Hard to overstate Godard's importance to the film world, both as a critic and a filmmaker. As a critic with Cahiers du Cinema he and others championed many forgotten Hollywood films and established one of the first recognizable 'canons' of film -- one of the beginning points of film history as a subject. And unlike his predecessor and colleague Bazin, Godard went beyond theory to actually create films that embodied the radical new ideas about film that the Cahiers crowd promoted. I've seen people in the thread mentioning Italian Neorealism, and some of the great Hollywood films of the 50s, all fantastic examples of forward-thinking film art. But Godard and his contemporaries' contributions were about synthesizing earlier developments with a pop-art bent in a way that destroyed established boundaries of the medium and paved the way for explosions of film creativity on the continent and beyond. His genius was finding a middle ground between directors like Hawks and Rosselini, or Ford and Renoir, and using that space to create indelible masterpieces. RIP JLG
Le Mépris (Contempt) is by far my favourite movie, peak cinema. Absolutely stunning Mediterranean cinematography, beautiful coastal and indoor shots, a decent plot with Odysseus in the background, and certainly not hurt by Brigitte Bardot's onscreen presence. Overall unbeatable aesthetics.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF0Ju0ONwGU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF0Ju0ONwGU</a><p>Watching it is like taking a short vacation. Phenomenal.
It is hard to overstate how much Godard changed cinema, even in America. If you don’t believe me check for yourself. Open the best picture nominees between 55’-65’ and watch their trailers. Films like Marty/On the waterfront/12 angry men/To kill a mockingbird/The Caine Mutiny/Sweet smell of success is what movies were like in the late 50s.<p>The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes.<p>Starting in the mid 60s there was a radical shift, topping the nominations we have films like Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Deer Hunter, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver etc. Actors would act and behave like normal everyday people facing everyday problems. The new Archetype is the Anti-Hero, someone with flaws/vices in their character, someone that viewers can relate to. We see the rise of the director as the auteur, the creative master of a film. Every known filmaking rule is being tested to it’s limits and broken by young experimenting directors.<p>The catalyst for this change was the French New Wave, a group of young filmmakers tired of the old style of cinema wanting to do films about their own life and experiences. The poster boy for the New Wave was Jean-Luc Godard starting this revolution with his 1960 film Breathless.
"I just talked about myself, and you, yourself.
You should’ve talked about me, and me, about you."<p>— Michel Poiccard, Breathless (1960)<p>"The 1960 French crime drama film, Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard has a very interesting idea about love. The protagonist, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a car thief and crook, is unlikeable. He steals from helpless women as well as vulnerable men, and kills a police officer without remorse. He claims to be in love with an American, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), but at one point he threatens to strangle her, and he disregards her wishes whether big or small. But he wants to be with her, and we believe him. Is this enough to be defined as love?"<p>From:
What Is Love? The True Definition According To The Movies
<a href="https://moviewise.substack.com/p/what-is-love" rel="nofollow">https://moviewise.substack.com/p/what-is-love</a>
I wish I could understand him more. My wife and I tried to watch Breathless and it was insufferable watching this complete jerk mope his way around. We didn't even manage to finish it. On top of that, Godard himself came off as rude in 2017's Visages Villages (Agnes Varda).<p>Is there something of his I might appreciate more?
Tarantino mentioned Godard as an influence at the beginning of the Reservoir Dogs script (Here he is talking about it: <a href="https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU</a>). He says that the seminal moment when he recognized his key aesthetic as a director, was when he read Pauline Kael's review of a Godard film (A band apart), where Kael says in her review: "It was as if a bunch of movie mad young frenchmen had taken up a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the lines". Tarantino says that when he read that he knew that this was his aesthetic -- this is what he wanted to do as a director.<p>Tarantino called his production company "A Band Apart" (in my opinion) for that reason.<p>(Tarantino's comment: <a href="https://youtu.be/vb7oUEVjFjo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vb7oUEVjFjo</a>)
An interesting take from The New Yorkers' movie critic Richard Brody from twenty years ago: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/profiles/2000/11/20/exile-paradise" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/profiles/2000/11/20/exile...</a>
Godard changed my life. I still can't express how exactly though, but watching Pierrot le Fou literally left a serious deep impact to me when I was adolescent. I am deeply thankful that he existed in this world.
I'm not against art films, but when there's an obsession over theme, technique, or personality, I'm probably out. Good art is scandalous and daring without needing any provenance or context. The Banksyism is: "comfort to the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." What matters to the general audience is what is on their plate, not the difficulty in or constraints on making the sausage. If someone wants to go the direction of say Spike Lee, then that's a deliberate choice to put art above chasing dollars, risking becoming the archetype of the starving artist and possibly their wide-appeal legacy. They're neither good nor bad, but different roads needing different driving styles.
Maybe HN can help:
Years ago I watched a French movie, I think black and white, involving a young guy living in Paris.
I don't remember much: Scenes where he jumped the iconic Parisian metro entrances without a ticket, and also a bourgie party with an American astronaut (?) staring at the moon?
Maybe New-Wave, maybe not. I always wanted to find it again.
I recommend you to also watch Opération Béton - a documentary about the construction of the Grande Dixence concrete dam by JLG preceding his film work and a testimony.
When I first saw the headline, my mind immediately read it as “Jean-Luc Picard” has died” and I was about to say something nice about the actor who plays him.
<i>...the ogre Henri Langlois...</i><p>"Ogre"? In the context of European film, this designation could indicate a fairly terrible person. I can't find anything negative about Langlois other than that he had a disagreement with his bosses, which seems forgivable. What am I missing?
Alan Tanner also died just yesterday, and I rate him much higher than Godard. I'll only see Revolutionary Maoist Godard obituaries I assume, not any Tanner's.
Not even a movie yesterday.<p>They lived very close, Geneva and Grenoble.
The poster-boy for commodity fetishism.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism</a>
I remember sitting in a hotel room in SF with my girlfriend at the time and her waxing about Godard, whom I knew little about. She was right about how influential and brilliant he was.
The obituary did miss the most important part. Why the hell did he commit career suicide, by becoming a revolutionary Maoist, had to leave to Paris, and only made horrible bad movies after that.<p>The answer is simply a pretty blonde aristocrat, Anne Wiazemsky, who drove him into radicalism. Cannes recently had a bad movie "Redoubtable" about that. <a href="https://freebeacon.com/culture/godard-mon-amour-review/" rel="nofollow">https://freebeacon.com/culture/godard-mon-amour-review/</a><p>He was extremely talented, until Le Chinoise and The Weekend.
A more complete, and written in English, obituary : <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2022/09/13/jean-luc-godard-legendary-french-film-director-dies-aged-91_5996746_15.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2022/09/13/jean...</a>