nonchalant improvisational cinematography that became synonymous with his style. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave directors, had invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art.

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.

Jean-Luc Godard died "peacefully" at his home in Switzerland, his family said.

His breakthrough, “Breathless,” was a blockbuster that sold more than 2 million tickets in France when it debuted. After Agnes Varda, who was also closely associated with the New Wave movement, died in 2019, Goddard was one of the last survivors. That was his foray into film-making with “Operation Concrete.” In 1949, he enrolled as an ethnology student at the Sorbonne in Paris before dropping out. Godard’s work took on a more sociological turn in the late 1960s. His mother, Odile, belonged to a wealthy family of bankers. It was a desire to show that everything was allowed.” That year, Godard embraced socialism by setting up a Marxist cinema collective called Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet director. His father, Paul-Jean, studied medicine in France before moving the family to Switzerland, where he had found work in a clinic. The movie introduced an aesthetic revolution with new filming techniques, the use of hand-held cameras and jump cuts that gave the viewer the impression of moving forward in time. “It’s a movie that’s been made in reaction to everything that wasn’t being made,” Godard said in an interview in 1960. The filmmaker used assisted suicide, which in his case was medically and legally validated, Godard’s legal counsel

'Breathless' director influenced generations of film-makers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.

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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.

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.

Deadline's Pete Hammond and Todd McCarthy discuss the latest film topics in Deadline's Take Two video series.

His film Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography won the best documentary prizes from the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics associations, and he won an Emmy for writing the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer. In addition to writing, Hammond also hosts KCET Cinema Series and the station’s weekly series Must See Movies. He is also Deadline’s Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, for which he was a contributing editor.

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)

THR's Paris-based film critic chooses his five favorite works by the bold and brilliant auteur.

Blossoms in Sumptuous but Shaky Biopic of a Classical Violinist](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/chevalier-kelvin-harrison-jr-stephen-williams-1235218307/) This ruminative documentary is arguably Godard’s most personal work, starring the director, in his early 60s at the time, as himself with his home in Rolle, Switzerland, as the main setting. This collage-like fiction was made with two other movies, La Chinoise and Weekend, in a year that saw Godard transform from a New Wave director experimenting with genre and form to an overtly political filmmaker who would engage in the uprisings of May 1968 the year after. With a mix of melancholic humor and dialectical genius, Godard reflects on his career and the cinema in general, finding poetry in the simple things that surround him: a favorite movie playing on television, a painting on the wall or a brisk walk around Lake Geneva. In the end, The Odyssey that Lang is adapting onscreen only serves as a backdrop to the battles, both personal and professional, that happen behind the camera. One of the director’s strongest collaborations with his then wife and muse Anna Karina, the film is both a cruel, almost documentary-like portrayal of a girl who descends into poverty and prostitution after leaving family life behind, and a tragic tale of freedom curtailed that nonetheless offers its shred of hope and the sublime. Not only does it mark the first time he worked with Anna Karina, who is filmed with as much rapture as Jean Seberg was in Breathless, but it foreshadows the murky and controversial political battles — in this case, those surrounding the Algerian War — that the director would wage throughout much of his career. Adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel, Contempt is one of Godard’s most celebrated movies and perhaps the closest he ever came to making an epic Hollywood feature. But the director’s second feature, made the year after his groundbreaking debut but released only in 1963 after being censored by the French government, is, at least for this critic, the more memorable of the two — and certainly one of Godard’s greatest achievements. It’s a work inspired by both Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is seen playing in a movie theatre, and Jean Renoir’s Émile Zola adaptation, Nana, whom the main character is named after. Odds are most people remember the latter two over the Hawks film, which goes to show that any list is entirely subjective and should be taken with a grain of salt — or, to cite a Godardian staple, an unfiltered Gauloises cigarette. Some Godard enthusiasts think that everything he made was genius, to the point that any ranking of his oeuvre will immediately bring its share of haters and snobs.