Prodded on by Jean Seberg’s Patricia, halfway through Breathless, a director played by Jean-Pierre Melville says his greatest ambition is “to become immortal, and then die.” It’s a line that might as well sum up the extraordinary career of Breathless’s own helmer and French New Wave doyen, Jean-Luc Godard, who died of assisted suicide at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, on September 13. He was 91. His longtime lawyer told The New York Times the director suffered from “multiple disabling pathologies,” while a relative told the press he “was not sick—he was simply exhausted.” The tributes that have since poured in from all corners of the world are as gargantuan and scholarly as his output. But though “the practice of honoring our artistic giants is one that thrives on analysis,” Justin Chang notes at the L.A. Times, “what feels more fitting to offer at this still-early moment of reckoning is a cluster of observations, associations and persistent memories from a moviegoing life that this towering artist and fearless iconoclast has long enriched.”
If Godard’s passing feels so earth-shattering to so many, that’s because one’s baptism with the cineaste very often coincided with one’s first real encounter with the medium itself. To watch his films is to be made joltingly aware of what cinema is, what it can do, and how far it can be pushed. Reminiscing about his first time watching Godard’s 1961 A Woman Is a Woman, Rolling Stone’s K. Austin Collins confesses he’ll “never forget seeing it for the first time and feeling like I was being pushed to notice movies—with all their contrived, ingenious delights and ridiculously artificial sensations—for the first time, encouraged to keep looking on in awe while also being challenged to step back from that awe in order to begin asking questions.”
All through a career that spanned seven decades and over 40 features, Godard routinely forced us to confront film as film. “He made [cinema] self-conscious as no one had before,” Kevin Macdonald observes at The Guardian, which has collected several heartfelt homages from other filmmakers and Godard acolytes around the world.
You always knew you were watching a film when you watched his films, like a Brecht for the movies. You are always aware of the process and underpinnings of his films […] "Breathless," "Bande à part," "Une femme est une femme": all brilliant, cool, iconoclastic films that were really about movie-making. He’s not really interested in story, or people. He’s interested in influences and ideas. He started a critic and remained a critic all his life.
“By the time the movie finished,” Peter Webber echoes in another Guardian homage while remembering his own encounter with Godard’s Pierrot le fou, “I was aware for the first time of what a film director was, and how most movies had rules that this film just exploded to glorious effect. And I came out of the cinema into the rain muttering to myself: ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to make films.’”
Webber was one of countless other youngsters whom Godard cajoled into picking up a camera and making their own stuff. Indeed, “no one did more to make movies the art of youth than Jean-Luc Godard,” writes The New Yorker’s Richard Brody (whose adoring and comprehensive biography of the filmmaker—Everything is Cinema: The Work and Life of Jean-Luc Godard—should be mandatory reading for all aficionados).
[His films] inspired young people to make movies in the same spirit in which others started a band. […] More than any other filmmaker, he made viewers feel as if anything were possible in movies, and he made it their own urgent mission to find out for themselves. Where Hollywood seemed like a distant, cosseted, and disreputable dream, he made the firsthand cinema—the personal and independent film—an urgent and accessible ideal.
In other words, he changed not just the way one looks at films, but how one thinks of them—shattering any assumptions as to what they should contain, look, or behave like. “Maybe the most important thing I’ve gotten from Godard,” Richard Hell argues over at Screen Slate in one of the most inspired eulogies to come out since the director’s passing, “was a widening of my understanding of what in the artist’s life and consciousness is suitable for use in his or her work.”
This is another aspect of him that is unmatched by other filmmakers, but that he shares with the greatest artists throughout history—in fiction, for instance: Cervantes, Sterne, Melville, Woolf. They all introduced in their work personal and intellectual considerations and impulses that prior to them were not thought appropriate to the medium (if the medium existed; in a sense, each invented his or her medium anew). Godard is the king of this in film. The only thing consistent about what goes on in his movies is that the phenomena originated in his life and thought. This is a wonderful thing to learn from an artist in one’s own time: that the object is to reflect and consider life, and the only access you have is your own being and perceptions, so if you want truth, don’t exclude anything.
It is also, as Claire Denis sees it, a powerful call to arms. “His presence,” she admits in her own tribute at The Guardian, “made me brave,” while his films “gave me a belief not in cinema—for I was already a believer—but in how I had to find my own path, even with my extremely small gifts.” Perhaps this is why, for so many, Richard Brody in primis, Godard’s passing “is personal.”
