The NYT obituary:
"Jean-Luc Godard, Daring Director Who Shaped the French New Wave, Dies at 91/The Franco-Swiss filmmaker and provocateur radically rethought motion pictures and left a lasting influence on the medium" (NYT).
As a young critic in the 1950s, Mr. Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
When his first feature-length film as a director, “Breathless” (“À Bout de Souffle”), was released in 1960, Mr. Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labeled La Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave.
For Mr. Godard, as well as for New Wave friends and associates like François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.
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I didn't get him, or rather, I got the young French (Swiss?) Quentin Tarantino of his early years, but not the later Maoist guru.
I remember going back to see one of his pictures again to be sure that there wasn't something the critics saw in it that I had missed.
It seemed like the movie critics only liked his later work because they had liked his earlier films and wanted to remain true to the enthusiasms of their youth.
Godard, Mon Amour (Redoutable) was a recent somewhat witty and satirical look at Godard, unkind, but not entirely unaffectionate.
They sometimes show these odd French films late at night on TCM.
Interesting if you've had a lot of Scotch...
I like "Breathless" and "Contempt"and bits and pieces of some of his other films. THis guy was treated like a GOD by the American critics in the 60s. He was cutting edge and so Left-wing, and so...European. Kael, Kauffman, and John Simon were wrtiting 4-6 page reviews of his movies. Most of which are now forgotten.
Today, a few movie nerds like him. Nobody else.
Ultimately, he just was another 60s Counter-culture figure who got famous by attacking the existing culture and being a "new and different". But once he stopped being "new and different", and the culture he attacked went away, he also faded away.
He died from assisted suicide.
Breathless was a groundbreaking multi generational influence. He transformed and elevated Noir and/or Pulp B-movies into Art house and box-office gold. That said, from a practical standpoint, Roger Corman, was the greater influence on modern cinema.
I was worried, I thought Jean Luc Picard died!
I liked his stuff okay, but the French New Wave owed a lot to American Film Noir which preceded it. What New Wave offered, imo, was New Editing, a significant contribution to cinema.
"To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director."
Yeah, this shit was really, really important. Back then.
Seeing Goodbye to Language in a movie theater was like meeting an ex-lover much, much later. Those images up on the big screen, and the quality sound of a theater, reminded me how good Godard was at the things he was good at. Having watched the early movies once, and found them fresh and exciting despite their long, tedious stretches -- it was a great pleasure to me to meet up with his gifts again.
You can look at that ex-lover with fondness now that you both have mellowed and the issues of conflict are long buried by time and circumstance. And that way you can appreciate again the things you loved so much once. Godard dared do filming differently and he could produce amazing images and sequences. He couldn't tell a story or create a very convincing character. He couldn't resist lecturing his theoretical audience and thus boring his actual one.
In Goodbye to Language, it is easier to enjoy his dog's appearances than those of the man and woman (still nude!) who also appear for parts of the movie. But it still had some breathtaking stretches, and presented a little puzzle for you to tussle with about its intended meaning. I am sorry Godard is gone; his longevity was one of those hopeful facts about the world that provided little moments of cheer when you read of, or otherwise encountered him again. There are many stars up in the sky, but one of the many in mine just winked out.
Most of the 60s reviews of Godard are unreadable now. Page after page of unreadable horseshit. Kael was always bad when she got off American Films, but Kauffman sunk to new lows of pretentious twaddle.
Marx and Coca cola. Shooting without script. Crazy randomness and surrealism. In "Weekend" we get a guy pontificating about Colonialism from Marxist perspective for 10 mintues. We end with a group of Marxist "Guerrialls" killing and eating a Bourgouis family. You can just imagine all the 60s Manhattan "Elite" lapping it all up and afterwards going to dinner to discuss Sartre and Marixst film crticism.
