Film director, born in Paris, France. Educated in Paris, he was a journalist and film critic before turning director. His first major film A bout de souffle (1960, Breathless) established him as one of the leaders of Nouvelle Vague cinema. He wrote his own film scripts on contemporary and controversial themes, his prolific output including Vivre sa vie (1962, trans My Life to Live) and Weekend (1968). He then collaborated with other film-makers in the making of politically radical films, but returned to feature films with Sauve qui peut (1980, trans Slow Motion), Detective (1984), Je vous salue, Marie (1985, trans Hail, Mary), Nouvelle Vague (1990), For Ever Mozart (1997), and Notre musique (2004, trans Our Music).
Jean-Luc Godard (born 3 December 1930 in Paris) is a French filmmaker and one of the most influential members of the Nouvelle Vague, or "French New Wave".
Born in Paris to Franco-Swiss parents, he was educated in Nyon, later studying at the Lycée Rohmer, and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Known for stylistic implementations that challenged, at their focus, the conventions of Hollywood cinema, he became universally recognized as the most audacious and most radical of the New Wave filmmakers. His work reflected a fervent knowledge of film history, a comprehensive understanding of existential and Marxist philosophy, and a scholarly disposition that placed him as the lone filmmaker among the public intellectuals of the Rive Gauche.
Cahiers and early films
After attending school in Nyon, Switzerland, Godard returned to Paris in 1948 and began to attend the Lycée Rohmer, a year before enrolling at the Sorbonne to study anthropology. Godard began attending, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave, André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy.
Despite its intricate manifesto, the guiding principle behind the movement was that "Realism is the essence of cinema." This technique can be seen in some of Godard's most celebrated action sequences.
An interesting aspect of Godard's philosophy on filmmaking was his inherent and deliberate embrace of contradiction. In short, Godard used "mass-market" aesthetics in his film to make a statement about capitalism and consequent societal decline. This analysis can be closely reviewed in the book, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the invisible, by David Sterritt.
His approach to film began in the field of criticism. When André Bazin founded his critical magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, were among the first writers. Most of the writers for Cahiers du cinéma started making some brief forays into film direction in the years before 1960.
Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building, Opération béton (1955).
In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining notoriety as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules, a homage to Jean Cocteau.
Cinematic period
The Godard canon has never been able to escape the critical desire to distinguish between, and in turn label, its most visible periods. The first and most celebrated period roughly spanned from his first feature, Breathless (1960), through Week End (1967) and focused on narrative and somewhat conventional works that often refer to different aspects of film history. This cinematic period stands in contrast to the revolutionary period that immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema’s history as "bourgeois" and therefore without merit.
Films
Godard's first major feature film, Breathless (1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, was a seminal work of the French New Wave. François Truffaut, who co-wrote Breathless with Godard, suggested its concept and introduced Godard to the producer who ultimately funded it, Georges de Beauregard.
The same year, Godard made Le Petit Soldat, which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence. Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Godard and Danish-born actress Anna Karina, whom he later married in 1961 (and divorced in 1964). The film, due to its political nature, was banned from French theaters until 1963.
Godard's next film, Vivre sa vie (1962) was one of his most popular among critics. The film's style, much like that of Breathless, boasted the type of experimentation that made the French New Wave so influential.
Les Carabiniers (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent injustice. It was the influence and suggestion of Roberto Rossellini that led Godard to make the film.
His most commercially successful film was Contempt (1963), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by the arrogant American movie producer Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, which German director Fritz Lang has been filming.
In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), another collaboration between the two and described by Godard as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka."
Une femme mariée (1964) followed Band of Outsiders. Godard made the film while he acquired funding for Pierrot le fou (1965). The film was entirely produced over the period of one month and exhibited a loose quality unique to Godard.
In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire.
Pierrot le fou (1965) was one of his most cinematic pictures in terms of its complex storyline, distinctive personalities, and apocalyptic ending. Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation in the way it played on so many of Godard’s earlier characters and themes.
Masculin, féminin (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, La Femme de Paul and Le Signe, was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics.
Godard followed with Made in U.S.A (1966), whose source material was Richard Stark's The Jugger;
La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright yet. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France.
That same year, Godard made a more colorful and political film, Week End. One of them, a ten-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is often cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends. Week End's enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema," appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard filmmaking career.
Politics
Politics are never far from the surface in Godard's films. In addition to the international conflicts Godard sought an artistic response to, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France.
In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End, but is evident in several films — namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée.
Vietnam
Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam conflict.
In the same film, the lovers accost a group of American sailors along the course of their liberating crime spree.
Notably, he also participated in Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from La Chinoise), Claude Lelouche, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnés Varda.
Bertolt Brecht
Godard's engagement with German playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (Verfremdungseffekt) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (in Brecht's case theater, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used filmic expression for specific political ends.
For example, Breathless' elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content. Godard employs this device as well as several others, including asynchronous sound and alarming title frames, with perhaps his favorite being the character aside.
Marxism
A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard’s early work. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie’s consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man’s alienation — all central issues of Marx’s condemning analysis of capitalism.
In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Ranciere states, "When in Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism and of a feminist denunciation of women’s false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story". The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticizing the Marxist rhetoric, rather than solely being tools of education.
Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis".
Revolutionary period
The period that spans from May 1968 indistinctly into the 1970s has been subject to an even larger volume of inaccurate labeling. The period saw Godard align himself with a specific revolution and employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric.
Films
Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in Maoist ideology. In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings, but the anti-consumerist Week End was released in 1967.
According to Elliott Gould, he and Godard met to discuss the possibility of Godard directing Jules Feiffer's 1971 surrealist play Little Murders. During this meeting Godard said his two favorite American writers were Feiffer and Charles M. Godard soon declined the opportunity to direct;
Jean-Pierre Gorin
After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle republic", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like minded individuals in the filmmaking arena.
Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages.
The Dziga Vertov group
The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Vertov, a filmmaker and contemporary of both the great Soviet montage theorists, as well as the Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin.
Later work
His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example Passion (1982), Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982), Prénom Carmen (1984), and Grandeur et décadence (1986).
His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — films such as Nouvelle Vague (New Wave, 1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December, 1995), and For Ever Mozart (1996). During the 1990s he also produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series Histoire(s) du cinéma, which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself. The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible. The Cinema alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000.
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