According to the French media "Liberty", jean-Luc Godard, a famous French director and one of the founders of New Wave cinema, died on Tuesday, September 13, local time, at the age of 91.
Jean-Luc Godard was born in 1930 and is a French and Swiss director. Living in Switzerland as a child, he returned to Paris as an adult and began to work on film.
While in Paris, he met many like-minded friends. These people later became the vanguard of the New Wave of French cinema, including the founders of the Film Handbook, André Bazin, Jacques Sivette, Claude Chableau, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Houguier, Jacques Demi, and others.
Together, they actively promoted the reform of French cinema and issued a manifesto. They believe that the essence of cinema is realism. They advocated the use of long shots and complex scene scheduling to express visual messages and avoid unnecessary editing.
In Godard's films, he used to use consecutive long shots to show the authenticity of the film. At the same time, he is also very good at using a large number of jumps, which look a bit abrupt, but have become the signature movement of the New Wave generation. His films are often seen as challenging and countering the approach and narrative style of Hollywood films. He also injected his political ideas and extensive knowledge of the history of cinema into his films.
In 1960, Godard filmed his first feature film, Exhausted, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival. Under the lens of Godard, the heroine Jane Sibo used her short hair and agile personality to fascinate the world.
In 1965, Godard won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival for his science fiction film Alpha City. This offbeat science fiction film creates a cold, black, logically supreme, ruthless and loveless city, which has influenced the creation of countless subsequent science fiction directors.
In addition, "Piero the Madman", "Extralegal", "Contempt", "Carmen", and Godard's abundant creativity in the sixties allowed him to shoot 15 feature films and 8 short films in less than a decade, almost all of which are called important works in the history of cinema.
As for entering the new millennium, Godard, who is seventy years old, is still trying a new direction for film.
In 2001, Eloge de l'Amour (Elegy of Love), he used traditional film film to shoot the first half and then the second half with a digital camera, blending black and white with color images.
In 2004's Notre Musique, Godard revisits the theme of war, including the Bosnian War, the American Civil War, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to illustrate the ubiquity of American battlefields, even in heaven patrolled by U.S. Marines.
2014's Goodbye Language and 2018's Book of Images, one of Godard's last two works, are both rethinking the possibility of cinema as an art. The former dismantles the film and separates the sound, image and narrative that are the three elements of the film; The latter, on the other hand, gave up shooting altogether and edited images, books, and music from existing materials to create new films.
Even at the age of 90, Godard is still active on the front line of film creation, paying attention to the current state of the world. In 2020, Godard chose to broadcast live on Instagram, with the theme of images about the COVID-19 era.
In Paris in the 1960s, Bazin, Truffaut, Claude, Varda, were full of talent and genius, which together promoted the birth of "author film", so that today almost everyone in the world defaults to the director as the soul of a film, and the film is the director's creation.
When Godard emerged as a member of the French New Wave, no one expected that this revolution would eventually be left with only this fighter who was constantly innovating. At the age of 91, Godard sent away one comrade-in-arms and friend after another, and now it is finally his turn.
"I don't make a film that suits the taste of the masses", godard is indeed, as he says, never succeeds in telling the whole story from beginning to end, but his films are always broadening the boundaries of cinema as a creation itself.
Goodbye, Godard. Goodbye, New Wave.