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Jean-Luc Godard

 
Who2 Profiles:

Jean-Luc Godard, Filmmaker

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  • Born: 3 December 1930
  • Birthplace: Paris, France
  • Best Known As: Existentialist, Marxist French movie director

Jean-Luc Godard was a French movie critic who became one of the major filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema, a 1960s movement that stressed experimental techniques and film as art. He became internationally known after his first feature film, Breathless (1960, Ábout de souffle), and continued to garner critical success (if not big box office returns) in the 1960s, with films such as Contempt (1963, Le Mépris, starring Brigitte Bardot), Band of Outsiders (1964, Bande á part), Masculine-Feminine (1966, Masculin, féminin) and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle). He earned a reputation by the 1970s as a serious, furiously political practitioner of the art of cinema. He has also stirred up his share of controversy, such as when the Catholic church urged a boycott of his 1986 film Hail Mary, (Je vous salue, Marie) a contemporary treatment of the story of the biblical Mary. Over the years Godard's existentialist Marxism lost the luster it once had, but his work of the 1960s is still considered part of the canon of great cinema.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Jean-Luc Godard

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(born Dec. 3, 1930, Paris, France) French film director. He wrote film criticism for the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma before impressing audiences with his first feature film, the improvisatory and original Breathless (1960), which established him as the apostle of the New Wave. He continued to explore new techniques in films such as My Life to Live (1962), Pierrot le fou (1965), Alphaville (1965), and Weekend (1968), using the camera creatively to express political commentary. He returned to themes of more universal concern with Every Man for Himself (1979) and Passion (1982) but stirred controversy with his updated nativity story in Hail Mary! (1985). He received wide critical acclaim for Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1997), a video study of French film, and In Praise of Love (2001).

For more information on Jean-Luc Godard, visit Britannica.com.

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard (born 1930) may be one of cinema's greatest names, but his films remain consistently abstruse and unseen by mainstream audiences. This is a situation the French-Swiss screenwriter, director, and occasional performer most likely prefers. Critics have cited the years prior to 1967 as Godard's most masterful period, when he and other young French directors broke new ground in what came to be known as cinema's New Wave movement, hallmarked by fresh conceptualization and technical tricks that challenged viewers' perceptions.

Though a true Hollywood outsider vociferously critical of directors like Steven Spielberg, Godard has always paid homage to American film's golden era by including fleeting references to its bygone works-a poster on the wall, or a bit of dialogue-in his own films. In turn, Godard has influenced a new generation of film-makers. Elements of his style-the arch dialogue, the quirky camera work-can be seen in the films of Quentin Tarantino, Gregg Araki, and John Woo, among others.

Early Years

Godard was born in Paris on March 12, 1930, but grew up in Switzerland. He attended school in Nyon and, as a young man, returned to Paris for his university education. He studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but also experienced the heady intellectual and freewheeling spirit of the Latin Quarter, the Parisian neighborhood that is home to the Sorbonne and its students. His primary interests were in theater and the written word, but "little by little the cinema began to interest me more than the rest," Godard told Jean Collet for his biography, Jean-Luc Godard. He began frequenting the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he became friends with Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. Like Godard, the other three would also achieve fame as the most influential of France's postwar filmmakers. The group skipped their classes for visits to the Cinematheque Francaise, France's museum of film, with its steady program of classic works. "We systematically saw everything there was to see," Godard told Collet.

With Rohmer and Rivette, Godard co-founded La Gazette du Cinema in 1950, which published their criticism of mainstream French films and their directors. It survived only five issues. Godard had yet to make his own film."I had ideas, but they were absolutely ridiculous," he commented to Collet. Instead he acted in the short works his friends were making in order to observe and learn. In 1954, Godard made his first foray into directing with Operation Beton, a short film centered around the construction of a dam ("beton" means concrete); Godard had worked as a laborer on the very project in order to save the money to make the film.

With his next short, 1955's Une Femme Coquette, comes evidence of Godard's interest in experimentation-the hand-held camera, jump-cutting from one scene to another, and other quirks which would later become hallmarks of his style. By 1956, Godard was writing regularly for France's respected journal of film criticism, Le Cahiers du Cinema, and becoming well-known for his polemics on mainstream filmmakers. He directed a project from after a script by Rohmer, Tous les Garcons s'appellent Patrick (title means "All Boys Are Called Patrick"), in 1957; the following year's short Charlotte et son Jules was both written and directed by Godard. He also appeared briefly, but its real star was a young French actor with a swagger, Jean-Paul Belmondo.

New Wave Cinema

The year 1959 marks the formal birth of France's Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) cinema, when Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and the others obtained the means to make the quirky, unconventional films they desired. Perhaps Godard's most famous film, and considered his first full-length feature, was made that same year and realized New Wave's concepts memorably. A Bout de Souffle (also known as "Breathless") premiered in March 1960 and was an immediate sensation. It pioneered the use of hand-held cameras, filming at actual, recognizable locations. Most radically, it was shot with the barest of script. "Breathless" made stars of Belmondo and his co-star, American actress Jean Seberg. They each appear as entirely vacuous characters, seemingly roused only by images from pop culture.

