Over the course of a prolific career spanning more than half a century, Jean-Luc Godard has provoked, bewildered, delighted and inspired.
Jean-Luc Godard, who died this Tuesday (13/09) at the age of 91, was one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.
The Franco-Swiss director became famous in the late 1950s as one of the leading figures in the French movement known as new wavedirecting dozens of films over a career spanning more than half a century.
Here are nine facts about Godard:
1. He changed cinemas with a girl and a gun
All you need to make a movie, Godard once wrote, is “a girl and a gun”. He proved this when debuting him in 1960 with harassed.
The girl, Patricia, is involved with a criminal, Michel, who is on the run after shooting a police officer. She betrays him and the police kill him on the street.
harassed it resembles a crime drama, but as in many of his works, the plot was just a frame for Godard to explore culture, experience the image, and analyze cinema itself.
It made an immediate impact, being acclaimed and generating a huge profit on its meager budget.
Nearly 60 years later, it is widely recognized as a classic, and its strength still surprises.
2. He broke with conventions
One of the most radical elements of harassed was the prominent use of the editing technique known as jump cut.
Film production before and after Godard’s debut largely favors fluid editing to give the illusion of continuous time.
On the contrary, in the harassedGodard cut the scene sharply, making it seem like time was skipping forward.
It’s disconcerting, as Godard certainly intended it to be. At the very least, it grabs the viewer’s attention, but it has also been interpreted as a reflection of Michel’s boredom or as an attempt by Godard to force his audience to reflect on the nature of cinema.
During his career, Godard played with the grammar of cinema.
3. Rewrote the script
There were other innovations. harassed it was shot on location, using hand-held cameras, with Godard writing the script that day and providing the actors with lines as they recorded.
This was another break with tradition, faced with expensive studio-directed films that relied on dense scripts, large crews and storyboards.
The technique used by Godard gives the harassed a great spontaneity and a documentary atmosphere.
He would use it in many of his films, infuriating the stars who arrived on the film’s set still not knowing what their lines would be.
Godard and his contemporaries in new wave they’ve seen the real big movies like those imprinted with the director’s vision and what better way to check out a movie if you’re actually creating it as it happens.
4. He was a big movie buff
Godard may have been an iconoclast, but he came from a place of deep knowledge and affection for cinema.
Before becoming a director, he was an avid cinephile: sometimes he saw the same film several times on the same day in clubs, he and other figures of the new wave frequented.
Like other figures of the time, he was first a critic, developing his ideas on what he thought must be the cinema that he was able to achieve in practice.
His films are full of references to other works, and even as he tried to advance cinema, he couldn’t help but look back.
5. It continued to innovate
harassed alone he would have secured his place in film history, but his career has been prolific. The IMDB website lists more than 100 works, including shorts, documentaries, TV series and more than 40 feature films.
The 1960s saw his most celebrated and widely followed works: da A woman is a woman (1961), which he called “neorealist musical”, to dystopian science fiction Alphaville (1965) and the sour comedy French weekend (1967), in which Emily Bronte is set on fire.
After French weekendembraced political radicalism, making a series of films with Marxist themes that culminated in Everything is fine (1972).
In the following decades he recounted the virgin birth, arousing a denunciation of the then Pope John Paul II (I greet you, Maria), unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Richard Nixon as an actor (King Lear) and published an epic personal history of cinema (History (s) of cinema. In 2014, at the age of 80, he made an experimental 3D film starring his dog Roxy (goodbye to the language).
6. Put the audience to work
There’s no getting around it: Godard’s films range from provocative to almost incomprehensible.
It was commercially successful, but later works had limited versions despite critical acclaim.
Godard was a voracious reader as well as a film buff, and the weight of references can be disconcerting. Just 70 minutes in duration, goodbye to the languagefor example, it is full of references to the abstract painter Nicolas de Staël, the American modernist author William Faulkner, and the mathematician Laurent Schwartz.
Also on the stage is one of Godard’s most important influences, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Brecht wanted his audience to remain critically involved in his work, so he employed various methods to destabilize it and remind them that they were watching something artificial.
Many of Godard’s films use Brechtian artifices, such as the Chinese (1967), which includes hideous subtitles and actors breaking the so-called “fourth wall”, with Godard even leaving the clapperboard at the beginning of the scenes.
7. He put himself into his art
In many of his works, the protagonist can be seen as a representative of Godard himself.
In contempt (1963), Michel Piccoli plays a French playwright charged with reworking a film adaptation of Ulysses.
The film explores the tensions between commercialism and creativity and describes a crumbling marriage, inspired by Godard’s relationship with Anna Karina, the star of many of his films.
The characters in the film are often a spokesperson for themselves, but in later years it has become an element of his films.
In 1995 he published the autobiography JLG / JLG – December Self Portraitand his essays present his own voice, more recently Image and Word (2018).
A review by American critic Roger Ebert of Godard described him in 1969 as “deep in his universe,” a good explanation of why Godard’s films can be so distinctive and so frustrating.
8. Could be ‘shit’ at times
Not unjustifiably, Godard had a reputation for being difficult both personally and professionally.
His two marriages, first to Anna Karina and then to Anne Wiazemsky, were stormy, something that spilled over into his films.
Annoyed by producer Iain Quarrier’s editing of his Rolling Stones documentary, Sympathy for the devil (1968), Godard punched him in the face when the film premiered in London.
There was an extraordinary fight with your friend, another great director of the new waveFrancois Truffaut.
In 1973 Godard wrote to Truffaut attacking his latest film, The American nightand asking for funding to respond. Truffaut wrote an angry response, accusing Godard of acting “like a piece of shit” and listing years of Godard’s misconduct. Unsurprisingly, Truffaut refused to pay for Godard’s film. The duo’s relationship never recovered.
But the collaboration was also an important part of his career.
His first films would not have been the same without Karina or Wiazemsky, nor without Jean-Paul Belmondo.
He established a close relationship with leftist thinker Jean-Pierre Gorin and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who said, “He may be a piece of shit … but he’s a genius.”
Since the 1970s, his most important collaborator has been his life partner, Swiss director Anne-Marie Miéville.
9. But it was also a source of inspiration
Film industries around the world have experimented with their own Nouvelle Vagues. THE new wave American gave us works like Bonnie and Clyde – A blast of bullets, Chinatown And Shark.
Godard’s work, personal, experimental, political, or all three, has had a huge impact.
American director Quentin Tarantino called his production company A Band Apart, a reference to Godard’s film side by side (1963). Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has included a tribute to him in his film The dreamers.
Godard’s influence can be seen in the ambiguity between documentary and fiction by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami or in the thematically and formally provocative work of the Danish Lars Von Trier.
Four Godard films have been named to the list of the 50 greatest films of all time by the British film magazine Sight and Sound – harassed, contempt, The eleven o’clock demon And History (s) of cinema.
– This text was published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-62889030
Source: Terra
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
