Adieu au cinema.

Jean-Luc Godard is dead at the age of 91 by assisted suicide, news that will surely sadden any cinephile; this is our tiny apocalypse, the end to our great long weekend. The pioneering iconoclast wasn’t just a great director, but helped transform film into the respected medium that it is today, elevating it into an art form on par with poetry and painting. Beginning as a film critic for the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma magazine alongside other burgeoning directors like Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol, Godard transitioned to filmmaking with his groundbreaking 1960 film Breathless (or À bout de souffle).

That film sent him down a whirlwind path of critical adoration, political involvement, and French celebrity status as perhaps the most important filmmaker of the French New Wave movement. His career would have many phases, transitioning from flashy postmodern films to political polemics, visual essays, and gorgeous art projects, resulting in him being named the third-best director of all time (after only Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock) by Sight & Sound and the BFI. Even Quentin Tarantino named his production company (A Band Apart) after one of his films (Bande à part, or Band of Outsiders). Let’s take a look at why Godard was and will remain one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema.

Jean-Luc Godard: Champion of Cinema

     Gaumont

Where do you begin with the best? How do you capture an oeuvre so unique, important, sad, but beautiful and filled with life? Words fail, which is perhaps why Godard stopped writing and made films instead. As his character Nana Kleinfrankenheim said in Vivre sa Vie, “Why must one talk? Often one shouldn’t talk, but live in silence. The more one talks, the less the words mean." Godard’s film criticism transitioned to making movies because the medium was so filled with possibilities and approaches that Godard simply couldn’t access them with literature (though there’s still a strong textual element to his films). He did say, after all, that the best way to critique a film is to make one of your own.

Godard overflowed with countless little truths like that — “Every edit is a lie;” “The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second;” “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order;” “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” This is because he was a philosopher and a poet as much as a filmmaker. In fact, none of those were mutually exclusive terms for him. Unlike the other great film theorists of his time (Christian Metz, André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc), Godard put his francs where is mouth is and actually turned theory into praxis, making films that demonstrated and deconstructed their ideas.

Godard and the French New Wave of the 1960s

     Columbia Pictures

After some notable early shorts, Godard burst onto the scene in the 1960s with a frenetic, relentless drive that towered over all other filmmakers of the decade. In the ’60s alone, Godard wrote and directed 25 films (not to mention eight shorts), almost all of which are masterpieces.

From 1960 to 1967, Godard and his main stars, his muses/wives Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky along with the great Jean-Paul Belmondo, deconstructed filmmaking genre by genre. They stripped away the excess from musicals with A Woman is a Woman; they modernized crime dramas and great gangster movies with Breathless and Band of Outsiders; they put radical politics into film with Le Petit Soldat, La Chinoise, and Pierrot le Fou; they turned sci-fi upside down with Alphaville.

     SNC

Throughout it all, they were stylish as hell. Hardly any films were as exciting, energetic, and intelligent as what Godard was doing with works like Made in U.S.A. or 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. When he filmed in color, it was eye-popping and vibrant, creating pop-art masterpieces with primary colors and brilliant tracking shots from the great cinematographer Raoul Coutard. When he filmed in black and white, he created gorgeously textured, high-contrast portrayals of youth (Masculine Feminine) and women (Vivre sa Vie, A Married Woman). The Midas of cinema, everything Godard touched turned to gold, until May 1968.

May ‘68 and the Politically Important Godard

     Athos Films

The events of May 1968 in France are legendary, with massive student revolts and an economic shutdown that deeply affected Godard on both a personal and artistic level. He and Truffaut lorded over the shutdown of the Cannes Film Festival as filmmakers throughout the world questioned the nature of cinema in the face of major political upheaval (assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.). As Donato Totaro expertly writes for Off Screen:

Godard’s films for the next decade would be his most patently political, vicious polemics with a Maoist edge that interrogated the nature of cinema and the function of art while attacking any target that moved. Godard united with Jean-Pierre Gorin to create the Dziga Vertov Group (named after the famed Soviet filmmaker) and made a stunning 14 films in four years. These movies often go unjustly underrated, as they’re considered to be didactic, negative, self-indulgent, and even more aimless than his New Wave films.

In film theory circles the “reform vs. revolution” debate took form through the following issues: What is the relationship of film to society? Is there a “correct” radical form or is radical content enough? Is the film medium itself ideologically loaded? What is the relationship between theory and praxis? Who is the intended audience for politically radical cinema? The one filmmaker in France who seemed to deal with all of these concerns was Jean-Luc Godard.

However, there are many masterpieces in this period, including the brilliant Tout Va Bien starring Jane Fonda in her political phase (followed by, of course, an essay film postscript titled Letter to Jane, analyzing Fonda’s involvement with the Viet Kong). That film included a massive see-through set of a factory, so that the camera could move from room to room while tracking the characters and labor of the workers. He also made One Plus One (also known as Sympathy For the Devil), one of the most interesting movies about music ever made; the film studied The Rolling Stones as they worked on the classic album Beggars Banquet, and captured the political moment of London in the late ’60s.

Godard’s Exilic Years in the Cinematic Wilderness

Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning) might be the most important film from this period, though it’s not the most entertaining. Godard isolated his actors (the great Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto) in a vast, blank abyss of nothingness, where they took in information from the radio or television while conversing. Godard narrated the surreal experiment, creating a kind of essay film that he would replicate in many ways in subsequent years. Le Gai Savoir was produced for French television, but they rejected it; Godard attempted to screen it in theaters, but the French government banned it. Apparently, the filmmaker had become too radical.