In the famous opening shot of "Breathless," Seberg's character, an American student living in Paris, is walking down the Champs-Elysees selling the New York Herald Tribune. She encounters her intermittent boyfriend, Belmondo's handsome thug who has just arrived in Paris to hide out from the authorities after a shoot-out in the countryside with police. Though there is talk of the two fleeing to Italy, and a hint that she may be pregnant, she realizes that Belmondo is wanted for killing a cop. In the end she turns him in. When Godard began the film, it was almost a freeform experiment, as he said in a 1962 interview in Le Cahiers du Cinema. "I had written the first scene, and for the rest I had a pile of notes for each scene. I said to myself, this is terrible. I stopped everything. Then I thought: in a single day, if one knows how to go about it, one should be able to complete a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead, I shall invent at the last minute."

Banned by Government

Godard's next film, 1960's Le Petit Soldat ("The Little Soldier") was banned by the French government. At the time, France had been fighting a nationalist uprising in its North African colony of Algeria for several years, and Le Petit Soldat is set amidst this political backdrop. It chronicles the dilemma plaguing a right-wing terrorist assigned to kill a journalist sympathetic to the Arab cause; instead he falls in love with an operative for the other side, the Algerian liberation movement. "The burning political issue in France at that moment, the Algerian war, Le Petit Soldat addressed with an implicative urgency summed up in the image of a hesitant assassin walking behind his victim with a large pointed pistol along a crowded street without attracting anybody's notice-a startling image of the daily unbelievability of political violence," wrote Gilberto Perez in The Nation of the film and its message.

In 1961, Godard married the female lead of Le Petit Soldat, Anna Karina. She went on to play several leading roles in his subsequent works: she was the exotic dancer who wants a child from her unwilling boyfriend in 1961's Une Femme est une Femme ("A Woman Is a Woman"). In 1962's Vivre sa Vie ("My Life to Live") she was a record-shop clerk who drifts into prostitution for extra money with predictably disastrous consequences. In these and subsequent films of the decade, Godard perfected the signature elements of his work. The theme of alienation is prevalent in his films: Godard's protagonist is nearly always an outsider of some sort or at odds with "normal" (i.e., bourgeois) society. The techniques Godard and his camera operators developed were similarly revolutionary: in some cases, the camera would follow a character walking down a street for minutes on end-virtually unheard-of experimentalism at the time. Godard also had no qualms about confounding viewers with nearly inaudible dialogue.

Absence of Plot

Une Femme Mariee ("A Married Woman"), released in 1964, typified the absence-of-plot style that Godard came to favor. It chronicles a twenty-four hour period in the life of a bored French fashion editor, and serves as a commentary on the seductive power of advertising imagery. The alienation of bourgeois society was a theme continued in Pierrot le Fou, a 1965 release that starred Belmondo as a man who escapes his tedious life with his criminal minded mistress, played by Karina. Alphaville, released the same year, was Godard's foray into science fiction. The film's hero is Lemmy Caution, played by American actor Eddie Constantine. Caution is posing as a journalist for a paper comically titled "Figaro-Pravda"-in the 1960s, the leading papers of France and the Soviet Union, respectively. He arrives in bleak Alphaville in a Ford Galaxy to track down the scientist in charge of Alpha-60, the computer that controls Alphaville and robs its citizens of individuality. Called at times Godard's only optimistic film, in the end Caution falls in love with the scientist's daughter and the pair flee.

Increasing evidence of Godard's left-leaning politics came with the 1967 film, La Chinoise. His real politicization occurred with the 1968 student riots in France, a week of street and labor unrest that galvanized the entire country and brought it to a virtual standstill. The following year, Godard released Un Film Comme les Autres, parts of which-interviews with workers at a car factory, for instance-were shot during the days of protest. At this point Godard began to make short films in 16mm he called cinetracts, which crystallized his radical political views and offered up a heavy dose of propaganda; they are almost like commercials for a revolution. He also became involved with the militant Dziga Vertov group, who would finance many of his works of this era.

Another famous Godard work from these days was 1970's One Plus One, described by some critics as one of his dullest cinematic experiments. To make it, he traveled to England immediately after the May 1968 demonstrations. In the middle of nearly three months of filming a movie that basically showed the behind-the-scenes genesis of the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil," band member Brian Jones was arrested, and production was held up by both fire and rain. "The result was Godard's most disjointed film to date," noted The Oxford Companion to Film. Godard also journeyed to the Czech capital of Prague to shoot Pravda ("truth" in Russian), which depicted the nation in the year since invading Russian tanks had arrived to quell a democratic uprising.

