Jean-Luc Godard Is Dead: The Cinema’s Highest Modernist Was 91

Writing in the winter of 1963-64, when he had six feature films under his belt but was still contributing to the famed French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard wrote of Orson Welles: “All of us will always owe him everything.”

The words occurred to me this morning when I learned of the death of Jean-Luc Godard yesterday, at the age of 91. The provocative director from out of the French New Wave of the 1950s taught cinema how to see the modern world. From his raw, nervous, funny, romantic off kilter 1959 noir Breathless, his feature debut, to his penultimate film, the confounded, confounding (in a good way) 3-D effort called Farewell to Language, in which he invented a double-perspective shot that no one had ever even dreamed of before, he was a tireless innovator who wore his genius in an always provocative way. His influence will always be incalculable.

Writing of a still image from Breathless, the novelist and critic Gilbert Adair noted: “[T]he photograph could have been taken yesterday for Esquire or Vanity Fair. And if Godard’s critical stock has fallen of late, the truth is that, as one of the century’s supreme inventors of forms, his genius has been usurped by its own posterity. Moreover, the evidence that not merely the cinema but the world itself has become Godardian is staring us all in the face.” This was spot on when Adair wrote it, in 1995, and still somehow true today.

Born to well-off French-Swiss parents in 1930, Godard went movie-mad as he reached his 20s and started writing for Cahiers shortly thereafter. The magazine was a proving ground, or maybe a petri dish, for critics who were to turn filmmakers: Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut, who was to become Godard’s close friend and sometime collaborator (he wrote the story, such as it was, for Breathless) among them. Given his subsequent radicalism, some of Godard’s enthusiasms as a critic look unusual today: he was really big on All About Eve creator Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for instance. (Truffaut was more of a firebrand, tarring a stylist like Minnelli as a Hollywood “slave” for instance.) But Breathless, with its opening full of jump-cuts, its non-judgmental depiction of amoral criminality, and new perspective of movie-star charisma embodied by lead actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, was arguably the brashest of the New Wave debuts. The image of Belmondo staring at a poster for a Humphrey Bogart picture, rubbing his lower lip with his thumb and saying “Bogie” was an announcement for self-conscious cinema: intellectual but cheeky. Two years before Andy Warhol debuted his Campbell Soup can, Breathless announced pop art via cinema.

And thus began a significant, exhilarating run. Like Warhol, like the Beatles, like the Stones (with whom Godard made a film, One Plus One aka Sympathy for the Devil, in 1968), Godard can be said to have BEEN the 1960s. The two portraits he made of his then-wife Anna Karina, 1961’s A Woman Is A Woman and 1962’s Vivre sa vie (My Life To Live), are remarkable contrasts. The first a widescreen color romp that takes a page from Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It and reads it out loud on the Paris streets. “It feels like the camera is flying,” Martin Scorsese marveled to me in a conversation I had with him in 2020 on the movies that informed his 1990 classic Goodfellas. The second was a measured, somber, black-and-white study of a streetwalker. Godard’s longtime cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, was instrumental in achieving the singular look of these films. Godard and Coutard constantly experimented with handheld techniques and fast film stocks that didn’t require filmmakers to hang a lot of light to get an image. Near-documentary immediacy was the thing — until it wasn’t, as the meticulous stagings of later films such as 1982’s Passion, also made with Coutard, testify.

In 1963 Godard dallied with Hollywood, making Contempt for producers Joseph E. Levine and Carlo Ponti and using an international cast including sex goddess Brigitte Bardot and American tough guy Jack Palance, with screen legend Fritz Lang playing himself. He exercised his own contempt for the money guys when, after they demanded nude shots of Bardot, he executed them, but through colored filters corresponding with the French flag’s tricolor. After which he picked himself up and continued to startle, with films like Alphaville (a sci-fi noir shot entirely in contemporary Paris settings that amalgamate in Godard’s vision to a kind of kitsch futurism), Pierrot le Fou (1966), and Masculin Feminine, the latter examining a younger generation Godard dubbed “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” The filmmaker’s political bent tended ever more leftward, and the Paris strike of May 1968 landed him squarely in the radical camp. He decided a new way of making films was necessary.

