Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great representatives of New wave French, he died today at the age of 91, as reported by the French newspaper Liberation. Godard leaves a vast legacy of about a hundred films, some masterpieces, such as At the end of the escapeand the merit of having invented a new way of making cinema in the 1960s.
Godard came to Paris in the 1940s to study ethnology at the Sorbonne. He soon joined as a critic Cinema notebooks, the magazine that would revolutionize first French cinema and then world cinema. Because in that publication there were all the great directors who would have had something to contribute to the transgressive film scene of the sixties: François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.
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And it is from the hand of Truffaut, who wrote the screenplay, and with the collaboration of Chabrol, that Godard gave life to his first film and his great masterpiece: At the end of the escape (Breathless, 1959). Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg starred in the film with which the New wave.
His knowledge of cinema after many years as a critic, his admiration for the American noir genre and the need to do something new, led Godard to shoot the story, which Truffaut had found in a chronicle of events, in a different way. .
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The director’s camera moved in a new, free, original way behind Laszlo Kovàcs (Belmondo), the Marseille car thief who runs over a man and flees to a black and white Paris far from the romantic postcards of the time. Kovàcs meets Patricia (Seberg) and wants to make the girl her lifeline, take her to Rome, but she denounces him and the protagonist dies struck by the police in the streets of Paris who witnesses the end of her escape.
The Jean Vigo award and the award for best direction at the Berlin Film Festival for this film elevated Godard in 1960, giving him all the freedom to continue making new and transgressive cinema. In A woman is a woman (1961) returns to have Belmondo and also includes his wife, Anna Karina, with whom he will shoot several films. The film, which tells the story of a stripper who wants to become a mother, convinced her once again in Berlin where she won the jury prize and the best actress award.
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The director repeated the cast to tell the story of another escape, that of a man with his children’s nanny inside Crazy Pierrot (1965), which received critical acclaim and is now, nearly 60 years later, considered one of the great films of French cinematography. Godard kept Karina and stayed true to black and white photography in his next film, Alphaville (1965), where he macerates the noir genre with science fiction. The film, which is also a tribute to German expressionist cinema, won the Golden Bear at the Barlín Festival.
May 68 marked a before and after in Godard’s way of making more intellectual and Maoist films, the director chose to leave the great actors behind and simplify the story to make deliberately anti-popular films. Sympathy for the devil (1968), a documentary on the emerging counterculture in general and the Rolling Stones in particular, marked that passage which was consolidated with another documentary A film like any other (1968), which explores the Parisian May that changed the world.
This new way of working distanced Godard from the audience and festival awards that had bolstered his prestige as a director. In 1972 he recovered somewhat more traditional film forms with Everything is going well, which again addressed May 68, but with the help of two great actors, Yves Montand and Jane Fonda. The film was unsuccessful and the director retired to Grenoble where he founded a television production company.
Jean-Luc Godard in an image taken in Switzerland in 1990
He returns to the cinema in the 80s surrounded by great controversy. His particular review of the myth of the Virgin Mary, I greet you Maria (1984) raised blisters. The pope condemned the film and Godard had a cake thrown in his face in Cannes as groups of Catholics protested outside cinemas to screen the film.
Godard, who after divorcing Karinna married Anne Wiazemsky and then Anne-Marie Miéville, received an honorary Oscar as a tribute to her entire career in 2010 and continued making films almost to the end. In 2018 he directed his latest film, the documentary The illustrated book.
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