Godard was involved in a serious car accident in 1971, and for a time ceased to make standard-format films. He was still a political rebel, however. In the 1972 short Letter to Jane, he lets loose a 45-minute invective against American actor and activist Jane Fonda, then known for her similarly leftist politics. In the film, Godard discusses a photograph of her published in a French newspaper. "The narration calls attention to her facial expression which, Godard claims, differs from that of a North Vietnamese soldier in the background because she is the product of a jaded, capitalist society," according to The Oxford Companion to Film. Rather than full-length feature films, much of what Godard produced over the next few years were video collaborations with his partner, Anne-Marie Mieville. These include Numero Deux, filmed in a television studio and ostensibly intent on examining relationships within a traditional family. What instead occurs is that Godard "makes explicit the relationship between home video and pornography-the fetishization of the primal scene," wrote Amy Taubin in the Village Voice.

Returned to Longer Films

By 1980, Godard returned to longer films with Sauve qui Peut (la Vie) (titled "Every Man for Himself" for its American debut). Over the next few years he made several acclaimed works, including Prenom Carmen (also known as "First Name: Carmen") and Je Vous Salue, Marie ("Hail Mary"). This latter work was a retelling of the story of the Virgin Mary and the immaculate conception that received a great deal of publicity from Roman Catholic groups objecting to its nudity and sexual content. In 1987, Godard released his modern-day urban version of the Shakespearean family drama, King Lear. In the film, Burgess Meredith plays the doomed monarch, and Molly Ringwald his daughter Cordelia; Woody Allen also shows up. Time magazine's Richard Corliss called it "Godard's most infuriating, entertaining pastiche in two decades."

Godard contributed a segment to Aria, a 1988 film conceived as a series of vignettes based on well-known opera works. The following year he released parts one and two of an ongoing video-essay project, Histoire (s) du Cinema. Typically Godard, the quintessential anti-film, Histoire (s) blends bits and pieces from hundreds of films into a critique on the art form itself and a look at its relation to society. Katherine Dieckmann, writing in Art in America, called it "an expansive, densely layered, elegiac treatise on the fate of cinema." The title, which can mean either "history" or "story" in French, also serves to point out how filmgoers are beguiled by the false (the story) rather than the real (actual history), "and Godard struggles to expose how cinema's capacity to seduce and lull implicates it in certain atrocities of this century," Dieckmann wrote. In Histoire (s), she noted,"gritty newsreel footage of war mingles with an image of the 20th Century Fox logo and its sweeping klieg lights, with the none-too-covert message that these forms of spectacle aren't completely separate."

Two Godard films were released in 1990: Nouvelle Vague ("New Wave"), a pastoral work filmed in the Swiss countryside, and Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero (also known as "Germany Year 90 Nine Zero"). Here Godard offers a sequel of sorts to Alphaville, set in a newly reunited Germany. Critics had once compared the bleak urban future-world of the 1965 film to the real East Berlin; in the latter work, Lemmy Caution tours the actual Berlin. In 1992, New York's Museum of Modern Art feted Godard with a retrospective of his work; not surprisingly, he did not attend his scheduled appearance, ostensibly because he was in the midst of finishing his next work, Helas pour Moi. The 1993 film starred Gerard Depardieu in the tale of the Greek deity Zeus and his transformation into human shape. JLG/JLG, released in 1995, shows Godard alone in a series of interviews. Some of it takes place in Switzerland, where the filmmaker has a home in Roulle with a large video studio and editing facilities.

Godard's 1963 film, Le Mepris ("Contempt"), was re-released in 1997. In this work, French actor Brigitte Bardot plays a woman married to a screenwriter, a man hired to adapt the Greek literary saga The Odyssey. Famed German moviemaker Fritz Lang plays the actual director of the fake film. Bardot hates her husband, a weak-willed man caught between Lang, who wants to remain faithful to the original story, and a crass American producer played by Jack Palance who wants nudity and mermaids. Godard's actual film had been partly bankrolled by a well-known Hollywood executive whom he hated, and Palance's character is an evident mockery of the real-life producer. The film was done in only 149 shots.

The year 1997 also marked the release of another work to American filmgoers, For Ever Mozart. Shot in 1995 in Sarajevo, Godard makes another film-within-a-film about a movie crew attempting to get their job done while battling the moral bankruptcy they feel all around, an after-effect of the former Yugoslavia's years-long civil war. "After 40 years, Godard can still astonish and amuse in the cinematic shorthand he virtually created," wrote Time magazine's Corliss in reviewing For Ever Mozart. The critic lauded Godard's "encyclopedic wit, the glamour of his imagery, the doggedness of a man who won't give up on modernism. His crabby films are, in truth, breathlessly romantic-because he keeps searching for first principles in the pettiest human affairs. Godard gazes at the intimate and finds the infinite."

Further Reading

Collet, Jean. Jean-Luc Godard, Crown, 1970.

The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, Studio Vista, 1967.

Kreidl, John. Jean-Luc Godard, Twayne, 1980.

The Oxford Companion to Film, edited by Liz-Anne Bawden, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Art in America, October 1993, pp. 65-67.

ARTnews, February 1993, pp. 57-58.

Le Cahiers du Cinema, 1962.

Film Comment, March 1996, pp. 26-30, pp. 31-41.

