Jean-Luc Godard, director of Breathless and co-founder of New Wave, has died

Breathless and Pierrot le Fou director Jean-Luc Godard received an honorary Oscar, two honorary Césars, a Golden Bear and a Silver Bear in Berlin, a Golden Lion in Venice and a special Palme d’Or in 2018. His death was announced at the age of 91 release This Tuesday, September 13th.

Cinema notebooks

Jean-Luc Godard was born into a middle-class Franco-Swiss family. During World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss. He began his studies in Lyon before returning to Paris in 1949, where he earned a master’s degree in ethnology at the Sorbonne. It was at this time that he met François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. With the last two he discovers Cinema newspaperThen becomes critical at art and that Cinema notebooks.

new wave

In 1954, he took his first steps behind the camera with the short film Operation Concrete. He made his first feature film only in 1959. BreathlessA huge critical and public success that would be the flagship film of the new wave.

It is the beginning of a series of films in which Godard thinks about cinema by reinventing the narrative form: Woman is Woman, Le Petit Soldat (censored because it openly dealt with the Algerian War, a taboo subject at the time), Carabinieri, Disgust, Piero Le Fo, Alphaville, The Strange Adventures of Lemmy Cawthon and the Masculine-Feminine. He also participates in collective films: Les plus belles scroqueries du monde and Paris vu par….

Activism

May 68: Godard is an active fighter and becomes a means of struggle against his film system (La Chinoise, Week-End). He advocates an idealistic cinema that would enable the proletariat to obtain the means of production and distribution.

Then he went abroad (New York, Canada, Cuba, Italy, Prague), where he started films that he would not finish or refuse to air (One American Film, Communication(s), British Voices, Lotte in Italy). The 1970s were a time of video experiments: Number Two, Here and Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Six Times Two – Over and Under Communication.

Scandal and stars

In 1980, he returned to more mainstream cinema, which attracted famous actors. He was selected three times at the Cannes Film Festival, for Sauve qui peut la vie (1980, with Isabelle Huppert and Jacques Dutron), Passion (1982) and Detective (1985 with Jonny Halliday), winning the Golden Lion at the festival. Venice name Carmen (which reveals Marushka Detmer). But his films continue to cause scandal: Hail Mary is censored in France and around the world.

experiments

Godard returned to experimentation in the 90s: JLG/JLG, For Ever Mozart, Histoire(s) du cinema (a photographic and personal vision of the history of cinema) and Eloge de l’amour, presented in competition on the Croisette in 2001.

The filmmaker returned there three years later with Notre musique, a triptych about hell, purgatory and heaven, presented in non-competition official selection. This is Godard’s eighth visit to Cannes.

In the early 21st century, he appeared in two films in which he played himself (Le Fantôme d’Henri Langlois’s Jacques Richard (II) and Morceaux de dialogs avec Jean-Luc Godard’s Alain Fleischer) before speaking to people. He on the Croisette with his film Socialism, selected in the 2010 section “From a certain point of view”.

3D test and blessing of late skin

Filmmakers over the age of eighty are rare in the cinematic landscape, but much less so in the halls of the Cannes Film Festival. He directed “3-Désastres,” one of three segments of the enigmatic 3x3D (2012) detailing the perception of 3D, presented at the end of the 52nd Semaine de la Critique at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Thirteen years after Eloge de l’amour, Jean-Luc Godard made a grand return to Cannes competition in 2014 with Adieu au Langage, his sixth film to compete for the Palme d’Or. It won the Jury Prize ex-aequo with Mommy by Xavier Dolan.

In 2018, he presented Le livre d’image at Cannes and held a press conference from his native Switzerland using Facetime technology. His film received a special Golden Palm branch, the first in the history of the festival.