Jean-Luc Godard

Biography: life and films

The ciné-revolutionary

There can be little doubt that Jean-Luc Godard, a leading light of the French New Wave and maverick pioneer ever since, is one of the most controversial and important filmmakers of his generation. For more than half a century, he has been the absolute epitome of the auteur filmmaker, relentlessly striving for new forms of cinematic expression in the pursuit of his life's goal - to represent life as authentically and meaningfully as possible through the medium of film. Godard's cinema is challenging, provocative, often frustratingly inaccessible, but it is never dull or predictable.

The most adventurous and politically conscious of the Nouvelle Vague group that revolutionised filmmaking in the early 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard rarely - if ever - allowed commercial considerations to impinge upon his art. Indeed, his art can be seen as a constant reaction against commercial cinema, an attempt to break away from the rigidly imposed conventions that have confined cinema to a straitjacket of conformity since the 1930s. Even in those films of his which did engage the mainstream, Godard challenges his audience's patience and expectations with his wild experimentations in storytelling and montage.

Influenced by the Hegelian principle of dialectics, Godard's cinema is founded on the idea that contradictions are the essence of life - for a thing to have meaning, it must simultaneously be presented with its opposite. The most important dialectic in Godard's work is the one operating between realism and abstraction. For all of his films, Godard begins by filming life as realistically as he can, using natural locations, real light sources, direct sound, convincing actors and (as often as not) improvised dialogue. Then, at the editing stage, he introduces the element of abstraction to give to this raw material an even greater sense of reality. The resulting montage may appear jarringly fragmented but it creates dramatic and thematic relationships which would not be as apparent had Godard stuck to the conventional rules of filmmaking. His films have a 'sur le vif' quality, a searing authenticity, that is sorely lacking in ordinary cinema.

Occasionally, Godard goes too far, employing so much abstraction that his film ends up losing all sense of reality. A prime example of this is Made in USA, in which the narrative becomes so thoroughly fragmented that it loses logic and coherence altogether and resembles more a crazed narcotics-induced dream than real life. But when Godard's unique dialectical approach works well - as on Le Mépris and Pierrot le fou - the filmmaker delivers his most stunning work, films that exert a fantastic hold over the spectator and succeed in capturing the essence of the human condition in all its complexity and poignancy.

His early life

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris on 3rd December 1930. The son of a medical practitioner, he was the second of four children. Although both of his parents were of French origin, he was raised in Switzerland where, from an early age, he showed a keen interest in sport and painting. After passing his baccalaureate at the third attempt, he entered the Sorbonne in Paris to study anthropology but soon lost interest and devoted most of his time to his new passion in life: cinema. By his late teens, he was a fully fledged cinéphile and frequently attended several ciné-clubs in Paris. Influenced by such prominent reviewers as Maurice Schérer (now known as Éric Rohmer), he began writing articles on film in 1950.

Godard's first job came in 1953, as a cameraman for a Swiss television company. The following year, he obtained employment as a construction worker on the Grande Dixence Dam, which led him to make his first film - a documentary short entitled Opération béton. This was followed by another short, Une femme coquette (1955), after which he went back to Paris to work as a press attaché for an American film company. Around this time, he joined the staff of the highly regarded film review magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma, where he became good friends with fellow editors Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut.

In 1958, Godard made his first commercial film, Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick, a short produced by Pierre Braunberger with a script provided by Rohmer. A light comedy of manners, the film would not be out of place in Rohmer's subsequent Moral Tales. After this, Godard edited the footage that Truffaut had shot for his abandoned short Une histoire d'eau, tying together the narrative with a voiceover to which he lent his own distinctive voice. His next short, Charlotte et son jules, marked his first collaboration with a star-in-the-making, Jean-Paul Belmondo. With his lead actor otherwise engaged (on his military service), the director had to dub him with his own voice.

The French New Wave

The producer Georges de Beauregard was so impressed by Godard's short films that he offered to finance his first feature, À bout de souffle (a.k.a. Breathless). In common with many of Godard's early films, this startling debut offering was strongly influenced by American film noir, but whilst the film revels in its conventional noir trappings it was to be dazzlingly innovative, most notably in its aggressive use of the jump cut. Having come up with a film that was initially too long and unwieldy Godard chose not to take the conventional course - removing superfluous scenes - and instead opted to repeatedly excise chunks of varying length from the same scenes. Today, this technique is so widely used that we hardly notice it, but in 1960, when Godard's film was first seen, it was something of a revolution. The chemistry between the two lead actors, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, was another ingredient in the film's success for both critics and audiences. The film won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1960. À bout de souffle's popularity, coming in the wake of Truffaut's Les 400 coups, established the French New Wave as a powerful new force in French cinema.