Nation, February 18, 1991, pp. 209-212.

Time, February 1, 1988; August 4, 1997.

Village Voice, November 24, 1992, p. 45; July 1, 1997, p. 89.

Oxford Companion to French Literature:

Jean-Luc Godard

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Godard, Jean-Luc (b. 1930). A Swiss by birth, the most controversial of French-language film-makers. His first feature, A bout de souffle (1959), made a great impact through its parody of film noir conventions and the studiedly amoral cool of Belmondo and Jean Seberg. The role of improvization, the dislocation of sound and image, the incorporation into the cinematic text of other texts (literature, music, paintings, references to films, posters, etc.) are constants in an œuvre of Protean diversity. Pierrot le fou (1965) is a moving love story in Technicolour which also presages the political concerns that were for a while to dominate his work. La Chinoise (1967) is the masterpiece of his ‘Maoist’ period and an extraordinary prefiguration of May 1968.

His political commitment, a motorcycle accident, and an interest in experimenting with video successively kept him away from the ‘conventional’ cinema for more than a decade. His subsequent films (Sauve qui peut/la vie, 1979; Prénom Carmen, 1983) have revealed a continuing obsession with the sound/image relation and (some would say) with the bodies of young women.

[KAR]

Quotes By:

Jean-Luc Godard

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Quotes:

"The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea."

"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."

"To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body -- both go together, they can't be separated."

"Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion."

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't."

See more famous quotes by Jean-Luc Godard

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Jean-Luc Godard

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Biography

As a charter member of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard was also arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland, he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette's 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer's Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine. However, Godard's first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette's Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s'appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d'Eau (both 1958).

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters' connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961's comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard's films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963's war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers' good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964's Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features -- Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d'Elle -- bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard's so-called "radical" period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director's dominant focus. The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One -- a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil -- followed.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make "political films politically" and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective's work -- 1969's British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d'Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970's Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu'a la Victoire -- went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective's messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972's Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution. There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974's Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975's Numero Deux and the following year's Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979's Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his "trilogy of the sublime," a collection of films -- 1982's Passion, 1983's Prenom: Carmen, and 1983's highly controversial Hail Mary -- all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.



After 1985's neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986's Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England's Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986's TV film Grandeur et Decadence d'un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987's Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990's Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France's film legacy. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L'Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L'Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville. No less prolific during the following decade, Godard continued to turn out a film or two a year, even into his late 70s and early 80s. Additional titles included The Old Place (2000), In Praise of Love (2001), Notre Musique (2004) and Vrai faux passeport (2006). Godard's 2011 Film Socialisme not only wandered even farther from conventional cinematic narrative than anything else in his prior catalogue, but demonstrated his perverse crypticism in another way: he included English-language subtitles that reflected nothing of the actual dialogue being spoken in the film - making the movie, for some, almost completely incoherent. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

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Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard, 1968
Born 3 December 1930 (1930-12-03) (age 81)
Paris, France
Citizenship Swiss
Alma mater University of Paris
Occupation Film critic, director, actor, cinematographer, screenwriter, editor, producer
Years active 1950–present
Notable work(s) Breathless, Pierrot le Fou, Band of Outsiders, Contempt, My Life to Live
Style French New Wave
Influenced by Jean Rouch, André Bazin, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Karl Marx, Kenji Mizoguchi, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, F. W. Murnau, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Henri Langlois, Jean Cocteau, Bertolt Brecht, existentialism
Influenced Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michael Mann, Hal Hartley, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Brian De Palma, Edward Yang, Serge Daney, Gregg Araki, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-wai, Abbas Kiarostami
Spouse Anna Karina (1961–67)
Anne Wiazemsky (1967–79)
Anne-Marie Miéville (not official)
Awards
Signature

Jean-Luc Godard (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; born 3 December 1930) is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave".[1]

Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality",[1] which "emphasized craft over innovation, privileged established directors over new directors, and preferred the great works of the past to experimentation."[2] To challenge this tradition, he and like-minded critics started to make their own films.[1] Many of Godard's films challenge the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema.[citation needed] He is often considered the most radical French filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s.[3] Several of his films express his political views.[3] His films express his knowledge of film history through their references to earlier films. In addition, Godard's films often cite existentialism as he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy.[citation needed] His radical approach in film conventions, politics and philosophies made him an influential filmmaker of the French New Wave.

After the New Wave, his politics have been much less radical and his recent films are about representation and human conflict from a humanist, not Marxist perspective.[3]

In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time (which was put together by assembling the directors of the individual films for which the critics voted).[4] He has created "one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century."[5] He and his work have been central to narrative theory and have "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary."[6] In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award, but did not attend the award ceremony.[7] Godard's films have inspired diverse directors like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, D. A. Pennebaker,[8] Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, Wong Kar-wai, Wim Wenders,[9] Bernardo Bertolucci[10], Pier Paolo Pasolini[10], Paul Thomas Anderson, Arthur Penn, Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, Jørgen Leth, John Woo, Richard Lester, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone and Ken Loach.

