Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away today (Tuesday) at the age of 91, was one of the filmmakers the world most misunderstood, at least in recent decades, when his name became more famous than his films.
He was thought to make remote and esoteric films, but in fact his first films were huge international hits. He was thought to be a radical creator, whose films actually influenced the entire cinema and redefined what mainstream is. He was thought to be serious, but in fact quite a few of his films presented him as a creator with a wonderful and anarchic sense of humor. He was called a “French New Wave” man, but in fact he was Swiss.
For almost 50 years now, Godard the man has done everything to thwart Godard the director, when he chose to cut himself off from the world, turn his back on the film industry and choose radical political positions. Even his friends didn’t stay around, as Anies Verda proved in the scene that ends her film “People and Names”, when she arrives at Godard’s house, sees that he is home, but he does not open the door for her. It is hoped that now, with his death, the cinematographers and movie channels will pay tribute to his memory and it will finally be possible to remember the great moments of the director who changed the face of cinema. And he was one of my favorite directors of all time.
“Until the Breath Brides”, his debut film from 1959, was a huge hit all over the world, including Israel. Godard did to cinema what rock and roll did to music four years earlier: he broke all the instruments, smashed the rules, and showed that a film could be made with zero money and maximum groove. Godard came to the cinema with an admiration for the low-budget American films, made on the fringes of Hollywood, and with a loathing for the bourgeois French cinema that was presented around him. He created a film that admires America and mocks France and along the way breaks everything that the film teachers taught about editing, shooting and acting.
From that moment, a generation of viewers and creators realized that it was impossible to make movies like before. All Hollywood cinema of the sixties and seventies is a direct influence of Godard: Coppola, Scorsese, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Robert Altman, Dennis Hopper. Godard created his films inspired by Brecht, by making films that are self-aware, alienated and break the fourth wall and address the audience directly, and everyone who came after him has already made their films inspired by Godard: from Hal Hartley to Nadav Lapid, from Tarantino to Steven Soderbergh, from Peter Greenaway to Laos Carax , from Wang Kar Wei to Amos Gitai – Godard’s influence remains present in the culture of popular and high-quality cinema to this day, thanks to his fans and followers.
Godard, who taught the world to simply take an old camera and go shoot in the street even without lighting or sound, was actually a great esthetician. His collaborations with the great photographer Raoul Coutard created some of the most beautiful and quoted shots and frames in the history of cinema – starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Brigitte Bardot or Anna Karina.
Godard, who was in fact the first postmodern director, showed that great films depend on great films made before them. His films carry a feeling of great admiration alongside the act of smashing idols. He treated the classics with humor and disrespect and seriousness, and tried to change the world’s consciousness through cinema – the status of women, gentrification, exploitation and commercialization – from film to film, his works became more and more loaded with political messages, which would finally explode in the student protest of May 1968, in which Godard was one of the participants (he exploded the Cannes Film Festival of that year).
After 1968, Godard took his cinematic extremism and applied it to his life, when he underwent political radicalization and began to support extreme groups – from the Maoist Party, through the Vietcong to the PLO – that worked against bourgeoisie, capitalism and colonialism. America, whose films he so admired, became his great political enemy His films became stilted, lacking a sense of humor, and he turned his back on his closest friends from the days of the magazine “The Cinema Notebooks”. From the 1980s he tried to make comebacks every few years, while closing himself off from the audience and the media (he even directed a film produced by Menachem Golan). His last films were intellectual and complicated, and sometimes looked more like film essays than actual motion pictures, and yet they were always fascinating, challenging, infuriating, and crackingly clever. Occasionally he came back with successful feature films, which didn’t get enough recognition in real time, mostly because Godard didn’t cooperate With no one, not the industry, not the festivals, not the media, and it seems he prefers to boycott the whole world.
But he had one superpower: longevity. All his friends from the New Wave days died one after the other – Truffaut, Chevrolet, Rivet, Rene, Varda. Godard was the last man left. Spawn, in his home in Switzerland, does not open the door to anyone, waiting to fulfill in his life the dream that director Jean-Pierre Melville says in “To the Bride of Breath”: “My ambition is to become immortal, and then die.”