Jean-Luc Godard’s filmic legacy

Jean-Luc Godard died at the age of 91 on 13 September 2022 at his home in Rolle at the Lake of Geneva in Switzerland. The uncompromising French-Swiss cineaste was arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of the last 60 years. With his innovative approach to cinema, he broke with tried-and-tested conventions and taught us instead how to see and hear films differently and thus, how to perceive life, and the world, from a more nuanced and critical angle. Throughout his life, Godard remained a film critic who critiqued cinema not with a pen but with film itself.

Godard once stated that he was a child of the Cinémathèque in Paris. Indeed, his formation as a critic and filmmaker began in the early 1950s at this venerated institution, founded and run by Henri Langlois. There, he saw innumerable films from Hollywood, Europe, and other parts of the world, silent and sound films, of all possible genres. There, he also met his fellow film aficionados François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and others. Under the wings of film theorist André Bazin, these young enthusiasts worked as critics at the then, newly founded and now legendary film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma.

With the knowledge accrued during that time, Godard released his first feature film in 1960, the low-budget production Breathless. Already in this first film, Godard showed his aesthetic program. He set out to find his own filmic language by violating the conventions and rules established in Hollywood and European mainstream cinema. As an open sceptic of the traditionally made French films of the 1950s, Godard expressed in his 1960s’ films that after the Second World War different films had to be made.

He sought inspiration in Hollywood B movies, gangster and crime genres, the MGM musical, and also Italian Neorealism. This hodgepodge of contrasting influences is on display in Godard’s copious output of the 1960s. In Contempt (1963), he reflects on the melodrama, in Band of Outsiders (1964) and Made in U.S.A. (1966) on the gangster genre, in Alphaville (1965) on sci-fi films, in A Woman Is a Woman (1961) on the Hollywood musical, in The Little Soldier (1963) on spy thrillers, and in Vivre sa vie (1962) and A Married Woman (1964) on Ingmar Bergman’s cinema.

In these films, Godard experimented with unconventional storytelling techniques, with freeing up the camera in handheld shots, with unusual techniques of editing the images and sounds, such as jump-cuts and abrupt beginnings and endings of music. This experimentation with the filmic material generated an alternative approach to filmmaking, which only became common currency, primarily in television making, within the last 10 and 20 years, as seen in many HBO, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Starz productions.

In the late 1960s, Godard’s work became increasingly political, with a decisive, and dogmatic Marxist program. Together with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the Dziga Vertov Group collective, Godard engaged in radical agitprop filmmaking from British Sounds (1969) to Tout Va Bien (1972), distancing himself more and more from the established norms of the film industry.

A critical break occurred in his life when he abandoned his left-wing agenda and moved away from Paris to the Alpine city of Grenoble in 1974. There, as a pioneer of early videomaking, Godard produced independently social-critical television programs such as Numéro deux (1975) and Ici et ailleurs (1976). The experimentation made during these years with image and sound—as expressed in the name of his production company SonImage (SoundImage)—bore fruit in his films of the second wave, made in the 1980s at the Lake of Geneva, where he moved in the late 1970s.

With his return to cinema, he created such poetic and lyrical films as Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), Passion (1982), and First Name: Carmen (1983). In these films, Godard’s mature style comes to the fore. By now, he had internalized his youthful, rebellious experimentations aimed at Hollywood; they featured his unique, distinct style and were now adopted in his profoundly moving, philosophical, and deeply intellectual films.

One of these productions is Godard’s monumental, experimental television epic Histoire(s) du cinéma, an eight-part series completed between 1988 and 1998. In a highly original fashion, as a virtuoso of the images and sounds, Godard came to terms with film art by presenting his unique, very personal history of cinema in an essayistic style, challenging his audience to the limits of their sensorial and intellectual capabilities. His provocative, encyclopedic work explores the function and influence of cinema in history and society of the twentieth century. With this work, Godard expanded even further his filmic style and presented the material as superimposed layers of images and sounds creating a challenging collage consisting of textual, visual, and musical quotations from the vast vault of Western art, literature, and philosophy. With the collage the viewer-listener is forced to not only reevaluate cinema and Western thinking in general, but also to question the image- and soundtrack’s function in an audio-visual artwork per se.

After Histoire(s) du cinéma, he continued to make films with his expressive, profound, and innovative language, exploring historical, social-critical, and political issues. Of his late films, Nouvelle Vague (1990), his intimate self-portrait JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (1994), In Praise of Love (2004), and his experimentation with 3D film, Adieu au langage (2014), are noteworthy. With his last film, Le Livre d’image (2018), Godard returned to the questions he raised in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Particularly, this last production, for which he was awarded the Special Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival, creates the facility of wonderment or judgment in the audience, bringing the viewer-listener closer to Godard’s own, personal position as a director and innovative filmmaker.

In the words of film critic Manohla Dargis, Godard “insisted that we come to him, that we navigate the densities of his thought, decipher his epigrams and learn a new language” (New York Times). Perhaps it will take years, if not decades, until we are able to grasp—perhaps only partly—the profound, complex audio-visual language that “this vexing giant, the cool guy with the dark sunglasses and cigar” (Dargis) left behind for us to decipher.

_{Featured image by Ian W. Hill via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)}