Jean-Luc Godard

Godard, the "enfant terrible" of the French New Wave who revolutionized popular cinema in 1960 with his debut feature Breathless, stood for years as one of ...

In December 2007 he was honored by the European Film Academy with a lifetime achievement award. It came out a year before popular anger at the establishment shook France, culminating in the iconic but short-lived student unrests of May 1968. Godard, who was later to gain a reputation for his uncompromising left-wing political views, had a brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made The Little Soldier. He used the pay to finance his first complete film, the 1954 Operation Concrete, a 20-minute documentary about the building of the dam. Godard also launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective film projects, contributing scenes to The Seven Deadly Sins along with directors such as Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. By 1952 he had begun writing for the prestigious movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema.

The radical filmmaker upended conventions with art-house classics like "Breathless" and "Alphaville."

He started out as a critic at the 1950s. In recent years, Godard continued to work steadily, exploring the new possibilities of digital technology in artistically rigorous works like "Film Socialisme" (2010), "Goodbye to Language" (2014) and "The Image Book" (2018). Jean-Luc Godard, the iconoclastic and stylistically adventurous filmmaking giant who rose to prominence as part of the French New Wave movement in the 1960s, has died.

Godard continued to make movies throughout his life, evolving his approach since his directorial debut in 1960.

Godard’s first film, Breathless (1960), is considered one of the best films ever made. His peers included Éric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy and Jacques Rozier. For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can make sure we can keep reliable, meaningful news open to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. “He will be cremated… For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away. More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.

The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

He and his friend Truffaut got into a spat after the release of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” in 1973 and never reconciled before “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. In 1988, he began one of his most ambitious projects, a seven-part series on the history of film, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which he completed in 1998. After a pair of aggressively didactic films, “Un Film Comme les Autres” (1968) and “Le Gai Savoir” (1969), and an abortive project with the Rolling Stones, released against Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard directed a candy-colored, wide-screen homage to the Hollywood musical “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), starring Ms. Belmondo’s central character in “Breathless,” a petty criminal who himself identified with the doomed romanticism of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the American films that Mr. And covering a 2000 revival screening of “Breathless,” the essayist and novelist Philip Lopate said he felt as exhilarated by the film as when he first saw it 40 years before. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Truffaut. Godard remained best known for “Breathless” and about a dozen films he made in quick succession afterward, ending with “Weekend” in 1967.University audiences identified with the doomed romanticism of Mr. Godard once observed, “A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.” As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

With “Breathless” in 1960, the filmmaker rode the crest of the French New Wave movement to liberate a hidebound movie industry.

Mr. One of Mr. Reemerging in the 1980s based in Rolle, Mr. In the meantime, Mr. “Breathless,” one of Mr. At his best, Mr. Much of “Breathless,” made on a shoestring budget, was filmed by handheld camera on the streets of Paris. The award revived a long-standing debate about whether Mr. Sontag wrote that Mr. Hollywood studios tended to look on movies as a collaborative effort organized by a producer, but Mr. Where a playfulness and exuberance pervaded his early films, Mr. These techniques and motifs set a template for much of his later work, with characters who stepped out of character to wink, wave and mug at the camera.

A titan in the history of film, the French New Wave director's groundbreaking movies changed the medium forever.

More comfortable on the European festival circuit, he was nominated for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion award eight times, receiving an honorary award in 1982 and the accolade itself in 1983. Ardently dismissive of cinematic traditions, director Quentin Tarantino praised Godard’s ability to be “thumbing his nose at cinema technique but always finding some clever anti-version of technique.” Such was the impact of the work that film critic and New York Film Festival founder Richard Roud once opined, “There is the cinema before Godard and the cinema after Godard.”

Speaking years after the event, Peter Lennon recalled Jean-Luc Godard shutting down the 1967 Cannes film festival following a screening of the Irishman's ...

