Farewell to Jean-Luc Godard, great director of the New Wave

Director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the great New Wave masters of French cinema, died today in Rolle, Switzerland. Godard was 91 years old and according to the French newspaper Libération, he resorted to assisted suicide not because he was ill, but because he was tired of living, according to a source revealed to the newspaper.

Born in Paris in 1930 to a wealthy family of Swiss descent, he first studied in the Swiss country and then at the Sorbonne, where he earned a degree in ethnology in 1919. His career as a filmmaker began with criticism: in fact, in the 1950s he wrote regularly in Arts Cahiers du cinéma and Gazette du Cinéma, distinguishing himself with particularly incisive reviews. It was in 1953 that he abandoned the pen in favor of the camera, and in 1954 he signed his first short film, Opération béton, a documentary about the Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland, where Godard had found employment for some time. He shot several more shorts until 1958, when Une histoire d’eau, a collaboration with François Truffaut, was released: the meeting between the two is crucial because the following year Truffaut would provide Godard with the subject for his friend’s first feature film, Until the Last Breath, one of the iconic films of the New Wave, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Godard’s debut feature disrupts the traditional rules of cinematic storytelling to introduce a freer, more expressive and more true-to-life register, with a film moreover shot in economy of means: the film nonetheless is a success and earns Godard the Jean Vigo Award and the Silver Bear in Berlin for best director.

Films such as Le petit soldat (1960), La donna è donna (1961), Questa è la mia vita (1962), Silver Lion at Venice, and Il disprezzo (1963) are from the following years, while another great masterpiece, Bande à part, famous among art lovers for the scene in which the three protagonists, played by Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur, race through the Louvre to set the record for the shortest visit time. 1966 marked the end of the New Wave period for Godard, and the French director espoused the idea of a revolutionary cinema, fueled by the Marxist ideas that the filmmaker had in the meantime matured: thus was born La gaia scienza, a militant film that won a nomination for the Silver Bear in Berlin. Instead, 1969 was the year in which the Dziga Vertov Group was founded (the name celebrated the Soviet director who had died in 1954) with the idea of giving birth to a collective and free cinema, from which came films such as Pravda, East Wind and Lotte in Italia, the first a documentary, the others militant films starring Italian Gian Maria Volontè. The period of revolutionary cinema ended in 1972, when Godard, due to a car accident, had to withdraw momentarily from the scene.

The last period into which his activity is divided is the most experimental, and one that is more inclined to investigate the dynamics of family life. Films such as Passion (1982), Prénom, Carmen (1983), which won the Golden Lion at Venice, and Je vous salue, Marie (1985) are from this period. His latest film is 2018’s Le livre d’image, a collage of videos, paintings, and musical pieces on the history of cinema and its relationship to the tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries, reiterating a modus operandi that Godard had experimented with in the last years of his career. The film received the special Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018, as well as a nomination for the Palme d’Or.

Godard’s awards include the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011, the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2014 for Adieu au langage, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 1982, the Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Senate for Germania nove zero in 1991, the Critics’ Prize for Forever Mozart in 1996 at the Venice Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin for La donna è donna in 1961, the César honorary in 1987, the Pardo d’onore in 1995 at the Locarno Festival, the Special Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Film Critics Awards in 1991, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Film Awards in 2007, and the Extraordinary Honorary César Award in 1998 (interestingly, despite several nominations, Godard never managed to win an award at his country’s main film festival).

Farewell to Jean-Luc Godard, great director of the New Wave

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