Contents

Early life

Godard was born in Paris on 3 December 1930,[11] the son of Odile (née Monod) and Paul Godard, a physician.[12] His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco-Swiss descent, and his mother was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod and pastor Frédéric Monod.[13][14] Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland and the Lycée Rohmer. In 1949, he registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), but did not attend class.[15] He got involved with the young group of film critics at the ciné-clubs that started the New Wave.

Film criticism and early filmmaking

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After attending school in Nyon, Godard returned to Paris in 1948. It was there, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, that ciné-clubs (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs, where he soon met the man who was perhaps most responsible for the birth of the New Wave, André Bazin, as well as those who would become his contemporaries, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rozier, and Jacques Demy. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He has said; "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread – but it isn't the case any more. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope ... a telescope. ... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."

His approach to film began in the field of criticism. Along with Éric Rohmer and Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal, Gazette du cinéma, which saw publication of five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded the influential critical magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, Godard, with Rivette and Rohmer, was among the first writers. They, along with several other writers for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, started making brief forays into film direction.

Godard, while taking a job as a construction worker on a dam in 1953, shot a documentary about the building, Opération béton (1955). As he continued to work for Cahiers, he made Une femme coquette (1955), a ten-minute short; All the Boys Are Named Patrick (1957) another short fiction film; and Une histoire d'eau (1958), which was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut.

In 1958 Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules, a homage to Jean Cocteau.

Cinematic period

His most celebrated period as a filmmaker is roughly from his first feature, Breathless (1960), through to Week End (1967) focused on relatively conventional works that often refer to different aspects of film history. This cinematic period stands in contrast to the revolutionary period that immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema’s history as "bourgeois" and therefore without merit.

Films

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Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture – specifically American cinema. The film employed various innovative techniques such as jump cuts, character asides and breaking the eyeline match rule in continuity editing. Truffaut co-wrote Breathless with Godard and introduced Godard to the producer who ultimately funded the film, Georges de Beauregard.

Godard viewed film making as an extension of criticism and was more interested in redefining film structure and style than actually being understood by the public. Often his movies were more about the presentation of a story than anything else. The stories in his films were very simple yet unfocused and constantly digressing from the main story line (Jean-Luc Godard and Vivre Sa Vie by Tom Milne, 1962).

From the beginning of his career, Godard included more film references into his movies than any of his New Wave colleagues. In Breathless, his citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate); visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio. Most of all, the choice of Jean Seberg as the lead actress was an overarching reference to Otto Preminger, who had discovered her for his Saint Joan, and then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse. If, in Rohmer’s words, "life was the cinema", then a film filled with movie references was supremely autobiographical.

The following year, Godard made Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier), which dealt with the Algerian War of Independence. Most notably, it was the first collaboration between Godard and Danish-born actress Anna Karina, whom he later married in 1961 (and divorced in 1967). The film, due to its political nature, was banned by the French government until January 1963. Karina appeared again, along with Belmondo, in A Woman Is a Woman (1961), intended as a homage to the American musical. Angela (Karina) desires a child, prompting her to pretend to leave her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) and make him jealous by pursuing his best friend (Belmondo) as a substitute.

Godard's next film, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live) (1962), was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress whose financially straitened circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker. It is an episodic account of her rationalizations to prove she is free, even though she is tethered at the end of her pimp's short leash. In one touching scene in a cafe, she spreads her arms out and announces she is free to raise or lower them as she wishes. The film's style, much like that of Breathless, boasted the type of camera-liberated experimentation that made the French New Wave so influential.

Les Carabiniers (1963) was about the horror of war and its inherent injustice. It was the influence and suggestion of Roberto Rossellini that led Godard to make the film. It follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in the whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders. His most commercially successful film was Le Mépris (Contempt) (1963), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot. A coproduction between Italy and France, Contempt became known as a pinnacle in cinematic modernism with its profound reflexivity. The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by the arrogant American movie producer Prokosch (Jack Palance) to rewrite the script for an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, which the Austrian director Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's 'high culture' interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy. Another prominent theme is the inability to reconcile love and labor, which is illustrated by Paul's crumbling marriage to Camille (Bardot) during the course of shooting.

In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed Bande à part (Band of Outsiders), another collaboration between the two and described by Godard as "Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka." It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, who both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several gangster film conventions.

Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) (1964) followed Band of Outsiders. It was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black and white picture without a real story. The film was entirely produced over the period of one month and exhibited a loose quality unique to Godard. Godard made the film while he acquired funding for Pierrot le fou (1965).

In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire. Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution, a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer. Pierrot le fou (1965) featured a complex storyline, distinctive personalities, and a violent ending. Gilles Jacob, an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival, called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation in the way it played on so many of Godard’s earlier characters and themes. With an extensive cast and variety of locations, the film was expensive enough to warrant significant problems with funding. Shot in color, it departed from Godard’s minimalist works (typified by Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Une femme mariée). He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, in order to guarantee the necessary amount of capital.