For his second feature, Godard turned his attention to the Algerian War. With its explicit depiction of torture on both sides of the conflict, Le Petit soldat was bound to be a highly controversial film, so it was hardly surprising that it should end up being banned by the government censor. It was not seen until 1963, after Algeria had gained independence. The film is significant in that it marks the start of the director's remarkably fruitful relationship with the Danish model-turned-actress Anna Karina, who starred in seven of his features. The couple married in 1961 but divorced after three years. Karina was the enigmatic muse that inspired Godard to make some of his greatest films.

Anna Karina and Belmondo were brought together (with another darling of the French New Wave, Jean-Claude Brialy) for Godard's next film, Une femme est une femme (1961). This scurrilous comedy divided the critics but received two Silver Bears at the 1960 Berlin Film Festival (the Best Actress award for Karina and the Special Prize for Godard). The director was honoured with another major award (the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival) for his next film, Vivre sa vie (1962), in which Karina stars as a woman driven into the life of a Parisian prostitute.

Prostitution was a recurring theme in Godard's early work and reveals not only a genuine concern for the exploitation of women in modern society but also a deep-seated revulsion for consumerism, which, he would argue, makes prostitutes of us all. In his cogent sociological film essay Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966), Godard offers not only a portrait of ordinary women driven to prostitution by necessity and boredom, but also a bitter commentary on how society as a whole is compelled to demean itself for cash, by the forces of capitalism and advertising. Prior to this, the director had been lambasted in the French press for Une femme mariée (1965), in which he portrayed marriage as nothing more than a banal form of prostitution.

After the failure of his low-budget anti-war offering Les Carabiniers (1962), Godard scored a notable hit with the public with his sixth feature Le Mépris (1963). Featuring Brigitte Bardot at the height of her popularity as a screen goddess, the film is among the director's most sumptuously photographed. There's some irony in the fact that Godard's most virulent assault on commercial cinema so far proved to be his biggest commercial success, attracting an audience of 1.5 million. At the time, critical reaction to Le Mépris was mixed, but now it is considered one of the director's greatest works.

For Bande à part (1964) and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965), Godard returned to Série Noire territory to offer another typically pessimistic view on where our society may be heading. The second of these films is among the director's most seductive masterworks, offering a bleak vision of the future in which society is rigidly governed by an all-powerful computer and there is no place for the individual. This inspired mix of B-movie thriller and science-fiction fantasy offered the unlikely pairing of Anna Karina with potboiler star Eddie Constantine and received the Golden Bear at the 1965 Berlin Film Festival.

Then came Pierrot le fou, Godard's best known and arguably finest film, an unhinged road-movie thriller reuniting Anna Karina and Belmondo as an ill-fated misfit couple on the run. Beautifully photographed by Raoul Coutard, this intensely lyrical work proved to be another box office winner, although the critics were once again divided. Today, it is almost universally acknowledged as a masterpiece and often figures highly in lists of the greatest films ever made. Godard followed this with Masculin féminin (1965), a punchy sociological essay showing how modern youth has been corrupted by consumerism and American influences, and Made in USA (1966), an American-style thriller rendered almost totally incomprehensible by its excessively fragmented structure.

The political maverick

La Chinoise (1967) marked a decisive turning point in Godard's filmmaking career, reflecting his growing preoccupation with extreme left-wing politics and an almost total disillusionment with commercial cinema. With its depiction of a group of Parisian students mindlessly spouting the words of Chairman Mao whilst plotting a Communist revolution the film now appears eerily prescient of the May '68 uprising of the following year. Not only did the film fail to impress the critics, it also drew condemnation from Maoists. One of the young actors to feature in the film was Anne Wiazemsky, who subsequently married Godard even though he was 17 years her senior (the union only lasted a few years).

With his next film, Week-end (1967), Jean-Luc Godard spat out his most forthright assault on consumer society, presenting an apocalyptic vision of the near future in which civilisation is reduced to cannibalistic barbarism by the forces of capitalism. Despite strong performances from its lead actors - Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc - this odyssey of despair proved to be a costly commercial and critical failure, and Godard's initial inclination after this setback was to give up filmmaking for good. In his next work, the ponderous film essai Le Gai savoir, he argued that if cinema is to have a future it must begin by returning to first principles.

This is the point at which Jean-Luc Godard began to lose his way as an artist and, some would argue (perhaps unfairly), stopped making films of interest to anyone but himself. Whereas his New Wave contemporaries Truffaut and Chabrol had all but given up on innovation and were now finding mainstream success by making more conventional films, Godard appeared like a stray sheep in a misty wilderness, shifting aimlessly between projects which were either too ill-conceived or too contentious to have any chance of making an impression.

