Jean-Luc Godard

The radical filmmaker upended conventions with art-house classics like "Breathless" and "Alphaville."

He started out as a critic at the 1950s. In recent years, Godard continued to work steadily, exploring the new possibilities of digital technology in artistically rigorous works like "Film Socialisme" (2010), "Goodbye to Language" (2014) and "The Image Book" (2018). Jean-Luc Godard, the iconoclastic and stylistically adventurous filmmaking giant who rose to prominence as part of the French New Wave movement in the 1960s, has died.

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.

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.

Jean-Luc Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave, has died. He was 91.

Godard continued to work prolifically in his later years and enjoyed what many described as a late-career renaissance in the early 2000s starting with In Praise of Love (2001), which screened at Cannes followed by Film Socialisme (2010). His most recent film The Image Book (2018) played in competition at Cannes and picked up the special Palme d’Or. [Jean-Luc Godard](https://deadline.com/tag/jean-luc-godard/), a leading figure of the [French New Wave](https://deadline.com/tag/french-new-wave/), has died. The former Culture Minister of France, Jack Lang, told France Info radio this morning that Godard was “Unique, absolutely unique… Godard is best known for his seminal work of the 1960s, including Le mépris (Contempt), starring Brigitte Bardot, and Le Petit Soldat, which was banned until 1963, and starred the director’s future wife, Anna Karina. [Breathless](https://deadline.com/tag/breathless/) (À bout de souffle), which catapulted him onto the world scene in 1960.

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.

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)

Over a long career that began in the 1950s as a film critic, Godard was perhaps the most boundary-breaking director among New Wave filmmakers who rewrote ...

Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 “Operation Concrete,” a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. “There’s a bit of Godard in nearly all films today,” said Frederic Maire, president of the Swiss Cinematheque. The impact was immediate — “Breathless” arrived like a cinematic thunderclap when it was released in 1960 — and lasting. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrest of May 1968. Godard married his second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. Godard married Danish-born model and actress Anna Karina in 1961. He spiced it all up with references to Hollywood gangster movies and nods to literature and visual art. His work turned more starkly political by the late 1960s. The statement gave assisted suicide, which is legal in Switzerland, as the cause of death. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

Jean-Luc Godard, who has died at 91, was the rebel spirit who drove the French New Wave, firing out a volley of films in the 1960s that rewrote the rules of ...

From the start, Godard’s career was dogged by controversy. So big was its impact that Truffaut called Godard cinema’s Picasso, someone who had “sown chaos… When the ship ran aground three years later, it wasn’t just his small band of disciples who treated him as a visionary. Born in Paris into a well-to-do Franco-Swiss family on Dec. That swaggering story of a small-time crook on the run who romances a young American in Paris was a major landmark in French cinema, heralding the arrival of a generation of irreverent young filmmakers determined to break with the past. Between “Breathless” (“A Bout de Souffle”) in 1960 and the student protests of 1968, Godard exhilarated audiences as he shook the film world with his technical innovations and savage, occasionally lyrical, satires.

Jean-Luc Godard, the visionary film director who shaped cinematic history with his provocative contributions to the French New Wave, died on Tuesday at the ...

Times](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead) in 2006. Godard’s 2001 film [In Praise of Love](https://www.imdb.com/video/vi4015915545/?playlistId=tt0181912&ref_=tt_ov_vi) features representatives of the Spielberg company trying to buy the memories of Holocaust survivors, among other jabs at the director—attacks that Ebert [deemed](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/in-praise-of-love-2002) “painful and unfair.” The film was remarkable for its use of hand-held cameras, natural light and jump cuts that marked abrupt transitions in the narrative, writes the [Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead)’ Dennis McLellan. In 1952, according to Jamey Keaten and Thomas Adamson of the [Associated Press](https://apnews.com/article/jean-luc-godard-dead-ab2fc0cb0e83666334720f0fd392fcd0) (AP), Godard began writing for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema. [Marsha Kinder](https://dornsife.usc.edu/vsri/Marsha-Kinder), a film scholar at the University of Southern California, told the [L.A. Soon after, he released the short film [All the Boys Are Called Patrick](https://www.shortfilmwindow.com/allboy-cp_gems/), which follows a man who makes dates with two college students on the same day, not realizing that they are friends. And yet, for those who know and love Godard’s work, the power of his vision is undeniable. [Operation Concrete](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047306/), a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. Godard returned to Paris after the liberation of France to attend secondary school, and later enrolled in the Sorbonne with the intention of studying ethnology—though he ultimately found the film societies that were flourishing in the city’s Latin Quarter more enticing. “I had no choice,” Godard told the [spanned more than six decades](https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2022-09-13/jean-luc-godard-dead), Godard changed the course of modern cinema with his spontaneous style of filmmaking. “We have lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius.”

Is there another filmmaker over whom so many would claim ownership, each in their own distinct manner? The immensity and variety of his work, ...

Godard was a fan of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it was almost as if he were creating his own spiritual bonfire in which to toss his earlier efforts. Some of us even recorded it on our own phones (a screen of a screen of a screen of a screen, which Godard would have surely appreciated). The Image Book presents cinema as part of the great battleground of images, a catalog of myths and attitudes and fantasies that help shape our consciousness and thus our misconceptions of others. Then, the picture journeys to a new space, as Godard begins to include images from Middle Eastern cinema (from works by the likes of Youssef Chahine and Nacer Khemir) almost as a counterpoint to everything else he’s just shown us. He’d have continued to be revered as a legend and probably won a couple of César Awards along the way, too. The confrontational pictures of the revolutionary, early ’70s Dziga Vertov period (which are, again, beautiful in their own right; Godard was never not Godard), with their constant interrogation of the cinematic image, seemed like penance for the perceived bourgeois shallowness of his prior films. (But it’s still a film of lovely surfaces, too, as much about revolution as it is about the color red. Either way, Godard had unearthed a greater truth, not to mention a highly accessible one for a postwar generation that had grown up in the light of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Breathless was a seismic event, but the real stroke of brilliance was that Godard didn’t double back and try again. Godard’s trajectory as a filmmaker, in that sense, reflects the development of the average cinephile as well, from the adolescence of the early work to a growing awareness of the universe beyond. And while Jean-Luc Godard, who died Monday at the age of 91, was iconic in all the usual ways, he was also perhaps iconic in this particular way: Everybody has their own Godard. The immensity and variety of his work, with its ceaseless contradictions, ensure that.