The final credits of Week-end read: “End of story — End of cinema.” A cynic might regard the rest of his career as mischievous, practical demonstration of that taut thesis. His dedicated chroniclers have divided the post–nouvelle vague career into “political films” and “transitional films” and “second wave”. Whereas Chabrol and Truffaut became something like establishment figures — the latter actually appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Godard continued to ignore polite convention with a cinema that provoked as much philistine ridicule as it generated cultish adoration. The director was not in attendance, but, eight years later, typically playful, Godard turned up virtually for a FaceTime press conference when The Image Book It is often claimed that the still thrilling Week-end marked the end of his nouvelle-vague period, but, in retrospect, that violent Marxist fable, released months after the 1967 political disturbances that led to Godard and colleagues shutting down Cannes, now points towards the director’s later, increasingly oblique attitude to his craft. The writers of what became Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, the film that launched Hollywood’s postclassical period in 1967, approached Godard early on, but his plans to shoot the Texas-set crime flick in New Jersey during winter did not appeal to the producers. The attitude was economically evoked by the scene in Godard’s Bande à Part, from 1964, that finds a gang of young people racing through the Louvre at disrespectfully breakneck pace. He followed Breathless with one of the great runs in world cinema. Born in Paris, then raised largely in Switzerland as part of a wealthy Protestant family, he ended up back in the French capital as a student of anthropology and there became involved with the young critics who would later launch the upending movement known as the nouvelle vague. Quentin Tarantino later named his production company A Band Apart in tribute to that film Driven both by high and by low culture, the films exhibited a looseness of approach that the previous French generation — dubbed “le cinéma de papa”, or daddy’s cinema, by Truffaut — would have regarded as unspeakably vulgar. He developed a seat-of-the-pants cool in the early 1960s.

Godard's political ardour fuelled by the May 68 upheaval in France led to the shutting down of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students ...

His political ardour, fuelled by the May ‘68 upheavals in France, would culminate in protest, co-organised by François Truffaut, that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Being an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy, the intellectual penchants resound in his moving images that often touch upon socio-political issues. He threw down the gauntlet to mainstream French cinema's “Tradition of Quality”, which enshrined established convention rather than innovation and experimentation.

The nouvelle vague director, who has died at the age of 91, revolutionised film-making.

The final credits of Week-end read: “End of story — End of cinema.” A cynic might regard the rest of his career as mischievous, practical demonstration of that taut thesis. His dedicated chroniclers have divided the post–nouvelle vague career into “political films” and “transitional films” and “second wave”. Whereas Chabrol and Truffaut became something like establishment figures — the latter actually appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Godard continued to ignore polite convention with a cinema that provoked as much philistine ridicule as it generated cultish adoration. The director was not in attendance, but, eight years later, typically playful, Godard turned up virtually for a FaceTime press conference when The Image Book It is often claimed that the still thrilling Week-end marked the end of his nouvelle-vague period, but, in retrospect, that violent Marxist fable, released months after the 1967 political disturbances that led to Godard and colleagues shutting down Cannes, now points towards the director’s later, increasingly oblique attitude to his craft. The writers of what became Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, the film that launched Hollywood’s postclassical period in 1967, approached Godard early on, but his plans to shoot the Texas-set crime flick in New Jersey during winter did not appeal to the producers. The attitude was economically evoked by the scene in Godard’s Bande à Part, from 1964, that finds a gang of young people racing through the Louvre at disrespectfully breakneck pace. He followed Breathless with one of the great runs in world cinema. Born in Paris, then raised largely in Switzerland as part of a wealthy Protestant family, he ended up back in the French capital as a student of anthropology and there became involved with the young critics who would later launch the upending movement known as the nouvelle vague. Quentin Tarantino later named his production company A Band Apart in tribute to that film Driven both by high and by low culture, the films exhibited a looseness of approach that the previous French generation — dubbed “le cinéma de papa”, or daddy’s cinema, by Truffaut — would have regarded as unspeakably vulgar. He developed a seat-of-the-pants cool in the early 1960s.

'Breathless' director influenced generations of film-makers from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.

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The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium.

Mr. He and Mr. “To me Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music,” Mr. Karina in 1987, Mr. Godard joined with Mr. In “Alphaville” (1965), Mr. Godard developed the outline of “Breathless” in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Mr. Truffaut, Mr. Rohmer and Mr. For Mr. A decade later, Mr. As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr.

When a figure as titanic as Jean-Luc Godard dies in the middle of a film festival like Toronto, it feels like the world should just stop.

