The cinema loses the most rebellious Frenchman, Jean-Luc Godard

France, which always takes care of its self-esteem and is proud of its cultural grandeur, yesterday poured comments of tribute and recognition to Jean-Luc Godard.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
14 September 2022 Wednesday 09:43
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The cinema loses the most rebellious Frenchman, Jean-Luc Godard

France, which always takes care of its self-esteem and is proud of its cultural grandeur, yesterday poured comments of tribute and recognition to Jean-Luc Godard. The Franco-Swiss filmmaker, who was 91 years old, a figure of the nouvelle vague, resorted to assisted suicide – legal in Switzerland –, as confirmed by his wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, and his producers. "He wasn't sick, he was just exhausted," a source close to the family explained to the Libération newspaper. So he made the decision to finish. It was his decision and it was important to him that it be known.”

Compared even to Pablo Picasso for the transformative energy he imprinted on the seventh art, Godard was undoubtedly a symbol of French cultural splendor in the 20th century, with Paris as a universal beacon and a strong spirit of rebellion. That irradiation is no longer what it was, due to the push of the Anglo-Saxon world, which is why France looks with great nostalgia at monsters like the late director of At the End of the Escape (1960), the film that catapulted him to fame, and of another hundred films.

Libération , spokesman for the French left, was the first medium to break the news of Godard's death at his Swiss home, although it took hours to learn that it had been an assisted suicide. The newspaper defined him as “a total filmmaker, of a thousand lives and with a work as prolific as it is protean”. According to Libération, Godard “leaves a career full of works of art and misunderstandings”. Le Monde found that, "since the 1960s, Godard has been one of those who rejected the aesthetic and narrative limits of the seventh art and embodied the nouvelle vague." Godard marked “a before and after in cinema”.

Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes festival, did not hesitate to say that Godard is "the Picasso of cinema", due to his insights, innovations and various creative eras.

The Elysee, whose current tenants are very sensitive to culture, tends to be very careful with their words in the face of deaths like yesterday's. The tribute was passionate. The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, published a tweet in which he assured that Godard "was like an appearance in French cinema", of which he became a "master". For the head of state, the late director was "the most iconoclastic of the nouvelle vague filmmakers, he invented an absolutely modern, intensely free art." "We lose a national treasure, a look of genius," Macron concluded.

Born in Paris to Swiss parents, Godard studied Anthropology at the Sorbonne but sessions at the Cinematheque and in the halls of the Latin Quarter took him in another direction. At a very young age he began to write as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, a publication that would be key and from which François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, among others, emerged.

In the 1950s, Godard worked as a construction worker in Switzerland, on a dam. It was there that he made his debut as a filmmaker, with a twenty-minute documentary, Opération béton (Cement Operation).

Contrary to what might be supposed, the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma were not originally young leftists but rather conservatives. The leftists expressed themselves in another magazine, Positif.

At the end of the breakaway it was the success that propelled Godard's career. Yesterday all the chains repeated the scene of Jean Seberg, along with Jean-Paul Belmondo, selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the Champs-Elysées. The young director introduced improvisation and spontaneity in the scenes. He was groundbreaking. Throughout his career, Godard worked with all the greats, from Michel Piccoli to Jeanne Moreau, from Alain Delon to Jane Fonda.

In their obituaries, French television channels recalled a circumstance from the film El contempto (1963), with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli as protagonists. Not even a character like Godard could escape the commercial demands of the producers, in this case the American Joe Levine and the Italian Carlo Ponti (late husband of Sophia Loren). Bardot was a global sex symbol that had to be monetized, despite the objections of the actress and the director. The first version of El contempt did not please the producers, who demanded a nude as a hook for the viewer. "No, no, this doesn't work," Levine said when he watched the tape. I want to see Bardot's ass." Godard buckled under the pressure and added the famous bed scene, with Bardot's bare back and butt, and some very explicit dialogue (“Do you like my ass, my breasts, my feet?). The only condition of the director was to use colored filters (red, white and blue) that cushioned the erotic effect. It was the sixties. It was an imposed but controlled rebellion.