One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) was the first film that Godard made in England and already reveals an artist in dire need of inspiration and creative focus. There is no narrative to speak of, just ad hoc scenes depicting the nefarious activities of a group of revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, carelessly inter-cut with scenes of the pop group The Rolling Stones recording their latest album. Even more pointless was Godard's next film, Un film comme les autres, a dispiriting documentary in which students and factory workers offer accounts of their activities during the May 1968 uprising. The British TV company London Weekend Television commissioned Godard's following work, British Sounds, but this political potpourri was deemed so provocative that it was never broadcast.

Godard's attempt to organise production of his next film - a western entitled Vent d'est (1969) - on Soviet collectivist lines ended with an internecine falling out between two camps (anarchists and Maoists) that virtually derailed the project. After this near-disaster, Godard teamed up with Jean-Pierre Gorin to create the Dziga Vertov group, a collective devoted to making exclusively political films. The group made two notable films - Vladimir et Rosa (1970), inspired by the Chicago Seven trial, and Tout va bien (1972), another attack on the evils of consumerism. Despite its big budget and the presence of Yves Montand and Jane Fonda in the lead roles, this latter film was a massive flop, and after falling out on their next film, L'Ailleurs immédiat, Godard and Gorin parted company.

It was around this time that Godard met and become romantically involved with Anne-Marie Miéville, who was to prove his most faithful collaborator during the next phase of his career. Not long after making Moi Je, the first of his films to be shot entirely on video, Godard moved to Grenoble with Miéville to start up a new film production company Sonimage, which was devoted to making films on video. The couple explored the limits of cinematic expression with Ici et ailleurs (1974), a film compiled using footage from an aborted earlier film Jusqu'à la victoire. Whilst the film has great merit it was widely condemned at the time for its perceived pro-Palestinian stance.

Godard and Miéville then collaborated on Numéro deux (1974), an experimental work depicting life on a housing complex in present day France. Once again Godard succeeded in alienating both critics and audiences. His next project was Six fois deux / Sur et sous la communication (1976), a mini-series commissioned by the French television company FR3. Aired in the summer of 1976, this comprised six episodes consisting of two parts each, and dealt with a range of themes including work, film and women. Not long after this, Godard and Miéville wound up Sonimage and moved to Rolle in Switzerland.

The auteur returns

In 1977, Godard was given another commission, this time from the French TV channel Antenne 2, to make a documentary series commemorating the centenary of Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, a famous travel book by Augustine Fouillée. The series ran to twelve episodes of 26 minutes each, but by the time Godard delivered it Antenne 2 had totally lost interest in the venture. It wasn't broadcast until 1980, the year in which Godard made his long overdue return to mainstream cinema with Sauve qui peut (la vie). No doubt helped by its prestigious principal cast (Jacques Dutronc, Isabelle Huppert and Nathalie Baye), this film was a moderate commercial success but once again critical reaction was mixed. By contrast, Godard's next film Passion (1982) pleased the critics but failed to find an audience.

The director was back on form with his next film Prénom Carmen, an updated version of the famous story by Prosper Mérimée. A commercial and critical success, the film took the Golden Lion Best Film award at the Venice Film Festival in 1983. Godard then received no end of flack from the Catholic press for Je vous salue, Marie (1985), and again the critics seemed to be unimpressed by his next foray into policier territory, Détective (1985), despite the inspired casting of Johnny Hallyday as a desperate boxing promoter. His subsequent comedy Soigne ta droite (1987), in which he played a wacky filmmaker, also met with a cool reception, in spite of winning the Prix Louis Delluc, and the least said about King Lear the better (suffice it to say that any resemblance to a play by William Shakespeare is purely coincidental).

Throughout the 1990s, Godard's main preoccupation was his incredibly ambitious Histoire(s) du cinéma, a series of films in which he offered a personal and thoroughly inspired retrospective on the history of film. In parallel, he turned out a few other features, mostly without success. Nouvelle Vague (1990) and Hélas pour moi (1993) were both notable flops, in spite of the casting of living legends in the lead roles (Alain Delon in the first, Gérard Depardieu in the second). After a protracted production, Éloge de l'amour was finally released in 2001, but was appreciated only by a minority of critics. Notre musique (2004) and Film Socialisme (2010) met with a more favourable reception.

The challenge of 3-D cinema was one that Godard could not resist taking on, and his first two forays into the medium earned him considerable praise. His short Les Trois désastres was included in a triptych entitled 3x3D (2013), along with contributions by Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pêra, and his next feature, Adieu au langage (2014), was widely acclaimed, winning him the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. Four years later, he received a Special Award at Cannes for Le Livre d'image (2018), a film essai that criticises cinema for failing to appreciate the atrocities of the past century. In 2011, Godard's remarkable contribution to cinema was acknowledged with an honorary Oscar. Prior to this, he had received two honorary Césars, in 1987 and 1998. Jean-Luc Godard's death on 13th September 2022 prompted a worldwide recognition of his immense contribution to independent filmmaking over half a century.

Filmography

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