Jean Luc Godard, French director and father of the Nouvelle Vague, has died at the age of 91. This is reported by the French newspaper Liberation, describing him as “a total director with a thousand lives and such a productive body of work”.
Godard’s masterpiece with Belmondo and Seberg is restored “to the last breath”.
Born in Paris on December 3, 1930, he was one of the most important film authors of the second half of the 20th century. Prominent exponent of the Nouvelle vague, from his first feature film, À bout de souffle (Until the last breath) from 1961, with Jean Paul Belmondo (deceased last year) was a point of reference for young filmmakers of the 1960s and marked a demarcation line between eras and cultures in the history of cinema.
A director “against”
Protagonist of great controversy and angry quarrels, he was told in the biopic in 2017 Michel Hazanavicius My Godard, with Louis Garrell in the role of the director, a personal tribute to the master who tells the love story between the filmmaker and the actress Anne Wiazemsky and the days of May in Paris, when he and his colleagues from the Nouvelle Vague stopped the Cannes Festival. Godard was a man and an artist “against” for more than sixty years, scion of a rich middle-class family, in the 60s he opposed capitalism and mass culture, but above all against the cinema of the fathers, which he first as a critic, then as a Filmmaker and political agitator.
‘Le livre d’amore’ the cut film by Jean-Luc Godard – trailer
The latest film in Cannes
Godard’s latest work, Le livre d’amore (The Book of the Picture), was presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, but Godard did not take part. In recent years, the master has been holed up in a Swiss village and has avoided any public or social occasion. But on that occasion, he spoke to journalists by video-joining with a mobile phone: “At this age I have difficulties living my life, but I still have the courage to imagine it.”
his cinema
In his sixty-year career, Godard has directed more than 150 of his films and videos. Among the most famous, considered a manifesto of the Nouvelle Vague, A bout de souffle (Until the last breath), filmed in 1960, are protagonists Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, which reflected the claim of many authors of his generation: a low-cost cinema, away from industrial structures, detached from the rules of the show. In the following films, radical criticism of traditional film language was accompanied by an increasingly conscious criticism of prevailing social values: This is my life (1962), La donna è donna (1962), Les carabiniers (1963), The contempt (1963), With Bridget Bardot and Michael Piccolibased on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia, A Married Woman (1964), The Bandit of Eleven Hours (1965) again with Jean-Paul Belmondo, The Man and the Woman (1966), An American Story (1966) , Two or Three Things That I Know About Her (1966).
Militant cinema
From 1967 Godard turned to a much more militant cinema and experimented with new production methods and both aesthetic and ideological elaboration: Chinese (1967), British Sound (1969), Pravda (1969), Lotte in Italia (1970), Crack Meister, everything Is Good (1972). Poetry and irony, an awareness of crisis and a new figurative sensibility seem to prevail in the films shot since the late 1970s: “Si salvi chi can” (1979) with Isabelle HuppertPrénom Carmen (1982), Je vous salue Marie (1984), Detective (1985), Nouvelle vague (1990), Germany nine zero (1992).
The Last Period
In the 1990s, Godard continued his search for new visual forms by creating Hélas pour moi (1993), Forever Mozart (1996). With “Histoire (s) du cinéma” (1998), “L’origine du XXIème siècle” (2000) and “Pour une histoire du XXIème siècle” (2000) he “rewrote” a personal history of cinema with a critical eye. Then he directed Éloge de amaour (2001), Notre musique (2004), Vrai faux passeport (2006), the short film Une catastrophe (2008), Film socialisme (2010), Adieu au langage (2013, for which the following year he received the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival) and the last, Le livre d’amore, was awarded the special Palme d’Or at the 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival in 2018.