Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard , 3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic.

He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement, and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork.

During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which emphasized established convention over innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless, helping to establish the New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. After the New Wave, his politics were less radical and his later films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, and a Marxist perspective.

In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time.[8] He is said to have "created one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." His work has been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award, but did not attend the award ceremony.

Godard was married twice, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964), and Pierrot le Fou (1965)—were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.

Early life

Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile (née Monod) and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, and his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas. She was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Other relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod, pastor Frédéric Monod, and former Prime Minister and later President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard was in France, and returned to Switzerland with difficulty. He spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva. Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland.

Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of André Malraux's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema, and his reading of La Revue du cinéma, which was relaunched in 1946. In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite. He lodged with the writer Jean Schlumberger. Having failed his baccalauréat exam in 1948 he returned to Switzerland. He studied in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He spent time in Geneva also with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco. His elder sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, which he did, in an abstract style. After time spent at a boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949. He registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), but did not attend class.

Personal life and death

Godard was married twice, to two of his leading women: Anna Karina (1961–1965) and Anne Wiazemsky (1967–1979). 

Beginning in 1970, he collaborated personally and professionally with Anne-Marie Miéville. Godard lived with Miéville in the municipality of Rolle since 1978, being described by his former wife Karina as a "recluse".

His relationship with Karina in particular produced some of his most critically acclaimed films, and their relationship was widely publicized; The Independent described them as "one of the most celebrated pairings of the 1960s". A writer for Filmmaker magazine called their collaborations "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema." Late in life, Karina said they no longer spoke to each other.

Through his father, he was the cousin of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, former President of Peru.

In 2017, Michel Hazanavicius directed a film about Godard, Redoubtable, based on the memoir One Year After (French: Un an après; 2015) by Wiazemsky. It centers on his life in the late 1960s, when he and Wiazemsky made films together. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. Godard said of the film that it was a "stupid, stupid idea".

Godard died on 13 September 2022 at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, following an assisted suicide procedure.

Selected filmography

Feature films

The list excludes multi-director anthology films to which Godard has contributed shorts.

• 1960 Breathless
• 1961 A Woman Is a Woman
• 1962 My Life to Live
• 1963 The Little Soldier
• 1963 The Carabineers
• 1963 Contempt
• 1964 Band of Outsiders
• 1964 A Married Woman
• 1965 Alphaville
• 1965 Pierrot le Fou
• 1966 Masculin Féminin
• 1966 Made in U.S.A.
• 1967 Two or Three Things I Know About Her
• 1967 La Chinoise
• 1967 Week-end
• 1968 A Film Like Any Other
• 1968 One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil)
• 1969 Joy of Learning
• 1969 British Sounds
• 1970 Wind from the East
• 1971 Struggle in Italy
• 1971 Vladimir et Rosa
• 1972 Tout va bien
• 1972 Letter to Jane
• 1975 Number Two
• 1976 Here and Elsewhere
• 1976/1978 How's It Going?
• 1980 Every Man for Himself
• 1982 Passion
• 1983 First Name: Carmen
• 1985 Hail Mary
• 1985 Detective
• 1987 King Lear
• 1987 Keep Your Right Up
• 1990 New Wave
• 1991 Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
• 1993 The Kids Play Russian
• 1993 Oh Woe Is Me
• 1994 JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December
• 1996 For Ever Mozart
• 2001 In Praise of Love
• 2004 Notre musique
• 2010 Film Socialisme
• 2014 Goodbye to Language
• 2018 The Image Book

Collaboration with ECM Records

Godard had a lasting friendship with Manfred Eicher, founder and head of the German music label ECM Records. The label released the soundtracks of Godard's Nouvelle Vague (ECM NewSeries 1600-01) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (ECM NewSeries 1706). This collaboration expanded over the years, leading to Godard's granting ECM permission to use stills from his films for album covers, while Eicher took over the musical direction of Godard films such as Allemagne 90 neuf zéro, Hélas Pour Moi, JLG, and For Ever Mozart. Tracks from ECM records have been used in his films; for example, the soundtrack for In Praise of Love uses Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling's album Epigraphs extensively. Godard also released on the label a collection of shorts he made with Anne-Marie Miéville called Four Short Films (ECM 5001).

Among the ECM album covers with Godard's film stills are these:

• Voci, works of Luciano Berio played by Kim Kashkashian (ECM 1735)
• Words of The Angel, by Trio Mediaeval (ECM 1753)
• Morimur, by Christoph Poppen & The Hilliard Ensemble (ECM 1765)
• Songs of Debussy and Mozart, by Juliane Banse & András Schiff (ECM 1772)
• Requiem for Larissa, by Valentin Silvestrov (ECM 1778)
• Soul of Things, by Tomasz Stanko Quartet (ECM 1788)
• Suspended Night, by Tomasz Stanko Quartet (ECM 1868)
• Asturiana: Songs from Spain and Argentina, by Kim Kashkashian & Robert Levin (ECM 1975)
• Distances, by Norma Winstone, Glauco Venier & Klaus Gesing (ECM 2028)
• Live at Birdland, by Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden & Paul Motian (ECM 2162)