Godard wandered the cinematic wilderness for a decade, creating rambling political experiments that were brilliant in their use of then-advanced technology but found no audience; movies like Six Times Two: Over and Under Communication and France/tour/détour/deux enfants seemed off-putting just by their titles alone. The biggest development for Godard (personally, politically, and cinematically — they were all the same for him) was his relationship with Anne-Marie Miéville, a photographer working at a pro-Palestine bookstore that he met in 1970.

For more than half a century, Godard and the marvelous Ms. Miéville were intimately close, romantically and professionally. She wrote scripts, edited, and directed alongside Godard, ushering in a new era of films for the great director. Possibly the greatest couple in the history of filmmaking, they stayed together until the end of his life, where she sat with him while he passed on — they collaborated even in death.

The Unpredictable Godard, Farting and Fuming

     Cannon Films

From the 1980s on, nobody could really pin Godard down. He claimed to have been making his ‘second first film’ with Sauve Qui Peut (la vie), or Every Man for Himself, a funny masterpiece with Jacques Dutronc and Isabelle Huppert. The film brought him mainstream success once again, which Godard almost seemed to resent, immediately returning to more difficult films. The visually stunning film Passion found him continuing to interrogate the nature of art but with more beauty than ever before, recreating famous paintings as tableaux vivants.

It was here and with his excellent subsequent films (Prénom Carmen, Je vous salue, Marie) that Godard began utilizing his famous referential technique, in which classical music, the visual arts, philosophy, poetry, and other films would be referenced and hybridized into fascinating new amalgams. It’s a technique he’d always flirted with, but it became more assured and brilliant from this point forward. He also evolved his essay filmmaking form, creating video masterpieces like the decade-long Histoire(s) du cinéma, perhaps the most important movie about movies.

He also began acting in his own movies, often with surprising hilarity, farting and mumbling onscreen with an exaggeratedly long cigar and a five o’clock shadow from another time zone. He entered into his own films more prominently with Prénom Carmen, followed by a hilarious but oddly touching role in the brilliant King Lear. If audiences thought that they had Godard understood, that postmodern masterpiece proved them wrong; starring Woody Allen, Burgess Meredith, Molly Ringwald, and Norman Mailer (not to mention the great director Leos Carax), the film remains one of the most bizarre, intellectual, and beautiful of all modern-day Shakespeare adaptations.

Maybe Godard Made Too Many Movies For Too Few People

     Lux Compagnie

Godard continued, fluctuating between short experiments and gorgeous feature films that hardly anyone saw; he was almost too prolific for his own good, making roughly 130 films (his IMDb page is a veritable short story, along with being a history of the medium itself). People couldn’t keep up, or they were no longer interested, Godard being relegated to a relic of the radical past, while neoliberalism and unchecked late capitalism transformed the world and cinema into its own image. He had always been controversial and difficult though; Roger Ebert wrote in 1969:

If some people disliked Godard’s films in 1969, by the ’90s there was hardly anyone left to criticize them; audiences had stopped attending, and critics had largely stopped caring. There were far too many new enfant terribles on the cinematic scene at that time, from Lars Von Trier and Harmony Korine to Quentin Tarantino and the aforementioned Leos Carax, all of whom were influenced by Godard. The filmmaker often lamented that cinema is dead; had his films died as well?

This most brilliant of all modern directors is heartily disliked by a great many people who pay to see his movies. No wonder. Godard is a perverse and difficult director who is deeply into his own universe. He couldn’t care less about making a traditional movie with a storyline. His films require active participation and imagination by the audience, and most movie audiences are lazy.

Godard is Dead. Long Live Godard.

     Wild Bunch

Godard came back in a big way with Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love) in 2001. A gorgeous, controversial film shot by Julien Hirsch and Christophe Pollock, In Praise of Love literally bifurcated Godard’s style, splitting the past and present by filming one half in black and white and the other in incredible color, making one half more of a narrative and the other half more experimental. This was a film that finally got Godard some attention, with some critics hating it (surely a compliment for Godard) and others adoring it; Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it the best film of the decade, “one of the most unusual, tremulous, and understated of love stories, as well as the story of love itself […] Godard’s third first film, thus something of a rebirth of cinema.” Brody knows that cinema and Godard go hand in hand.

The attention sustained itself, as Godard pushed his creative juices to their highest capacity even as he aged into octogenarian status. Notre Musique from 2004 remains one of the most beautiful political films ever made; Film Socialisme is a visually revolutionary film that redefined the potential of HD digital photography; Goodbye to Language continued his technological experimentation, creating arguably the best 3D film ever made with one of the greatest shots in all of film history. Godard left us with The Image Book, his final feature film, a poignant, powerful essay on the state of cinema that won the only Special Palme d’Or in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

There is so much more to be said about Jean-Luc Godard, and surely people will say it if they haven’t already. Tributes are pouring in for the director, and memorials will stack up. If anyone wants to truly honor him, though, they’d make a film. Godard did more than just make movies — he lived them; he was cinema itself. As such, his body may be gone, but he’s still alive. If there are eyes to see and ears to hear, Godard will be alive because his films will be loved; if there is still cinema in any capacity, there is still Godard. In his very first feature film, Breathless, a character (a director, no less) is asked, “What is your greatest ambition in life?” He responds:

To become immortal… and then die.