They’re too old to kick their legs up the way they did, but they dance with abandon and good cheer, in a way the real Varda and Godard never got to. [break into a dance called the Madison](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61H_xl9dzgI). Faces Places didn’t turn out to be Varda’s final film—that ended up being 2019’s Varda by Agnès, a sort of self-curated retrospective of a career that only received its proper reverence in her last years—but it has the feeling of one, not least because one of its subjects is how Varda’s failing eyesight makes it increasingly difficult to make movies. The two were early allies, although Varda made her first movie while Godard was still an aspiring critic, and Godard appears in a film within Varda’s breakthrough feature, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7, starring in a short silent-film pastiche which the movie’s protagonist watches during the titular timespan. [Agnès Varda](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/oscars-honoree-agnes-varda-is-a-documentary-giant.html) and [Documentary Now!](https://slate.com/culture/2019/02/documentary-now-season-3-review-cate-blanchett-bill-hader.html), the news that the latter would be devoting an episode to parodying the former took me to the happiest of places. [pointed out Tuesday morning](https://twitter.com/cameron_tiff/status/1569655393399209984) after the news broke, Godard had hardened into such an anti-sentimental crank that he might have taken an outpouring of flowery postmortem sentiment as an affront.

The director revolutionised cinema with New Wave films such as 'Breathless'

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Jean-Luc Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave, has died. He was 91.

Godard continued to work prolifically in his later years and enjoyed what many described as a late-career renaissance in the early 2000s starting with In Praise of Love (2001), which screened at Cannes followed by Film Socialisme (2010). His most recent film The Image Book (2018) played in competition at Cannes and picked up the special Palme d’Or. [Jean-Luc Godard](https://deadline.com/tag/jean-luc-godard/), a leading figure of the [French New Wave](https://deadline.com/tag/french-new-wave/), has died. The former Culture Minister of France, Jack Lang, told France Info radio this morning that Godard was “Unique, absolutely unique… Godard is best known for his seminal work of the 1960s, including Le mépris (Contempt), starring Brigitte Bardot, and Le Petit Soldat, which was banned until 1963, and starred the director’s future wife, Anna Karina. [Breathless](https://deadline.com/tag/breathless/) (À bout de souffle), which catapulted him onto the world scene in 1960.

The French director did more than transform the aesthetic and the practice of filmmaking—he turned the cinema into the central art form of his time.

To the end of his life, he was still fighting his way up and in, even from the heights of cinematic history that he had scaled. The awe-inspiring example of his films has converged with his personal practice to enter the DNA of today’s cinema. (I interviewed Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who called the town Rollywood.) Godard made his domestic activities and local observations converge with the history of the cinema and the grand-scale politics of his era. At the restaurant where we ate, he was voluble, and his conversation was wide-ranging, embracing Shakespeare (we discussed “Coriolanus”) and “Schindler’s List,” the Second World War and the later films of classic Hollywood directors and aspects of his own youth (such as his avoidance of military service both in France and in Switzerland), and he talked of food (the coffee and the local fish), and made winking fun of the shirt that a man at another table was wearing. There was no legend to look up to, no dominant figure to inspire or overawe; I naïvely but sincerely saw the film face to face, so to speak, and saw him in it the same way, as a filmmaker virtually addressing his audience, across the decades, in real time. And, as prolific as he was during his first flush of artistic fervor, he was even more so at the time of his return—though he made fewer features (“only” eighteen from 1980 onward), he also created video essays, including the monumental “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that were crucibles, epilogues, and living notebooks for his features. He sought a culture of his own, and, with his largely autodidactic passion for movies, he found one that was resolutely modern—and that, with his intellectual fervor, he helped raise to equality with the classics. Godard was raised in bourgeois comfort and propriety—his father was a doctor, his mother was a medical assistant and the scion of a major banking family—and his artistic interests were encouraged, but his voyage into the cinema was a self-conscious revolt against his cultural heritage. At twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Cahiers, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of rigorously reasoned artistic freedom; at twenty-five, he wrote an instant-classic essay on film editing, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. What he retained to the very end of his career (his final feature, “ [The Image Book](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-image-book-reviewed-jean-luc-godard-confronts-cinemas-depiction-of-the-arab-world),” was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of adventure. [to Bob Dylan’s](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/bob-dylan-in-correspondence).) Yet, like many artistic heroes of the sixties, Godard found that his public image and his private life, his fame and his ambitions, came into conflict. But it wasn’t just the news that made his films feel like the embodiment of their times—it was Godard’s insolence, his defiance, his derisive humor, his sense of freedom.

The death of Jean-Luc Godard at the age of 91 marks the end of an era, not only of a certain modernist tradition of auteur cinema, but also of cinema as a ...

