“I only want to talk about cinema. Why talk about anything else? With cinema, we talk about everything, we get to everything”, said with his drawling accent the Franco-Swiss, who “has messed up the cinema “, according to François Truffaut, his accomplice, for a time, of the New Wave.
“JLG”, who has shot around fifty feature films since the beginning of the 1960s – to which are added dozens of short or video formats, was a figure both familiar and enigmatic, like his films.
One of the most studied filmmakers in the world, he has been honored with a César and an Oscar for his career, as well as a special Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2018.
The films of the man with the tortoiseshell glasses stood out with their original, nervous editing, a very personal use of literary quotations, or their provocative spirit.
“JLG” has always divided critics and the public: for some, he is a genius, for others a filmmaker with hermetic work.
He knew how to occupy the field of film theory like no other, delivering his precepts: “When we go to the cinema, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower it” or “the cinema is not at the ‘shelter from time. He is shelter from time’.
– “Star of his generation” –
“We have lost the measure of what he represented in the imagination of the Western world in the 60s and 70s. He was the star of his generation”, underlined the former director of Cahiers du cinema Jean-Michel Frodo.
Born in Paris on December 3, 1930 to a doctor father and a mother from a wealthy Protestant family, he grew up in Switzerland in a refined environment.
He likes sport, hardly obtains the baccalaureate in Lausanne. His parents divorced, his mother died in 1954. Tough years, bohemian life. Jean-Luc, a kleptomaniac, is banished from his family.
Enrolled at the Sorbonne to study ethnology, he preferred to attend film clubs. At the Cahiers du cinema, where he signed in the 1950s, he rubbed shoulders with creative and turbulent young people: François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer or Claude Chabrol, all opposed to “dad’s cinema”.
A year later, he married Anna Karina, a young Danish actress who would play in seven of his films, including “Le Petit Soldat” – about a deserter during the Algerian War, a forbidden time -, “A woman is a woman” and “Pierrot le fou” in 1965, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of his masterpieces.
In 1963, it was the public success of “Le contempt”, in which Brigitte Bardot, naked on a bed, asked Michel Piccoli: “And my buttocks, do you like them, my buttocks?…”.
– Anna, Anne and Anne-Marie –
Two years later, he met Anne Wiazemsky. Then began the “Mao years”, a more radical period of his life, dominated by “La Chinoise” (1967), played by Anne whom he married.
Godard actively participates in May 68. With a bang, the descent to Cannes which will lead to the cancellation of the festival, alongside Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, Claude Berri, Jean-Pierre Léaud…
“I’m talking to you about solidarity with students and workers and you’re talking to me about tracking shots and close-ups! You’re idiots!”, he says.
He then turns didactic and leftist works, taking pro-Palestinian positions that are controversial. Anne no longer understands her cinema. They separated in 1970.
In 1971, he was the victim of a serious motorcycle accident. It was at this time that he became friends with screenwriter Anne-Marie Miéville. Of her, he will say: “there were the women in my films and the woman in my life”.
In the mid-1970s, the man with “constant melancholy” who had made several suicide attempts, according to his biographer Antoine de Baecque, moved to Grenoble, where he became passionate about video.
In 1977, the couple put down their suitcases in Switzerland, in Rolle.
He returns to the news in fits and starts, as with his monumental “Histoire(s) du cinema”, produced from 1988 to 1998, a book and films of collages and quotations.
Entering a new experimental phase, he presented in Cannes, without ever coming, “Film socialisme” in 2010, then “Farewell to language” in 2014, an unclassifiable work in 3D rewarded by the Jury Prize, and in 2018 “Le livre d’ ‘image’, devoted in large part to the Arab world, where images follow one another and quotes in voice-over. A “special” Palme d’Or was awarded to him for this film.
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Jean-Luc Godard, the man-cinema