The greatest directors from the leaders of the French New Wave: farewell to Jean-Luc Godard
The acclaimed filmmaker passed away at the age of 91 and left behind some of the most influential and important films of the last decades. In honor of his passing, we chose to go through some of the most significant stations in his life, and to remember the revolution he was able to make in the industry and beyond
Godard not only managed to shape his own cinematic language, but was often crowned as the French New Wave director. In fact, he even formulated the possibility of cinema to express emotion and criticize anew. In many ways, Godard was the filmmaker of filmmakers, the one who dares, the one who takes the work to the extreme.
Jean Luc Godard Born on December 3, 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. His father Paul was a doctor, and his mother Odile was the daughter of a French family of considerable economic and cultural status. Godard also had a sister who was almost a year older than him. He spent his youth on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, but returned to Paris in the second half of the 1940s.
At first he wanted to study engineering, but abandoned it after becoming part of the film club culture that sprung up in Paris at this time. There he also met François Truffaut and Jacques Rivet, two of the five directors who were also identified with the New Wave. They all used to spend whole days in the film clubs and the French Cinematheque, in what became an unplanned training course for writing and making films.
Later, in the 1950s Godard was a key figure in the development of the aesthetic-political discourse on cinema. He wrote regularly in the important French magazine “Cinema Notebooks” and even challenged the aesthetic perception of the magazine’s founder, Andre Bazin, who advocated spiritual and realistic cinema. Godard, on the other hand, saw the externalization of style as a means of investigating the essence of reality. A perfect distillation of Godard’s approach can be found in his film “The Little Soldier”, when the main character says: “Photography is truth. Cinema is truth 24 times a second.”
Later Godard helped his friends make their first short films, and at the same time directed three short films himself. His fellow members of the forming movement even started working on their first features. Only a few years later Godard began the transition from writing to acting. His first feature, “The 400 Lags” (1959), managed to stir up the world of cinema. The film was poetic, with a low budget, and sought to challenge “respectable cinema”. This is how the creator at the beginning of his career got an opportunity to make his first film, which is, as is well known, “Until the Breath”, which was released in 1960.
Pretty quickly Godard was able to influence many artists and filmmakers around the world – Europe, Japan, South America and even Israel. In fact, for the last four decades, Godard has continued to direct and work, even in his advanced age. His films continued to arouse interest and questions. In the last 42 years since Godard “returned to cinema” he has continued to direct at an admirable pace, even at his advanced age. His films continued to ask questions about the medium, attract hundreds of thousands of viewers from all over the world, and remind us all that this is unique, unusual, fruitful and complex cinema.
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