"By this time, I had some sense of the plot [of Jean-Luc Godard's 'King Lear']... The narrative was now roughly this: The world has been destroyed, post-Chernobyl..."

"... and a puckish little man named William Shakespeare Jr. The Fifth is tasked with re-creating his famous ancestor’s work. The avant-garde opera director Peter Sellars was cast as Shakespeare’s descendant, and Godard inserted himself in a role that doesn’t appear in any Shakespeare play: Herr Doktor Pluggy—an inventor who wears a contraption on his head, with cables dangling, doing research in pursuit of something called 'the image.'.... One day, Godard sneaked into [the room of the actor playing King Lear, Burgess Meredith] and short-sheeted his bed. I noticed that the director seemed to derive satisfaction from provoking people... Toward the end of the shoot, Godard mentioned that he deemed everything I did in the film completely authentic except for one moment.... I asked him which one. 'I’ll tell you when it’s over,' he said.... When I finished my scenes, I approached him to ask which moment, and he told me that it was the scene in which Cordelia lies next to her father, dead. This was completely nonsensical, since it was the last scene that I filmed—it hadn’t even been shot when he made the comment."

Writes Molly Ringwald, in "Shooting Shakespeare with Jean-Luc Godard/The actress and writer recalls working with French cinema’s enfant terrible" (The New Yorker).

Jean-Luc Godard has died.

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.

"He leaves Marseille. He steals a car. He wants to sleep with the girl again. She doesn’t. In the end, he either dies or leaves — to be decided."

That's what Jean-Luc Godard put on paper for Jean-Paul Belmondo for "Breathless," and the rest was improvisation, according to Belmondo, quoted in "Jean-Paul Belmondo, jaunty star of New Wave classic ‘Breathless,’ dies at 88" (WaPo).

He added that he was comfortable with a film almost wholly dependent on improvisation. “If I’m told exactly how to do everything,” he said, “I become stiff and uncomfortable.” He embraced Godard’s suggestion to “play around” with the character. 

Knowing that Mr. Belmondo liked to shadowbox in character, Godard filmed him boxing in front of a mirror as he experimented with his lines: “I’m not much of a looker, but I’m quite a boxer.” 

The film — sexy, witty, youthful and fatalistic — became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Belmondo became the subject of articles chronicling “le belmondisme,” his appealing air of insouciance.

AND: There's much to say about Jean-Paul Belmondo, but this is a blog, so I'll just say one thing that is important to me. He makes a prominent appearance in the Donovan song "Sunny South Kensington" — (on the delightful "Mellow Yellow" album). 

The chorus begins with the name Jean-Paul Belmondo:

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Mary Quant got stoned to say the least 

Ginsberg, he ended up dry and so he took a trip out East

What's in the verses? We're invited to take a walk in the London neighborhood of South Kensington, "a groovy place to live." Donovan points out the various characters — girl in a silk blouse who "ain't no freak," "a fella with a cane umbrella" — and tells us how we might act: "flip out, skip out, trip out" and "spread your wings."

Ginsberg is presumably Allen Ginsberg, who was famously in London in 1965. The "Mellow Yellow" album came out in 1966. When did Ginsberg go to India and why? We could read this from an Indian website from 2019: "Disillusioned with America, did the poet Allen Ginsberg find an antidote to rationality in India?" ("India turned his attention 'away from his cosmic obsessions and toward the humanity around him in the swarming streets of Kolkata and Varanasi'"). 

As for Mary Quant, she was celebrated last year in at the V&A South Kensington Museum — South Kensington, the place where Donovan pictured her stoned in 1966 — and here's the museum's video, intended to capture that 60s vibe, half a century after the fact:

 

I can attest to the fact that the false eyelashes I'm wearing in that picture I used in the sidebar on my now defunct blog The Time That Blog Forgot were Mary Quant eyelashes. The photo was taken by my father in 1968, when I would have been thrilled to wear anything and everything Mary Quant, and my Aunt Dorothy, who lived in London, sent me those eyelashes.

"Whether playing a streetwalker or a terrorist, Ms. Karina managed to look flirtatious, with her dark hair, wispy bangs, heavy eyeliner..."

"... and chic wardrobe of sailor-uniform tops, knee socks, lots of plaid and perky headwear, from berets to boaters.... At 14, she dropped out of school, sang in cabarets and worked as a television model. At 17, she ran away from home — hitchhiking to Paris — and was discovered by the casting director of an advertising agency while sitting at Les Deux Magots, the fashionable Left Bank cafe. During a photo shoot for Elle magazine, she met the fashion designer Coco Chanel, who advised her to change her name. Godard, a film critic at the time, saw her in a movie theater ad for a Palmolive bath product. When he subsequently offered her a small part in his first full-length film... she objected to doing a nude scene. Godard said he didn’t understand — after all, he had just seen her onscreen in a bathtub, looking very comfortable and showing plenty of skin. 'I wasn’t nude,' she told him... 'That was your imagination.' She had been wearing a swimsuit in the tub, she said, and “the soapsuds were up to my neck.'... After her divorce from Godard ('He would say he was going out for cigarettes and come back three weeks later,' she told The Guardian), she married several other times... Ms. Karina was happy to acknowledge Godard as a Pygmalion figure, but also pointed out her own contributions... 'I gave him self-confidence.'"

From the NYT obituary for Anna Karina, whose  name, prior to that encounter with Coco Chanel, was Hanne Karin Bayer.

"If I said that phrase back then, quite some time ago, it was in a way to counter the Spielbergs and that lot who said a story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and so, as a joke, I said: 'not in that order.'"

Said Jean-Luc Godard, confronted with his old statement that films should not follow a conventional narrative arc, quoted in "Godard injects anarchic spirit at Cannes with small screen cameo." The 87-year-old filmmaker appeared via Facetime to promote his new movie "The Image Book," which is a collection of "clips from other films, stills, news footage and even Islamic State online videos, with a soundtrack often at odds with the images."

Unfortunately, the Jefferson Airplane sounds pretty bad, and Jean-Luc Godard's camerawork is execrable.

But this NYC wake-up concert from a rooftop in 1968 had all the elements of greatness.

(The famous Beatles rooftop concert in the movie "Let It Be" was filmed in 1969.)

ADDED: Hazy Dave emails:

BTW, the Beatles thing was filmed January 30, 1969, and the Airplane was apparently Taken Off the roof December 7, 1968 (not November as the story states), so it was "the" year before, if not "a" year before. Almost 8 weeks, anyway. :) 

Who knows which one was planned first?

NYT gaffe of the day: "François Truffaut's 'Breathless.'"

From a pretty interesting article about copyright and the fair use of film clips in documentaries.

ADDED: And I can just hear some fact checker whine, but Truffaut's name is on the IMDB page!