A viewing of Breathless at seventeen, in 1975, transformed me—made me instantly certain that my life would be centered on movies. I had the benefit of ignorance: I knew nothing of classic Hollywood, nothing of art cinema, and nothing of Godard. 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. It was then his criticism (collected, along with his interviews and other writings, in a book called “Godard on Godard,” translated by Tom Milne) that guided me into movie-viewing. His films—including those of the seventies, largely under the journalistic radar—have remained my cinematic North Star.
It was their boisterous freedom that made Godard’s works both riveting and accessible. One thing his cinema made evident, Richard Hell goes on at Screen Slate, “was that it was possible to make glamorous art that was intellectual.” In that, the director stood as a radical alternative to the American model of the artist “as the noble savage type, suspicious of “book learning” […]. It was liberating to see a great artist who was proud to think.” Conversely, Godard also showed that highbrow art could still be open and captivating. “His sense of play, the lightness with which many of his films move,” Blair McClendon writes in a moving piece at n+1, “has always belied how extraordinarily dense they are.”
Through his many periods of innovation, Godard never forgot that in art, as in life, beauty persuades...He was once on the right, then he was a Marxist, a Maoist, a scourge, and all along he never forgot that if the light is right on two hands meeting or a man brushing his pouting lips with his thumb, you have gone a long way toward convincing your audience of anything that follows.
Juxtaposing the director’s films with the more “austere, pretentious, and even forbidding” foreign-language films he’d seen as a seventeen-year-old fledgling cinephile in the early 1960s, Deadline’s Todd McCarthy notes that Godard’s “did not seem like ‘art’ films at all.” “Shot through with energy, made on the streets and with sexy but non-glamorized young performers who were unpredictable and seemed real,” they “significantly altered my way of looking at cinema surged with beauty and insights into art, impulsive romantic relationships and ways of seeing.”
Still, there’s no denying the obscurity some of his films are shrouded in. As Roger Ebert wrote back in 1969, “Godard is a perverse and difficult director who is deeply into his own universe,” and whose films “require active participation and imagination by the audience.” Which should not be taken as a reason to steer clear of them. To feel inadequate in the face of a Jean-Luc Godard film,” Stephanie Zacharek points out at TIME, “marks us as human.“
If he has sometimes been maddeningly obtuse in a superior, condescending manner, he has also been great in a way that makes us reach out, asking Why? and How? To continue to draw from art, we need to keep faith in our own humility.
And the befuddlement one registers as a viewer isn’t all too different from the confusion Godard’s own actors would wrestle with on set. “He knew where he was heading,” Héloïse Godet, who starred in the director’s 2014 Goodbye to Language, tells IndieWire, “but he was intentionally leaving us in some kind of impressionist fog”; he was “composing his painting and the bodies of actors were like one color among others in an experimental narrative.” When it came to elaborate on his life and craft, however, Godard was both extremely articulate and generous. The Cinémathèque Française has recently uploaded the two-hour chat between the cineaste and critic Serge Daney, Entretien entre Serge Daney et Jean-Luc Godard (1988), an interview-river in which a discussion around the filmmaker’s monumental, eight-part series Histoire(s) du Cinéma turns into a chance for Daney and Godard to reflect on the medium’s past and future (you can watch the chat, for free and with English subtitles, via the Cinémathèque’s streaming platform, Henri). And among the few interviews Godard gave in English, one of the longest and possibly the most candid was the director’s 1980 exchange with Dick Cavett, available on YouTube.
Late into the chat, Cavett asks Godard the same question Seberg asked Melville in Breathless, to which the director, after a brief pause, answers: “I’d like to continue making movies, to keep the door open.” That the films he made still feel so alive and necessary today, as Martin Scorsese endearingly puts it in his own Guardian tribute, owes to the childlike wonder he was able to draw from each of them. Watching his works,
…you never knew what to expect from moment to moment, even from frame to frame—that’s how deep his engagement with cinema went. He never made a picture that settled into any one rhythm or mood or point of view, and his films never lulled you into a dream state. They woke you up. They still do—and they always will. It’s difficult to think that he’s gone. But if any artist can be said to have left traces of his own presence in his art, it’s Godard. And I must say right now, when so many people have gotten used to seeing themselves defined as passive consumers, his movies feel more necessary and alive than ever.
Click here for more Notebook coverage of Jean-Luc Godard through the years.
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