Masculin, féminin (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, La Femme de Paul and Le Signe, was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola."

Godard followed with Made in U.S.A (1966), whose source material was Richard Stark's The Jugger; and Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), in which Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute. A Classic New Wave crime thiller, "Made in the U.S.A" is inspired by American Noir films. Anna Karina stars as the anti-hero searching for her murdered lover; includes a cameo by Marianne Faithful.

La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events, the film is thought by some to foreshadow the student rebellions that took place.

That same year, Godard made a more colorful and political film, Week End. It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains some of the most written-about scenes in cinema's history. One of them, an eight minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends.[16] Startlingly, a few shots contain extra footage from, as it were, before the beginning of the take (while the actors are preparing) and after the end of the take (while the actors are coming out of character). Week Ends' enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema", appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard's filmmaking career.

Politics

Politics are never far from the surface in Godard's films. One of his earliest features, Le Petit Soldat, dealt with the Algerian War of Independence, and was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute rather than pursue any specific ideological agenda. Along these lines, Les Carabiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes a stiff anti-war metonym. In addition to the international conflicts Godard sought an artistic response to, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in Vivre sa vie.

In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as the colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. The side that opposed such colonization included the majority of French workers, who belonged to the French communist party, and the Parisian artists and writers who positioned themselves on the side of social reform and class equality. A large portion of this group had a particular affinity for the teachings of Karl Marx. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End, but is evident in several films — namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée.

Throughout his career, Godard has been accused of harboring anti-Semitic views.[17] As film critic Richard Brody demonstrates in a recent book, Godard has expressed in interviews the traditional stereotypes of Jews as miserly usurers. In 1985, for example, Godard spoke of Hollywood in the following terms: "What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt. The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew. They're the ones who invented the cinema, they brought it to Hollywood...Making a film is visibly producing debts." In 1981 on television, Godard expressed himself even more clearly: "Moses is my principal enemy...Moses, when he received the commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn't show what he had seen. That's why the Jewish people are accursed." Brody argues that these views towards Jews are likely the result of a variety of biographical and political elements in Godard's life, such as his pro-Palestinian politics and repugnance towards Hollywood.[18] Brody has specifically criticized the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book. Brody notes that Godard's work has approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness".[19]

Vietnam War

Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam War. Furthermore, there are two scenes in Pierrot le fou that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on the way the radio dehumanizes the Northern Vietnamese combatants.

In the same film, the lovers accost a group of American sailors along the course of their liberating crime spree. Their immediate reaction, expressed by Marianne, is "Damn Americans!" an obvious outlet of the frustration so many French communists felt towards American hegemony. Ferdinand then reconsiders, "That’s OK, we’ll change our politics. We can put on a play. Maybe they’ll give us some dollars." Marianne is puzzled but Ferdinand suggests that something the Americans would like would be the Vietnam War. The ensuing sequence is a makeshift play where Marianne dresses up as a stereotype Vietnamese woman and Ferdinand as an American sailor. The scene ends on a brief shot revealing a chalk message left on the floor by the pair, "Long live Mao!" (Vive Mao!).

Notably, he also participated in Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from La Chinoise), Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

Bertolt Brecht

Godard's engagement with German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating the viewer (Verfremdungseffekt) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (in Brecht's case theater, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used filmic expression for specific political ends.

For example, Breathless' elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces the viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content.[citation needed] Godard also employs other devices, including asynchronous sound and alarming title frames, with perhaps his favorite being the character aside. In many of his most political pieces, specifically Week End, Pierrot le fou, and La Chinoise, characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions.

Marxism

See also: Karl Marx in film
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A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard’s early work. Godard’s direct interaction with Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until Week End, where the name Karl Marx is cited in conjunction with figures such as Jesus Christ. A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie’s consumerism, the commodification of daily life and activity, and man’s alienation — all central features of Marx’s critique of capitalism.

In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Rancière states, "When in Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism, and of a feminist denunciation of women’s false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story." The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticizing the Marxist rhetoric, rather than solely being tools of education.

Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of commodity fetishism. Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analyzing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity. Georges Sadoul, in his short rumination on the film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman".

Revolutionary period

The period that spans from May 1968 indistinctly into the 1970s has been subject to an even larger volume of varying labeling. They include everything from his "militant" period, to his "radical" period, along with terms as specific as "Maoist" and vague as "political". The period saw Godard align himself with a specific revolution and employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric.

Films

Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s Godard became interested in Maoist ideology. He formed the socialist-idealist Dziga-Vertov cinema group with Jean-Pierre Gorin and produced a number of shorts outlining his politics. In that period he travelled extensively and shot a number of films, most of which remained unfinished or were refused showings. His films became intensely politicized and experimental, a phase that lasted until 1980.