The only reason you don't get more of it now, is all the Film professors have gone on to LBQZT, feminism, and racism. what's funny is all this crap filters down to the midwits. So when I listen to a podcast on Classical Film or Old TV, I get midwit podcasters who will start to jabber about "Colonalism" and "Misogyny" in Star trek!
Sometimes his movies got tedious, but you would put up with it just to watch Anna Karina.
"Breathless" and "Band of Outsiders" are often mentioned, but "Alphaville" deserves watching too--particularly by the I-believe-in-science, big government, language-means-what-I-say-it-means-today crowd.
How many decades ago did the NYTimes write that obit? And in all the time since then why did nobody give it a good hard thwack to knock the mythmaking bullshit out of it?
American commercial movies were already popular in France before Cahiers was a gleam. And every French magazine or paper that reviewed movies covered Hollywood product right along.
And, sure, the French film industry of the '30s '40s '50s, just like Hollywood, cranked out yearly lots of stuffy prestigious films (and awarded itself for them), but at the same time turned out lively, funny, sexy, exciting movies. Sometimes good, sometimes better, and once in a while great.
When the New Wave were only in print, not yet on film, they were publicizing themselves, with the aim of shoehorning themselves into the film industry. I'm glad they succeeded; they made lots of good movies. But the knock on earlier French cinema should have been laid to rest long ago.
I love his first ten movies, up to and including “Pierre Le Fou,” despite the occasional tedious passages noted above. Anna Karina makes up for a lot (also noted above). I recommend “A Woman Is a Woman,” the only Godard movie I would describe as “fun,” to fans of “A Hard Days Night” & “The Knack.” It’s not as good as those Richard Lester movies but I think it influenced them in a positive way. The next five Godard movies, culminating in “Weekend” (1967)(which has a final title card reading “End of Cinema, and it feels like it) are also worth seeing but the occasional tedious passages are no longer occasional (although they are probably intentional) and YMMV. After that… whoa Nellie.
When I was a teenage movie usher in Caldwell, NJ, we showed his “One Plus One” A.K.A “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968) as a midnight show since it features the Rolling Stones in the studio developing the title song. Alas, that’s not all it features. There’s an endless sequence in an adult book store with people reading aloud from political tracts and pamphlets, and an almost endless sequence with members of the Black Panthers in a junk yard, and I must say we had one very frustrated and annoyed audience that night. It was like the opening night audience for “Springtime for Hitler” before Dick Shawn arrives. But Dick Shawn did not arrive.
The Criterion Collection which showcased the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers for decades is now repackaging and marketing the French films of the 1950s that they deplored. Commerce marches on.
I suppose one could find striking images in Godard's films, but his habit of packing every little stray thought that passed through his head (the word "brainfart" comes to mind) into his movies did a lot to undercut the idea of him as a genius.
Sorry, I'm a Stones fan.
14 comments. LOL!
@Jeff Gee, someone made quite the programming blunder with that 1 + 1 booking, lol. How about a good word for La Chinoise, and Anne Wiazemsky (plus Jean-Pierre Leaud also in the cast). Youthful, oddly hopeful despite its silly revolutionaryismo, and incredibly pictorial, that is the Godard movie that has stayed with me the longest. Saw it again not too long ago and enjoyed it more than when I first saw it. Small warning, it has its annoying stretches, which were Godard's way of helping audiences get up, move around, and improve their blood circulation for five or 10 minutes. Wiazemsky's experience on that film, and her marriage to Godard, were the subject of a novel she wrote, and that in turn was the source of the movie Le Redoutable that Lurker21 references above. Or so Wikipedia has it.
Goodbye to Language was shot with GoPro 3D cameras. Had to wear those 3D glasses to watch it in the theater. You have to wonder if it will ever be shown in a theater with 3D again, unfortunately. The one I was in had a couple dozen people along with at least 200 empty seats. Godard in 3D..... glad I did not miss its one-day run. Rcocean, I'm sure you'd have loved it. Might have helped with that mood of yours!
How could they tell?
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