[Éloge de l’Amour](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/nov/23/1) (2001), a tale of the Resistance, memory and exploitation, used sumptuous black-and-white photography to capture contemporary Paris, then, in its second half, the saturated colour of DV to depict a period three years earlier. [Anne Wiazemsky](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/oct/10/anne-wiazemsky-obituary), a young student and granddaughter of the writer François Mauriac. Histoire(s) appeared also in an art-book and CD version and stands as one of the great artworks of the last century, confirming the view of the critic Serge Daney that Godard was less a revolutionary and iconoclast than a radical reformer tirelessly correcting his own practice and cinema itself. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye and the singer Jacques Dutronc as his alter ego, Paul Godard (the name of his father), it was Godard’s second “first film” and the culmination of his recent video experimentation with slow motion. He was briefly a globetrotter of revolutionary cinema, making trips to American campuses, Cuba and Canada, although One AM (One American Movie), which included interviews with the Black Panthers in Oakland, was never completed. [Bernardo Bertolucci](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/26/bernardo-bertolucci-obituary), or [Martin Scorsese](https://www.theguardian.com/film/martinscorsese), [Brian de Palma](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/07/brian-de-palma-carrie-scarface-retrospective-documentary) and [Robert Altman](http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/nov/21/news3) in America. Featuring a serene Marina Vlady as a housewife moonlighting as a sex worker (“elle”), it decoded the Gaullist ideology of urbanisation in the new housing complexes being constructed in the Paris region (also “elle”). [Bande à Part](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/22/culture.reviews4) (Band of Outsiders, 1964), a tender “suburban western” in which she dances the Madison with Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey. [Brigitte Bardot](https://www.theguardian.com/film/brigitte-bardot) in a love triangle with Michel Piccoli and [Jack Palance](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/nov/13/guardianobituaries.obituaries). [Eric Rohmer](http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/11/eric-rohmer-obituary) and [Claude Chabrol](http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/sep/12/claude-chabrol-obituary), and then, in September 1950, Truffaut, with whom he forged a close bond. [Raoul Coutard](http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/jun/09/books.guardianreview) and enlightened producer Georges de Beauregard but deliberately changed tack with Le Petit Soldat, featuring the Danish model [Anna Karina](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/16/anna-karina-obituary), whom he married in 1961. It was also a raw statement of artistic freedom, and it set Godard on course to become the most individual and influential film-maker of his generation, known for axioms such as “cinema is truth 24 times a second” and “it’s not a just image, it’s just an image”.

A source close to Jean-Luc Godard confirmed to Deadline that the director died aged 91.

It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio film-making system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting… Nous perdons un trésor national, un regard de génie. Adieu to a giant of cinema who ripped up the rule book. Depuis sa 1ère apparition au Festival dans Cleo de 5 à 7 en 1962, 21 films de Jean-Luc Godard ont été projetés à Cannes. Jean-Luc Godard laisse derrière lui 100 films dont presque tout autant de chefs d'oeuvre en 60 ans de carrière. That scene between them in the hotel: how many other directors could have managed that in so small a space and made it so captivating? It still leaps off the screen like few movies. [September 13, 2022] Jean-Luc Godard did not make cinema. Remarking on Godard’s radical and passionate approach to cinema, British director “To this day, Jean-Luc Godard inspires filmmakers worldwide.” Speaking on France Info radio shortly after the news broke, Jack Lang, former Culture Minister of France, said Godard was “unique, absolutely unique…

The titan of French film has died, aged 91. His was a career of immense creativity, which redefined the grammar of cinema.

His response: “to become immortal…and then die”. But the intellect as sharp as ever. Quentin Tarantino called his production house A Band Apart in homage to Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part. The hands frail. As a young man, Godard had tremendous reverence for the American studio system. That’s why the American cinema is so bad now. He’d leave in mistakes – like actors forgetting their lines – to remind viewers that all cinema was essentially fake. He dabbled with anthropology as a student, but his great love was cinema, and in particular American B-movies directed by Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray and his idol Howard Hawks. The voice was raspy. Conventional, “invisible” editing was replaced by abrupt jump cuts; smooth long shots alternated with unsettling montages and rapid close-ups; characters broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience. [Agnès Varda, a pioneering artist who saw the extraordinary in the ordinary](https://theconversation.com/agnes-varda-a-pioneering-artist-who-saw-the-extraordinary-in-the-ordinary-115437) [From Nazis to Netflix, the controversies and contradictions of Cannes](https://theconversation.com/from-nazis-to-netflix-the-controversies-and-contradictions-of-cannes-77655)