According to Elliott Gould, he and Godard met to discuss the possibility of Godard directing Jules Feiffer's 1971 surrealist play Little Murders. During this meeting Godard said his two favorite American writers were Feiffer and Charles M. Schulz. Godard soon declined the opportunity to direct; the job later went to Alan Arkin.[citation needed]

Jean-Pierre Gorin

After the events of May 1968, when the city of Paris saw total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle republic", and Godard's professional objective was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like-minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. The most notable of these collaborations was with a young Maoist student, Jean-Pierre Gorin, who displayed a passion for cinema that grabbed Godard’s attention.

Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make a total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was Tout va bien, which starred Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, at the time very big stars. Jean-Pierre Gorin now teaches the study of film at the University of California, San Diego.

The Dziga Vertov group

The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Vertov, a Soviet filmmaker—whose adopted name is derived from the verb to spin or rotate[20] and is best remembered for Man with the Movie Camera (1929) and a contemporary of both the great Soviet montage theorists, most notably Sergei Eisenstein, and Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Part of Godard’s political shift after May 1968 was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle.

1980 – 1999

His return to somewhat more traditional fiction was marked with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: for example Passion (1982), Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982), Prénom Carmen (1984), and Grandeur et décadence (1986). There was, though, another flurry of controversy with Je vous salue, Marie (1985), which was condemned by the Catholic Church for alleged heresy, and also with King Lear (1987), an extraordinary but much-excoriated essay on William Shakespeare and language. Also completed in 1987 was a segment in the film ARIA which was based loosely from the plot of Armide; it is set in a gym and uses several arias by Jean-Baptiste Lully from his famous Armide.

His later films have been marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem — Nouvelle Vague (New Wave, 1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre (JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December, 1995), and For Ever Mozart (1996). Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, 1991) was a quasi-sequel to Alphaville but done with an elegiac tone and focus on the inevitable decay of age. Between 1988 and 1998 he produced perhaps the most important work of his career in the multi-part series Histoire(s) du cinéma, a monumental project which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and the history of film itself.

2000 – present

Godard has continued to work actively into his seventies. In 2001, Eloge de l'Amour (In Praise of Love) was released. This film is notable for its use of both film and video – the first half captured in 35 mm black and white, the latter half shot in color on DV – and subsequently transferred to film for editing. The blending of film and video recalls the statement from Sauve Qui Peut, in which the tension between film and video evokes the struggle between Cain and Abel. Eloge de l'Amour is rich with themes of aging, love, separation, and rediscovery as we follow the young artist Edgar contemplating a new work on the four stages of love (should it be an opera? a film?). He meets up with a lost love who is terminally ill, and at her death we are thrust into the second half of the film where Edgar meets with her at her grandparent's house two years before. Producers for Steven Spielberg are negotiating the purchase of her grandparent's World War II story; the young woman attempts to stall the deal. This is one of Godard's most tender films, yet it is characteristically enigmatic and demands the viewer's full attention.

In Notre musique (2004), Godard turns his focus to war, specifically, the war in Sarajevo, but with attention to all war, including the American Civil War, the war between the US and Native Americans, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The film is structured into three Dantean kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Godard's fascination with paradox is a constant in the film. It opens with a long, ponderous montage of war images that occasionally lapses into the comic; Paradise is shown as a lush wooded beach patrolled by US Marines.

Godard's latest film, Film Socialisme, premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.[21][22] It was released theatrically in France in May 2010.

He is rumored to be considering directing a film adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an award-winning book about the Holocaust.[23] He has stated that his next feature film will be called Adieu au Language (Farewell to Language), which will be shot in 3-D.[24][25] The film will revolve around a couple who cannot communicate with each other until their pet dog acts as an interpreter for them.

Tributes

  • " From Hollywood to the Third World, from the mainstream to the Avant-Garde, Godard's name is perhaps the only one that occurs wherever cinema is discussed or produced." – Colin Myles MacCabe
  • " Like Picasso, Godard reveals to us throughout his work his world as source and subject; the artist's studio, the objects of his daily life, the references to and repetitions of his own works, the layering of words and images, the women he has loved, the horrors of war." – Mary Lea Bandy.
  • " Godard's is an art of plastic age, of fluent, pliable, putty characters." – Raymond Durgnat
  • " Godard's importance lies in his development of an authentic modernist cinema in opposition to (though, during the early period, at the same time within) mainstream cinema: it is with his work that film becomes central to our century's major aesthetic debate, the controversy developed through such figues as Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno as to whether realism or modernism is the more progressive form." – Robin Wood.