I don’t think any filmmaker has been called “pretentious” more than Godard. In any event, his talky, elliptical, sometimes deliberately boring films of post-’68, made in collaboration with Jean Pierre Gorin and later his life partner Anne Marie Mieville, motivated critics to break out the “p” word almost reflexively. Pop art Godard was replaced by (provisional) Maoist Godard. A Godard who also worked a great deal in television, even doing commercials (he contained multitudes). Richard Brody’s monumental 2008 biography of the man, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, persuasively argues that this period was as artistically significant as any other in Godard’s career. Godard not being any “fun” did not, after all, equal Godard not being great.

The old monster (as critic Colin McCabe referred to him; we’ll get to that) returned to conventional filmmaking — such as it ever could be when it’s Godard — with 1980’s Sauve qui Peut (Every Man For Himself/Slow Motion) starring pop star Jacques Dutronc as a Godard surrogate. Through the ’80s, Godard started appearing as himself, or a variation of himself, in his films, adding eccentric comic value. He’s dirty-old-man Uncle Jean in 1983’s First Name: Carmen, an almost sleazily erotic examination of what Godard called “women’s perfidy” back when he was a critic; he played the A/V-cord dreadlocked “Professor Plugg” in 1987’s amazing, and criminally hard to see, King Lear, the result of a misbegotten deal between the filmmaker, the writer Norman Mailer, and the moguls of notorious studio Cannon Films. The picture also features Mailer, Burgess Meredith, Woody Allen, and wait for it, Molly Ringwald, who apparently didn’t hate the experience.

One actor who did hate the experience was Jane Fonda, who wrote disparagingly of Godard in her memoir My Life So Far. She appeared in Godard’s 1972 labor-union film Tout va Bien and was struck by the irony of how, given the subject matter, Godard was so dismissive and imperious with his own film crew. Despite his drollery in film appearances and interviews, he was not known as a “nice guy.” In his relationship with Karina he was abusive. (Although when I interviewed the actress in 2016, the memories she recounted were mostly fond.) He famously fell out with Truffaut in the early ‘70s. In a famous 1973 letter to Godard, Truffaut calls him out for the “behavior of a shit” and accuses him of faking his radicalism, saying, “You’re the Ursula Andress of the militancy, you make a brief appearance, just in time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.” He sometimes seemed to flirt with a kind of anti-Semitism in some works (while also being one of the more perceptive critics of cinema’s depictions of the Holocaust). Agnes Varda’s 2017 film Faces Places contains a heart-rending depiction of Godard snubbing his former New Wave compatriot, for whom he appeared in her wonderful 1962 Cleo From 5 to 7, a lifetime before.

For all that, there wasn’t, it seemed, a major French performer who wouldn’t work with him, and his output in the ’80s and ’90s featured stalwarts like Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Baye, Johnny Hallyday and more. The cinema icon Alain Delon went before Godard’s camera for 1990’s Nouvelle Vague, and Godard later recalled photographing Delon “like a tree.” It was this picture that inspired Times critic Vincent Canby to bemoan “the party’s over” re Godard, but this actually reflected a critical intransigence on Canby’s part. I saw the film in Paris, when it was released, and even without English subtitles providing a crib for its dense, allusive soundtrack, it was a knockout.

His career was like no other, one in which he was not just a perpetual irritant (he even managed to piss off the Vatican with his 1985 Blessed Virgin meditation Hail Mary) but a never-ending creator not just of forms but of images, moving images; I think of the monumental tracking shot of a rural traffic jam in Weekend, and the almost rhyming tracking shot of a supermarket riot in Tout va Bien. His world was one of perpetual unrest, and his own artistic unrest will keep yielding treasures for as long as movie watching exists.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.