According to French media reports such as Liberation Newspaper, the famous director Jean-Luc Godard died in Basil, Switzerland, on September 13, local time, at the age of 91. According to Godard's family, he did not die of illness or old age, but chose euthanasia and "quietly left this world in the company of his loved ones". In this regard, the directors of the "Film Manual" school that inscribed the history of film have all disappeared from the human world. It can be said that Godard's death marked the end of the French New Wave movement, the end of a filmmaking concept, and the end of an era.
Jean-Luc Godard
"Movies are as important as bread"
Godard was an iconic figure in the French Film New Wave movement that emerged in the 1960s, and like François Truffaut, Eric Houmai, Jacques Riviette, and Claude Chabrol, he wrote for the film critic magazine Film Handbook and was called the Five Masters of the Film Handbook. After becoming a film critic to director, he is well-known in the film industry for his works such as "Exhausted", "Pierrot the Mad", and "Contempt", which has inspired countless latecomers around the world, and can be said to be the most influential art film director in the history of modern cinema.
Godard was filmed on location in Piero the Mad
Godard (first from right) and big director Fritz Lang (second from left) on set on scorn
And his iconic image of wearing sunglasses or smoking cigarettes has also been widely disseminated through various media, which can be called a popular symbol in a sense, so that even those who have not seen his works have often heard of this name that has spanned the film industry for more than half a century.
Film critic Jiao Xiongping said in the book "French New Wave of Cinema": "Godard is the most influential, the most changeable and the most maverick of all the new wave movements. He has created an eternal image of a rebel for himself, and the subversion of mainstream films and middle-class society by his films, the ruthless questioning of the values of modern society, and his adherence to principles and the face-to-face confrontation with old friends have become myths in the history of cinema. His various thoughts on film show that he is the most important creator of the entire New Wave movement, and he constantly redefines the structure and style of film with his creations. Compared with him, other directors are overly conservative and traditional. Truffaut praised him for changing the history of cinema: "Film history can be divided into films before Godard and films after Godard." ’”
After the news of Godard's death was reported by the media, French President Emmanuel Macron first posted condolences on social media, calling it a huge loss for France. However, Godard, who settled in the Swiss town of Basil for the second half of his life, had dual French and Swiss citizenship to be precise, and spent most of his childhood living in Switzerland, the hometown of his father, Paul Godard.
French President Emmanuel Macron posted condolences on social media
"Movies were as important as bread back then"
Paul Godard, a Swiss doctor, came from a well-off family and later married Julien Monod, a French banking tycoon. Two years after their marriage, little Godard fell to the ground on December 3, 1930, and was pampered from an early age. At the age of four, Godard's family returned from Paris to live in Nyon, Switzerland, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. After the end of World War II, Godard entered the Paris Bouphon High School to study high school, perhaps because his hobbies were too rich, and most of his time was spent reading idle books and watching movies, Godard failed to pass the senior high school exam and lost the opportunity to go to university. With a carefree life, he simply returned to his home in Switzerland, preparing to re-read and developing a hobby of painting.
At the age of 19, Godard re-entered the exam successfully, got an acceptance letter from the University of Paris in anthropology, but did not go to class well, most of the time was spent watching movies, became a regular visitor to various film clubs in the Latin Quarter and the French Film Archive run by Henri Langlois, and also met Rivit, Chablore, Truffaut, Houmai and other people. "Back then, for us, movies were as important as bread, and we couldn't do without it every day. We see film as a tool for acquiring knowledge, both a microscope and a telescope. Years later he recalled.
Just watching movies is certainly not enough. In 1950, he co-founded the folk film criticism journal Gazette du cinema with Houmai and Rivit, which only published five issues in total, but also won the attention of the famous former film critic Andrei Bazin. In 1951, Bazin founded the magazine "Film Handbook", and Godard and others began to write for it, and quickly broke through a lot of fame. At the same time, the eldest brother in the group, Houmai, who is ten years older than Godard, began to try to make his own films. In his self-written and directed ten-minute short film "Charlotte and the Steak", Godard not only starred, but also took charge of the props and choreography, which became his first intimate contact with the film.
