Jean-Luc Godard obituary: Daringly innovative director who changed the course of film-making

Born: December 3rd,1930

Died: September 13th, 2022

Jean-Luc Godard, the daringly innovative director and provocateur whose unconventional camerawork, disjointed narrative style and penchant for radical politics changed the course of film-making in the 1960s, died on Tuesday at his home in Rolle, Switzerland. He was 91.

His long-time legal adviser, Patrick Jeanneret, said Godard died by assisted suicide, having suffered from “multiple disabling pathologies”.

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“He could not live like you and me, so he decided with a great lucidity, as he had all his life, to say, ‘Now it’s enough,’” Jeanneret said in a phone interview. Godard wanted to die with dignity, Jeanneret said, and “that was exactly what he did”.

A master of epigrams as well as of movies, Godard once observed, “a film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order.”

In practice, he seldom scrambled the timeline of his films, preferring instead to leap forward through his narratives by means such as the elliptical “jump cut” which he did much to make into a widely accepted tool. But he never tired of taking apart established forms and reassembling them in ways that were invariably fresh, frequently witty, sometimes abstruse but consistently stimulating.

As a young critic in the 1950s Godard was one of several iconoclastic writers who helped turn a new publication called Cahiers du Cinéma into a critical force that swept away the old guard of the European art cinema and replaced it with new heroes largely drawn from the ranks of the American commercial cinema — directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.

When his first feature-length film as a director, Breathless (À Bout de Souffle), was released in 1960, Godard joined several of his Cahiers colleagues in a movement that the French press soon labelled la nouvelle vague — the new wave.

A short, slight, often scruffy man with heavy-rimmed black glasses and an ever-present cigarette or cigar, Godard rarely gave interviews

For Godard, as well as for new wave friends and associates such as François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, the “tradition of quality” represented by the established French cinema was an aesthetic dead end. To them it was strangled by literary influences and empty displays of craftsmanship that had to be vanquished to make room for a new cinema, one that sprang from the personality and predilections of the director.

Although Breathless was not the first new wave film ( Chabrol’s 1958 Beau Serge and Truffaut’s 1959 400 Blows preceded it), it became representative of the movement. Godard unapologetically juxtaposed plot devices and characters inherited from genre films and emotional material dredged up, in almost diarylike form, from the filmmaker’s personal life.

The film tells the story of a small-time Parisian crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo) as he commits muggings to collect enough money to run off to Rome with an American student (Jean Seberg), who seems indifferent to his romancing despite being pregnant by him.

Breathless is an artistic hybrid that seemed to capture the discontinuities and conflicts of modern life, half in the artificial public world created by the media and half in the deepest recesses of consciousness. In Godard’s later, more radical phase, he came to suggest that there was no real distinction between the two realms.

A short, slight, often scruffy man with heavy-rimmed black glasses and an ever-present cigarette or cigar, Godard rarely gave interviews. When he did, he typically deflected probing questions about his life and art.

“The problem of talking to people is that I have always confused cinema with life,” Godard said in that interview. “To me life is just part of films.”

Godard was born on December 3rd, 1930, in Paris, the second of four children in an extravagantly wealthy Protestant family. His French-born father, Paul-Jean Godard, was a prominent physician, and his mother, Odile Monod, was the daughter of a leading Swiss banker. Jean-Luc Godard credited his parents with instilling in him a love for literature, and he initially wanted to be a novelist.

Paul-Jean Godard, who became a Swiss citizen, opened a clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, and Jean-Luc Godard spent his early childhood there, visiting his family’s estates on the French and Swiss sides of Lake Geneva and remaining there until the end of the second World War.

After France was liberated, he returned to Paris as a teenager to attend secondary school, the Lycée Buffon, then enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1949, intending to study ethnology. Instead he immersed himself in cinema, spending much of his time at the Cinémathèque Française, a non-profit film archive and screening room, and in the film societies of the Latin Quarter.

It was at the Cinémathèque that he made the acquaintance of André Bazin, an influential film critic and theorist, and of the other young film enthusiasts in his circle, including Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette. He began writing reviews for the magazine La Gazette du Cinéma in 1952 under the pseudonym Hans Lucas and later joined Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette as a contributor to Cahiers du Cinema, which Bazin had founded.