Filmography

Main article: Jean-Luc Godard filmography

References

  1. ^ a b c Grant 2007, Vol. 4, p. 235.
  2. ^ Grant 2007, Vol. 2, p. 259.
  3. ^ a b c Grant 2007, Vol. 4, p. 126.
  4. ^ "BFI – Sight & Sound – Top Ten Poll 2002 Poll – The Critics' Top Ten Directors". http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/critics-directors.html. 
  5. ^ Grant 2007, Vol. 4, p. 238.
  6. ^ Grant 2007, Vol. 4, p. 202.
  7. ^ Freeman, Nate. "Godard Companion: Director Will Not Travel to Oscars for a ‘Bit of Metal’ | The New York Observer". Observer.com. http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/godard-companion-says-director-will-skip-oscars-calls-honorary-statue-bit-metal. Retrieved 2012-02-06. 
  8. ^ "1 PM". Pennebaker Hegedus Films. http://phfilms.com/index.php/phf/film/1pm/. Retrieved 5 January 2012. 
  9. ^ BFI (4 Sep 2006). "Jean-Luc Godard: Biography". BFI. http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/godard/biography.html. Retrieved 28 September 2011. 
  10. ^ a b Grant 2007, Vol. 3, p. 49.
  11. ^ Moullet, Luc (2005). "Jean-Luc Godard". In Jim Hillier. Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960–1968. New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood. 2. Milton Park, Oxford, UK: Routledge. pp. 35–48. ISBN 0-415-15106-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=mm9pgpYLA70C&pg=PA35. Retrieved 28 September 2011. 
  12. ^ Morrey 2005, p. 1.
  13. ^ "The religion of director Jean-Luc Godard". Adherents.com. http://www.adherents.com/people/pg/Jean_Luc_Godard.html. Retrieved 29 December 2011. 
  14. ^ "Jean Monod (1765–1836), pasteur". Ordiecole.com. http://www.ordiecole.com/cinema/godard_monod.html. Retrieved 29 December 2011. 
  15. ^ MacCabe 2005, p. 36.
  16. ^ Morrey, Douglas (2005). Jean-Luc Godard. http://books.google.com/books?id=Kby7RaRmTt4C&pg=PA72. 
  17. ^ Michael Cieply (1 November 2010). "An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/movies/02godard.html. Retrieved 27 January 2011. 
  18. ^ Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 558–60.
  19. ^ Richard Brody (2 November 2010). "Jean-Luc Godard: The Oscar Question". The Front Row. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/11/the-oscar-question.html. Retrieved 27 January 2011. 
  20. ^ Kino-eye: the writings of Dziga Vertov. Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=N-T_ogXMzlgC&pg=PR18&lpg=PR18&dq=dziga+vertov+name&source=bl&ots=2inAVyeqdb&sig=7hu5v6H1SaQvuSra3zEYzzOCiJI&hl=en&ei=QtA3SrX7JsKltgfKguTiDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#PPR17,M1. Retrieved 6 March 2010. 
  21. ^ "New Godard: "Socialisme"". Justpressplay.net. 8 May 2009. http://www.justpressplay.net/movies/movie-news/5284-new-godard-qsocialismeq.html. Retrieved 6 March 2010. 
  22. ^ "Hollywood Reporter: Cannes Lineup". hollywoodreporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/world/news/e3i3d82e5b089623802884efcd38a037f67?pn=2. Retrieved 16 April 2010. 
  23. ^ "Holocaust Tale Piques Auteur". The Hollywood Reporter. 3 June 2009. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/film/news/e3i3506b270c4e1b2d9d5284c9d1c969734. 
  24. ^ craig keller. (13 September 2011). "Cinemasparagus: ADIEU AU LANGAGE / Jean-Luc Godard / 5 x 45-Minute Interview This Week". Cinemasparagus.blogspot.com. http://cinemasparagus.blogspot.com/2011/09/adieu-au-langage-jean-luc-godard-5-x-45.html. Retrieved 29 December 2011. 
  25. ^ "Daily Briefing. JLG, Benning/Cassavetes, Jia + Zhao on Notebook". MUBI. 13 September 2011. http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/daily-briefing-jlg-benningcassavetes-jia-zhao. Retrieved 29 December 2011. 

Further reading

  • Godard, Jean-Luc. 2012 Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television. Montreal: caboose. ISBN 9780981191416
  • Brody, Richard. 2008. Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. ISBN 978-0-8050-6886-3
  • Temple, Michael. Williams, James S. Witt, Michael. (eds) 2007. For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing
  • Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
  • Godard, Jean-Luc: The Future(s) of Film. Three Interviews 2000/01. Bern — Berlin: Verlag Gachnang & Springer, 2002. ISBN 978-3-906127-62-0
  • Loshitzky, Yosefa. The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci.
  • Silverman, Kaja and Farocki, Harun. 1998. Speaking About Godard. New York: New York University Press.
  • Temple, Michael and Williams, James S. (eds). 2000. The Cinema alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
  • Almeida, Jane. Dziga Vertov Group. São Paulo: witz, 2005. ISBN 85-98100-05-6.
  • Nicole Brenez, David Faroult, Michael Temple, James E. Williams, Michael Witt (eds), Jean-Luc Godard:Documents, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007
  • Godard Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
  • Diane Stevenson, "Godard and Bazin" in the Andre Bazin special issue, Jeffrey Crouse (ed.), Film International, Issue 30, Vol. 5, No. 6, 2007, pp. 32–40.

External links

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
$copyright.smallImage.alttext Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Oxford Companion to French Literature. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
AMG AllMovie Guide. Copyright © 2012 All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Jean-Luc Godard.  Read more

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