Godard and Eric Houmai, the oldest of the Film Handbook faction (left)
In the autumn of 1952, Godard returned to Switzerland again, and his parents were separated by this time due to their emotional discord. At his mother's place, Godard met her lover, who was introduced to work at the construction site of the Dixons River Dam in Switzerland, and had the idea of making a documentary. Relying on a borrowed 35mm camera, he completed his short documentary debut, Concrete Work, on the site of the project. But it was also during the filming that godard's mother died in a traffic accident, much to Godard's grief.
Soon after, he completed his feature film debut in Geneva, A Troubled Woman, and then returned to Paris to continue to write film reviews for the Film Handbook, working on short films with his film partners. In the summer of 1959, filming of his feature film debut, Exhausted, officially began in Paris. The story of the film comes from Truffaut's real story from the newspaper, Chabrol, Levitte and other friends also advised him, and the actors used Jean-Paul Belmondo, a newcomer in the French film industry, and Jane Ceburg from the United States.
Godard was on location on "Exhausted."
"Exhausted" boldly breaks various traditional film shooting rules, especially the use of jumping techniques and the practice of breaking the fourth wall, allowing characters to communicate with the audience in front of the camera, which is of epoch-making significance in the entire history of film development. In March 1960, "Exhausted" was officially released in Paris, with a total of 2.29 million admissions, a box office hit, and also made the French film New Wave movement conquer audiences again after Truffaut's "Four Hundred Strikes".
Godard and Truffaut in "The Storm of May"
"It takes thirty years to digest completely"
After "Exhausted", which had the color of Hollywood B-movies, Godard took a big turn and filmed "Little Soldiers" set in the Algerian War, boldly challenging the nerves of the French government at the time, and the work was once banned. Godard's famous quote, "Cinema is the truth of 24 frames per second," is also from this film. The film starred his life partner and muse Anna Karina, and the two subsequently collaborated on works such as "Women are Women" and "Lai Huo", and also founded the Anochuka Film Company together, self-funding films such as "The Outlaw".
Godard and Anna Karina
Godard and his last partner, Anna-Marie Mievel
Different from today's film audience's inherent cognition of art films, in the 1960s in Europe and the United States, the society was turbulent, ideologically advocating liberation, art films are by no means unpopular, but often become the darling of the market, and the enthusiasm of young audiences for such works is no less than that of today's Hollywood superhero comic films. In this regard, Godard's works such as "Contempt" and "Pierrot the Madman" are his representatives. These films firmly grasped the so-called spirit of the times at that time, focusing on the nihilistic and alienated inner existence of the young generation in the West, coupled with box office stars such as Brigitte Bardot and Belmondo starring, and the beginning of the release was both acclaimed and popular.
By the second half of the 1960s, as Social Movements became more frequent in France, Godard's film brushstrokes became more and more politicized, with "Men, Women", "Chinese Girl" and "Weekend" being his masterpieces of this period, with increasing criticism of capitalist society and consumerism and increasing sympathy for the oppressed.
Godard was filmed on "Male, Female"
In 1970, Godard traveled to the Middle East to shoot his pro-Palestine Liberation Organization's "Until Victory". Prior to that, he was also involved in the filming of the anti-Vietnam war platter film Far Away from Vietnam, which also included Dutchman Evans, American cinematographer William Klein, French directors Agnès Varda, Arun Renai, Chris Mark, Claude LeRouche and others. Klein also died in Paris on 10 September at the age of 96. Of the film's seven co-creators, only 84-year-old Lerush is still alive.
Klein photographed Godard
In May 1968, the French student movement was fully upgraded. In order to show unity, Godard and Truffaut led the big fight at the Cannes International Film Festival that year, demanding that filmmakers must not be detached from reality, and must stand up and fight side by side with students and workers. Against this backdrop, he formed a documentary crew named after the Soviet filmmaker Giga Vertov, who made field trips to schools and factories, and the language of the film became more radical, completely away from the narrative patterns of the past.
