Jean-Luc Godard: The great director and pioneer of the “Nouvelle Vague” has died
At the age of 91
Jean-Luc Godard , the legendary French director and pioneer of the “Nouvelle Vague” movement, has passed away at the age of 91 . As announced by the French newspaper Liberation, he breathed his last on Tuesday, September 13, leaving behind a career full of masterpieces but also misunderstandings that defined him as a legend.
Jean-Luc Godard was considered a heretic for his time, strongly questioning the cinematic forms of Hollywood and established cinema at the time. He was the director of great films that have gone down in history among the best of cinema such as: ” Breathless “, ” Contempt “, ” Mad Pierrot “, ” Histoire(s) du Cinema “, ” Vivre sa vie” (My Life to Live) and ” Bande à part” (Band of Outsiders).
His film muses were Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, with whom he collaborated several times while they were also his wives. But his most commercial film was “Contempt” ( Le Mepris ) of 1963 with the then absolute star of the cinema, Brigitte Bardot.
A few words about his life and career
In 1949, Jean-Luc Godard is in Paris to study ethnology at the Sorbonne. There he will meet and socialize with Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette – the directors and filmmakers who will later form the Nouvelle Vague movement.
“I wanted to start from a conventional story and reconstruct, in a different way, what had been done up to that point in cinema. I also wanted to give the impression that film media was being discovered or being tested for the first time”, Godard will characteristically say in one of his first interviews in Cahiers du Cinema magazine in 1962.
Hand-held camera, improvisation, long takes, jump cuts, essayistic discourse, quotation of literary and philosophical texts are just some of the innovative solutions he applied for the first time.
From 1966 to 1968, the director creates films strongly influenced by the political events of the current decade and the socio-political currents that emerged from the May 1968 riots.
With Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard will found the group Dziga Vertov and renounce the title of creator and the role of cinema. He creates a series of films that are radical in their content and style and were mostly based on the ideas of class struggle and dialectical materialism.
Jean-Luc Godard continues to film for many years to come, inspiring many young filmmakers. In 2021 at the age of 90 he declares that he decides to say goodbye to cinema. ” I am completing my life in cinema, my life as a director, with these two scripts – ‘Scenario’ and ‘Funny Wars’ – and then I will say ‘goodbye cinema ,'” he said in an interview at the 25th Kerala International Film Festival in India .
