Film Director Jean-Luc Godard, Father Of The "Nouvelle Vague", Dies At The Age Of 91

He was the last survivor of the Nouvelle Vague, the new wave of filmmakers that revolutionized the seventh art with a whirlwind of fresh air in the early sixties, a new way of telling stories and characters and attitudes that, like the Beatles and the Stones or May 68 shaped Western culture and society of that decade. And he was more than that, “one of the greatest filmmakers of all time,” as Le Monde defines him. Jean-Luc Godard, who premiered with “At the End of the Escape” and consecrated himself and throughout his career never stopped provoking and exploring unknown lands with films that were often far from the taste of the general public, is died this Tuesday at the age of 91.

The Liberation newspaper, which broke the news, said he died surrounded by his own and by “assisted suicide” in Rolle, the town where he had lived in Switzerland for decades. “He wasn’t ill, he was just exhausted,” a close family friend told the aforementioned newspaper. “So I had made the decision to quit. It was his decision and it was important to him that it be known.” This practice is legal in Switzerland.

“It was like an appearance in French cinema. Then he became a teacher,” he said. French President Emmanuel Macron, in a message on the social network Twitter. “Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, had invented a resolutely modern, utterly free art. We’re losing a national treasure, a look of genius.”

Ce fut comme une apparition dans le cinema français. Puis il en devint a maître. Jean-Luc Godard, le plus iconoclaste des cinéaste de la Nouvelle Vague, avait I invented a kind of résolument modern, intensely free. Nous pardons un trésor national, un respect de genie. pic.twitter.com/bQneeqp8on
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) September 13, 2022

The death of Godard – at times aesthetic artist, at times politically engaged, often irritating and with multiple lives and reincarnations – closes an era. He was a central figure in the European culture of his time, the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, whose influence reached beyond the cinema. It was one of the last examples of what is associated with modernity and avant-garde. Filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a few years ago, compared him to Picasso in the sense that “he went through all his time and took all his burden”. “He tried everything, he absorbed everything, he was multiple filmmakers, he had multiple lives, some at the same time,” Assayas said. “He was in the cinema and out.”

The work of Godard, author of works such as Alphaville, La Chinoise, I welcome you, Maria or Goodbye to language, cannot be summed up in one or two titles. He left more than a hundred, but the best known are certainly those of his first phase, the Nouvelle Vague, when, along with François Trufffaut, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette and others, they broke with the entrenched codes of French cinema of that time and, inspired by classic American cinema, invented something completely new that radiated in the aftermath, but also in culture and literature: they captured the air of their time and at the same time they changed it.

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Godard, “who by this time left such works as Pierrot Le Fou and El contempto, and worked assiduously with the actress Anna Karina (1940-1989), his partner at the time,” was perhaps the most seminal of all his colleagues, and the one who was after that he never stopped transforming and even denied what he had done. From the Maoist period, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, to later video experiments or their particular 20th century reworking based on the images in Histoire(s) du cinéma, between the late 1980s and 1990s.

“Godard has always said that he makes every film against the previous one,” said film historian Nicole Brenez, a professor at the Sorbonne and a specialist in Godard’s work, in Babelia in 2020. “Nevertheless, if you see all his films, you discover that there is no logic of systematic contradiction. It’s more like he decided to explore new territories after getting fed up with the previous ones.”

Born on December 3, 1930 in Paris into a Franco-Swiss family of the Protestant bourgeoisie, Godard spent his childhood and youth – also during the Second World War – in Nyon (Switzerland) and took Swiss citizenship at the age of 20. Years. He returned to his hometown to study at the Sorbonne. There he began to attend the film clubs of the Latin Quarter and the Cinematheque, and to move in the cinephile circles of the gang, which studied and analyzed first in the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and then the cinema of his time would go to the other side of the barrier walk. She was the first generation to reach adulthood after war and occupation, and embodied the optimism of the Glorious Thirty, the post-WWII period of growth.

Jean-Luc Godard while filming Alphaville in Paris, 1965.getty

It was Godard with At the End of the Escapade, which also dedicated Jean-Paul Belmondo, 1960, and a year earlier François Truffaut (1932-1984) with The 400 Beats, which launched the movement that had established the director as an author up until then In general, the director was another element in the film production – as if he were a novelist or a poet. “Our goal was to publish a first novel with Gallimard Verlag,” Godard admitted years later in Le Monde. In the same interview, he summarized the ambition of this “small group” with the idea of ”moving things a little”.

Godard advocated, like other creators of his time, a work that told a story – but not always – and that at the same time reflected on the act of telling that story, a cinema whose subject can eventually – from his first film, be considered an imitation of the seen American Film Noir – was the cinema. “In the cinema we don’t think, we are thought,” he said in one of the sentences quoted by Liberation. “I find cinema extremely interesting because it allows you to print a print and make an impression at the same time.” Or: “I have a rule that has not abandoned me: do what we can and don’t do what we can want, do what we want from what we can, do what we want with what we have, and don’t dream of the impossible.” And further: “Only cinema has seen that light falls there, where it is needed, illuminates what is needed and discards what is needed.”