Without Jean-Luc Godard, there would not have been the Doors. In Oliver Stone’s film about the rock band, a scene evokes the meeting of the founders of the Doors, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, both film students at the University of California. They go into ecstasies in front of their idol, Godard. They only became musicians because they couldn’t become filmmakers of his level – Morrison was even booed by fellow students for an experimental film he made.
Of course, Oliver Stone is not a historian keen on accuracy, but he nevertheless comes very close to the truth here: in the 1960s, Godard is considered a messiah who opens the eyes of a whole generation of young artists on what is possible. And when it turns One + One [un documentaire aussi connu sous le titre Sympathy for the Devil] with the Rolling Stones, in 1968, very clever who can say who, him or Mick Jagger, is the king of coolness in the studio.
The 1960s, an inspired decade
If we must remember all this, it is because the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who has just died on September 13 at the age of 91, have often seemed pompous and high-sounding in recent decades. Works that had their place in galleries or at Documenta [une grande exposition d’art contemporain qui se tient tous les cinq ans à Cassel, en Allemagne]but who certainly had no chance of convincing a modern-day Jim Morrison to quit rock.
To tell the truth, Godard had sunk into obscurity at the beginning of the 1970s: in particular because he had retired to a ghetto, that of the left agit-prop. At the end of Week-end, a card announces the “end of cinema*”. Godard’s longtime cinematographer Raoul Coutard would later say: “It was at this time that he had the revelation: he was going to become a Marxist-Leninist.”
When he returned to the cinema, in the 1980s, he especially had the effect of a pontificating grandfather who slips away into the mists of a pretentious art, from which he occasionally unleashes a sparkling aphorism. In 2004, the musician Nicolas Godin, of the group Air, reacting to a quote from Godard on television, expressed his contempt:
“His job, apparently, is to throw out catchy phrases! I have the impression that he only makes films to fit his witticisms.
The explorer of unknown lands
Nevertheless, Godard remains one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. This status he owes to his films of the 1960s when, with Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and others, who, like him, were critical of Cinema notebooks, it forms the New Wave – the most important and inspiring artistic movement of the XXe century, alongside surrealism.
Each Godard film then explores unknown lands: aesthetically, morally and politically. The Little Soldier will be banned for a long time in France because of the critical view it takes of the Algerian war [tourné en 1960, le film a été censuré jusqu’en 1963], Live your life [1962] describes the shift of a young woman into prostitution, and into A woman is a woman [1961]a playful musical, a young woman is looking for a borrowed father for the child that her partner refuses to give her.
It’s no coincidence that Quentin Tarantino’s production company is called A Band Apart – that’s the translation of Keeping to himself, the most beautiful, the most venerable and the most casual of all Godard films, dated 1964. The dance of Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction would be unthinkable without this wonderful scene in which Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur dance the madison in front of a Parisian jukebox, with divine detachment.
Posture, intelligence and creativity
Moments of this type of cinema at the time had an effect analogous to that which punk would have some twenty years later: they show that cinema was less a matter of careful craftsmanship and jealously guarded old recipes than of posture. , intelligence and creativity.