Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss director who was a key figure in the Nouvelle Vague, the film movement that revolutionized cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, has died at the age of 91. He passed away “peacefully”, at his home in Switzerland, with his wife Anne-Marie Mieville at his side. An anonymous relative told AFP that Godard’s death was assisted, which is legal in Switzerland. “He wasn’t sick, he was just exhausted. So he had made the decision to end it. It was his decision and for him it was important that it be known”. Godard’s lawyer, Patrick Jeanneret, told AFP that Godard’s death followed “a medical report of multiple disabling pathologies.”
Best known for his iconoclastic and seemingly improvised filmmaking style, as well as his uncompromising radicalism, Godard made his mark with a series of politicized films in the 1960s, before enjoying an unlikely career renaissance in recent years, with films like “Film Socialisme” and “Goodbye”.
The Parisian director shot 131 films including fiction feature films, documentaries and short films. With 51 international awards and dozens of nominations at festivals and awards, the French filmmaker was a living legend in film history.
Born in 1930, his first steps on the big screen were at the hands of film critics in the magazine Cahiers du Cinema under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. In that atmosphere of cinephiles, film club members and chroniclers, Godard linked up with François Truffaut, claude chabrol, eric rohmeramong others, giving rise to the groundbreaking movement that would transform French cinema and influence the whole world: the Nouvelle Vague. Also, with referential figures from the intellectual world, such as critics André Bazin Y Henri Langlois.
The foundation of the Gallic movement was consolidated with two films with a strong imprint, “the 400 blows” by Truffaut, and the opera prima “à bout de souffleGodard’s. The feature film, starring jean seberg Y Jean Paul Belmondo, travels with innovative production techniques for the time, by filming with 16mm tapes in real locations, breaking the visual axis, and neglecting the movement of the camera in hand. However, the breaking of the montage sequence, taking frames, using the acceleration or slowing down of the image, would be the hallmark of the director that he would maintain in the next film “Living his life”.
“contempt” 1963 film starring brigitte bardot, michel piccoli, Jack Palance and the German director Fritz Lang, installed Godard’s private world in the cinema on the international scene. The film deals with the life of a screenwriter who must readapt “The Odyssey” by Homer for the filming of the renowned director of “Metropolis”.
During the following years, while directing, Godard collaborated with other members of the Nouvelle Vague as an actor, screenwriter, co-director or producer. “Pierrot the mad“, with Belmondo and Godard’s wife, the actress anna karinaand the dystopian feature film Alphaville, were films recognized at the international film festivals of berlin, Cannes and the Venice Film Festival.
After his divorce from Karina, the director faced a crisis of creative identity that linked him to future experimental and avant-garde film projects for the time. “La Chinoise” Y “week end” show his critical view of fashionable Maoist dogmatism and begin to awaken a vision committed to the French social context of the late 1960s.
The revolution of French Maythe suspension of Cannes, his new relationship with the young actress Anne Wiazemski and the chaotic production of his future films, are depicted in the 2018 biopic, “Redeemable” of Michel Hazanaviciuswith louis garrel Y Stacey Martin.
His so-called “radical stage” would end in 1976, with the documentary “here and elsewhere”, already separated from Wiazemsky. Godard would then return to conventional 35mm cinema to shoot controversial films such as “I salute you, Maria”, in parallel with his partner Anne-Marie Mieville in the ’80s. And toward the end of the decade, the filmmaker began work on an epic, eight-episode documentary series titled “History(s) of cinema”in which he would give his vision of the seventh art.
The following decades, exceeding 70 years, Godard continued filming with introspective tapes. “Nouvelle Vague”” (1990), the autobiographical “JLG/JLG” (1995), and “In Praise of Love” (2001), stand out in his filmography until reaching his last presentation on the big screen with “The Picture Book” (2018).
The legacy of his life influenced every corner of the planet. In Argentina, from Leonard Favio until Sunshine Pinewith whom he held his famous interview “Solanas by Godard”, were moved by his disruptive look. Multi-awarded by the main festivals around the world, his work transcended the screen and consolidated a personal style of making and watching cinema.
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