Jean-Luc Godard, cinema made man

Until the end, he kept his intransigence. His films made less and less admissions, but he felt no bitterness. In 2018, when the last, “The Image Book”, shot at the age of 87, was crowned in Cannes with a special Palme d’Or, he only smiled: “It’s nice , but it was not necessary. »

Jean-Luc Godard never accepted the concessions, if not to divert them. In 1963, when the producers of “Contempt” decreed that a film with Brigitte Bardot could not be so chaste, he, with feigned docility, hastened to add a scene of nudity which he placed at the beginning , as if to get rid of it, but whose intensity will remain unequaled: “Do you find them pretty, my buttocks? – Yes very. – And my breasts, do you like them? – Yes, a lot. ” Unforgettable !

There was a rogue side to this dandy that he claimed, if only out of hatred for his bourgeois origins.

There was a rogue side to this dandy that he claimed, if only out of hatred for the social caste from which he came, the bourgeoisie. Even with his friends, the young Jean-Luc willingly behaved cavalierly. Didn’t he put the young magazine where he wrote articles, the “Cahiers du cinema”, on the verge of bankruptcy, by leaving one day with the cash register to buy a train ticket? No one held it against him: he was so charming, with his drawling voice, his Swiss accent and his sunglasses with smoked lenses… To pay for his movie tickets, he went to his godmother’s apartment. do not hesitate to rob.

Because, more than a simple passion, the cinema very early became a real reason for living for this deceptively nonchalant nerd, who botched his studies but forged an immense culture, from which he kept a pronounced taste for quotations. . He goes to see everything: westerns and melodramas, films by Bergman and those by Rossellini, Soviet classics and the franchouillard nanars he murders in his texts but to whom he will never cease to devote a secret affection. He also loves American productions of series B, these films shot in a few days, with ridiculous budgets. In 1959, when he directed “A bout de souffle”, he dedicated it to Monogram Pictures, one of the most broke studios in the “poverty row” (the poor part of Hollywood).

In 1968, out of political conviction, he renounced his status as a cult director.

The release of this first Godardian opus, in March 1960, a year after Truffaut’s “The Four Hundred Blows”, marked the definitive birth certificate of the New Wave. Beyond its imperfections and its moral ambiguity, the film will mark, all over the world, several generations of filmmakers. By just oversimplifying, we can consider that there was a before and after “A bout de souffle” in the history of cinema. By its displayed casualness, its impertinence, its cookie-cutter humor, its contempt for standards, its constant formal inventiveness, in a word its nerve, the film, under its surroundings of a little thriller, brings a breath of fresh air that expires , by playing, all that has been done previously.

Godard is now famous. We know the rest. Films with Anna Karina, his first wife, then with Anne Wiazemsky, the second. “Pierrot le fou” (1965) and “Week-end” (1967) crowned him as the most pop of filmmakers. In 1968, a sudden break: out of political conviction, he renounced his status as a cult director, admired and adored everywhere. Austere and little broadcast, the militant films he made with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Henri Roger, under the banner of the Dziga Vertov Group, cut him off from the public. Co-directed with his third wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, “Number two” will be, in 1975, his return to “normal” cinema. Normal ? Not really… Godard, who has nothing of a careerist, refuses to fit into the mould. His subsequent films – which nevertheless include works as capital as “Passion” (1982), “New Wave” (1990) or “Eloge de l’amour” (2001) – did not return to commercial success: too pure, too hard. Too cool, maybe. Too free, certainly.