When his parents refused to support him financially, hoping that he would take more responsibility for himself, Godard began stealing money — from his family members and their friends and even from the office of Cahiers du Cinema. This went on for five years.

He distributed some of the proceeds to fellow filmmakers, lending Rivette enough money to make his film debut with Paris Belongs to Us.

“I pinched money to be able to see films and to make films,” he told The Guardian in 2007.

After his mother secured a job for him with a Swiss television outfit, he stole from his employer and in 1952 landed in jail in Zurich. His father obtained his quick release, but only after Godard agreed to spend several months in a mental hospital.

Godard insisted that despite his disappointment with contemporary Hollywood, he remained enamoured of the great American directors of the past

He grew estranged from his parents and when his mother died in a road crash in 1954, he did not attend the funeral.

A decade later Godard paid homage of sorts to his mother in Band of Outsiders, a film about two thieves who romance a young woman living in a villa. The female lead, played by Anna Karina, a Danish model who was Godard’s wife (his first) at the time, is named, like his mother, Odile, and, like his mother, she detests movies.

Godard’s personal and professional lives intertwined throughout his career. His first marriage, in 1961, to Karina, ended in divorce in 1964. (She died in 2019.) In 1967, when he was 36, he married Anne Wiazemsky, an actor 16 years his junior who was starring in his film La Chinoise. Wiazemsky, who died in 2017, wrote two books about their marriage, which ended in 1979. Twelve years ago he married Anne-Marie Miéville, who survives him.

Godard developed the outline of Breathless in 1959, inspired by a newspaper clipping given to him by Truffaut. For his stars, he chose Belmondo, the son of a well-known sculptor at the beginning of his acting career, and Seberg, an American actor whom the Cahiers critics had admired for her performances in two Otto Preminger films, Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958).

Godard remained best known for Breathless and about a dozen films he made in quick succession afterward, ending with Weekend in 1967. University audiences identified with the doomed romanticism of Belmondo’s central character in Breathless, a petty criminal who identified with the doomed romanticism of the characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the American films that Godard and his Cahiers colleagues admired.

As the 1960s unfolded, Godard continued to work at a breakneck pace.

Despite his stylistic innovations, at this point Godard saw the world in traditional Romantic terms: as a struggle of a heroic individual against the forces of conformity and oppression.

That changed in February 1968 when Godard, along with several new wave colleagues, stepped forward to protest the decision by the French minister of culture, André Malraux, to force Henri Langlois to resign as chief of the Cinémathèque Française, the film archive that Langlois had helped found in 1936.

Demonstrations filled the streets and quickly grew to embrace impatient demands for a general restructuring of French society.

By the end of April, the demonstrations had grown violent. Two weeks later, Godard joined with Truffaut, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Louis Malle and other film figures to close down the Cannes Festival. The protests of May 1968 were in full swing, and Godard was swinging with them, lashing out at his fellow filmmakers for failing to demonstrate sufficient solidarity with France’s striking students and workers.

For his part, Godard abandoned commercial cinema and plunged into radical politics, embarking on a series of films, financed on the fly and shot in economical 16-millimeter, that tried to leave fiction behind. Godard joined with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin to create a collective they named the Dziga Vertov Group, after the Soviet filmmaker whose efforts to create a new form of political documentary they much admired.

The films of this period, which include The Wind From the East (1970), Struggle in Italy (1971) and Vladimir and Rosa (1970), did not find wide distribution or wide acceptance, although they remain valuable artifacts from a tumultuous time and helped open the way to the equally provocative but less ideologically confined films that followed.

As he grew older, Godard seemed more intolerant of other film directors. He quarrelled bitterly with Truffaut, once his closest friends among the new wave directors.

Godard insisted that despite his disappointment with contemporary Hollywood, he remained enamoured of the great American directors of the past.

“We thought we could do better than the bad films, but not better than the good,” he said in a 1989 New York Times interview. “Myself, I never thought I would do better than John Ford or Orson Welles, but I thought I could perhaps do what Godard was meant to do.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.