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| Jean-Luc Godard | |||||||||
In 1951, Godard toured North and South America. Supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs, he continued watching films at a fanatical rate, and his articles for Cahiers began reflecting an enthusiastic admiration of the work of little-known American directors of action films and at the same time a deep contempt for the traditional cinema, especially the commercial French film.
In 1954, Godard went back to Switzerland to attend services for his mother, who had been killed there in a car accident. He remained in that country to work as a laborer on a dam project. With his earnings he bought himself a 35mm camera and made his first film, Opèration Beton, a 20-minute short about the construction of the dam. In 1955, following a spurt of renewed activity in Paris as a contributor to Cahiers, he was back in Switzerland shooting a second short, Une Femme coquette, an adaptation of a de Maupassant story. Working as a one-man band, he produced, directed, and acted in the film as Jean-Luc Godard and wrote the screenplay and photographed and edited the film under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. Returning to Paris in 1956, Godard collaborated on films by Rohmer and Rivette.
Following three more shorts, Godard stunned the world with his first feature film, Breathless, made in 1959 on a shoestring budget and released early in 1960. The film marked a significant break from orthodox cinema techniques, reshaping the traditional film syntax with its astonishing jump cuts and unsteady hand-held moving shots. It was a spontaneous, impulsive, vibrant, and totally original film that reflected the director's enchantment with the immediacy of the American gangster movie and his impatience with the laboriousness of the traditional techniques of "quality" cinema. It immediately established Godard as a leading spokesman of the Nouvelle Vague movement.
Godard's next film, Le Petit Soldat, was a savage exposition of the Algerian conflict. The feminine lead in Le Petit Soldat and in several of Godard's subsequent films was played by Anna Karina, who became the director's wife in 1961. They divorced in 1967.
Karina is a stripper who wants to have a baby and settle down, in one of Godard's most buoyant and charming films, A Woman Is a Woman (1961), and a lonely, pathetic Paris prostitute in My Life to Live (1962). Les Carabiniers (1963) was an antiwar allegory that provoked violently hostile reaction from audiences. The wide-screen polished color cinematography of Contempt (1963) stood in sharp contrast to the grainy dreariness of Les Carabiniers.
With Band of Outsiders (1964), Godard returned to the world of the gangster for the first time since Breathless. As in most of his films, the protagonists here are uprooted people, outsiders who defy the boundary between the real and the imagined. A Married Woman (1964) was a conventionally structured sociological study of the alienation of a modern Parisian woman who can relate only on the physical level to both her husband and her lover. Alphaville (1965), Godard's excursion into science fiction fantasy was followed by in the same year by Pierrot le Fou (1965).
Gradually, Godard's films were becoming stripped of structure and conventional dramatic form, with an increasing emphasis on film as an essay, and cinema as a political and social instrument. Masculine-Feminine (1966) was a free-form study of mores of Parisian youth. Made in USA (1966) had a crime story for an apparent plot. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) told the story of a Paris housewife who indulges in prostitution for extra income. La Chinoise (1967) featured in the leading role actress Anne Wiazemsky, who became Godard's second wife in June of 1967 and later appeared regularly in the director's films. This marriage, too, ended in divorce.
Godard's impact on the cinema of the 60s was cataclysmal and sweeping and his contribution to the art, thought, and language of the cinema significant. He used the camera not only creatively and inventively, rewriting the syntax of film grammar along the way, but also as a means of personal expression to tell "the truth 24 times a second."
After Weekend (1968), a new Godard surfaced, a revolutionary, didactic filmmaker who became obsessed with the spoken word and increasingly apathetic to cinema as a visual medium. He turned his back not only on the American films that had inspired the dreams of his youth but also on his own films. He dedicated himself to making "revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences," to expounding radical political ideas "as a secondary task in the struggle to liberate the oppressed from Capitalism.' He began making films as a collective effort, working in groups named after such Soviet film figures as Dziga Vertov and Alexander Medvedkin. In the late 60s and early 70s he collaborated regularly with Jean-Pierre Gorin, a young Parisian rebel who became the revolutionary guru of the politically naive Godard.
In the late 70s and early 80s Godard underwent yet another metamorphosis. Abandoning his political wars and video experimentations, as well as his revolutionary base of operations in Grenoble, he moved to the Swiss town of Rolle in 1978, rediscovering himself and his love of film in the process. More restrained and philosophical in middle age, he refocused his sights on themes of universal humanistic concern in Every Man for Himself (1980), Passion (1982), and First Name: Carmen (1983). He even paid a renewed homage to American cinema in Detective (1985) but caused massive controversy with his updated story of Christ's birth Hail Mary! (1985), inciting the condemnation of the Catholic Church.
Although he seemed to be inching back to the fringes of the mainstream, Godard remained inaccessible to general audiences and even seasoned cinema sophisticates seemed puzzled by and less than wholly comfortable with his films of the late 80s and 90s. King Lear (1987) was more famous for the conditions in which it was contracted ó roughed out on a napkin and signed during a lunch with Godard and producer Menachem Golan at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival ó than for the resulting film briefly seen two years later on the Croisette. Soigne ta droite (1987) featured top French pop tandem Les Rita Mitsouko, Nouvelle Vague (1990) boasted Alain Delon, and Hèlas pour moi (1994) Gèrard Depardieu, but Godard seemed to remain a highly rarefied taste. His For Ever Mozart (1997), with its typically Godardian disquisition on art and war, was better received. In 1998, Godard completed his long-gestating Histoire(s) du Cinèma, a highly personal video-based meditation of 100 years of cinema, which was released on video and in book form. Other works of the 90s include Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, and his self-portrait JLG by JLG (1995).
If Every Man for Himself was described by Godard as his "second first film," and proved to be the most accessible film of his middle period, then Godard's first film of the new millennium, Eloge de l'amour, may well be considered his "third first film" and perhaps the beginning of his last and most mature creative period. Rhapsodically received at the Cannes Film Festival this year by the international press (including many confirmed "non-Godardians"), this surprisingly moving study of art, history, memory and exploitation was immediately bought for many overseas territories, including the U.S. and Great Britain, something not seen for a Godard film in decades.
Godard won the best director award at the Berlin Festival for Breathless and the Golden Lion (best film) at Venice for First Name: Carmen. In 1986, he was honored with a Special French Cèsar Award for lifetime achievement.
adapted from The Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz; updated by Lenny Borger
 Band of Outsiders [DVD] Criterion Collection |
 Speaking About Godard by Kaja Silverman, Harun Farocki |
(Not Shown) Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews by Jean-Luc Godard, David Sterritt (Editor) Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard by Jean Luc, Godard, Jean Luce Godard, Annette Michelson, Jean Narboni (Editor) |
 The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible by David Sterritt |
 Cahiers Du Cinema: The 1950's Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard Film Studies) by Jim Hillier (Editor) |
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