In 1972, they took the Hollywood star Jane Fonda, who had just worked with them on "Everything Is Okay", and produced an avant-garde "Letter to Jane" piece. There are almost no moving images in the whole film, and only based on Jane Fonda's news photos, imagery analysis and bold self-criticism are the most overlooked pearls of Godard's entire film career.
The revolutionary enthusiasm of French intellectuals in the 1960s came and went quickly. At the same time, his wife Anne Vyazemski, who starred in "The Chinese Girl" and "The Weekend", parted ways with him (the two married in 1967, separated in 1970, and divorced in 1979), which made Godard depressed and said to have had suicidal thoughts at one point – French director Michel Azanavisius's "Awe" focuses on Godard's experience during this period, but is not recognized by Godard himself.
Godard with Anne Vyazemski
Starting from 1980's "Escape from Each Other", Godard returned to the traditional narrative film route, from the famous "Passion" and "Fangming Carmen" to the relatively lonely "Detective", "Divine Journey to Heaven and Earth", "Germany Nine Zero" and other works, although it is not wonderful, but the spirit of experimentation has never been extinguished. Of course, his most important work in this period may be the 266-minute -long "History of Cinema", which he has made a philosophical combing of the development of human thought in the 20th century, according to the New York Times film critic Dave Cole, it is worth watching repeatedly, "it takes thirty years to completely digest".
From 2010's "Cinematic Socialism" to 2014's "Goodbye Language" to 2018's "Book of Images", Godard's works have become abstract and obscure again, and the ideas behind the pictures are also diverse. As Jiao Xiongping said in The New Wave of French Cinema: "Throughout his life, he has been making films constantly seeking out how meaning is made, how the system of symbols (language and non-language) makes meaning, and how to change our cognition." ”
Although he admired Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock, Howard Hawkes, and Otto Pleminger in his early years, After becoming a director, Godard has always kept his distance from Hollywood, and he once said: "No matter how much money I am given, I will not work for Hollywood." But Hollywood has always treated him with courtesy: the studios have wanted him to direct "Bonnie and Clyde"; Jane Fonda starred in his "All Is Well" without pay; In 2011, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an Oscar for lifetime achievement, but Godard didn't take it seriously and didn't even bother to go to the award ceremony.
In 2011, Godard was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, but he himself did not attend the ceremony.
In the British magazine Sight and Hear, published just this month, American director Quentin Tarantino made a surprising remark, ridiculing new wave director Truffaut's poor film standards and "being an amateur director who is full of enthusiasm but full of mistakes." But for Godard, Quentin never hid his enthusiasm, and the film company he founded in 1991 was called the extralegal film company under the name of Godard's works. It is said that someone once asked Godard how he felt about this matter, but he replied that "Outlaw" was the worst of all the movies he had ever made, and he really did not expect that someone would use it as the name of his film company.
Due to his advanced age, Godard, who lives in the small town of Basil on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, has rarely appeared in public in recent years. Many people watched Agnès Varda's documentary "Faces, Villages" and expected to see him, but the door of his home was never opened to his old friends.
Godard and Agnès Varda
In 2018, Godard's last feature film, "Book of Images", was shortlisted for the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, and he also met with the media at the press conference through remote video to answer everyone's questions. In 2020, Godard and Lionel Baier, head of the film department at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, conducted a conversation entitled "Images of the COVID-19 Era" and made a live video broadcast, which triggered fans around the world. In December of the same year, his assistant Fabrice Aragno revealed in an interview with the Swiss news agency that 90-year-old Godard was working on two new films. Now, with Godard gone, his two unfinished works are destined to remain a mystery forever.
In 2020, Godard conducted a live video broadcast with the theme of "Images of the COVID-19 Era".