Godard, Jean-Luc

Godard, Jean-Luc (zhäN-lük gôdär`), 1930–, French film director and scriptwriter, b. Paris. Godard is probably the most influential of the French New Wave directors. His highly personal films are marked by a freewheeling approach to style, content, and story structure, and he initiated techniques that broke with traditional film narrative. In Breathless (1959), he introduced the jump cut, editing scenes so that only the beginning and end of an action are shown. He also used written material, interviews, and other documentarylike techniques to confuse the boundary between fiction and fact. Later films, such as La Chinoise (1967) and Weekend (1968), are openly essayistic in form, less concerned with character and story than with ideas and analysis of social issues.

Increasingly interested in Marxist and Maoist philosophies of Communism, for a period Godard subsumed his identity into that of a filmmaking collective. After some years of inactivity, he returned in 1980 with Every Man for Himself and has since directed such films as Hail Mary (1985) and Hélas pour Moi (1994), both of which explore the possibility of the divine playing a role in everyday contemporary life, and Forever Mozart (1996). His eight-part Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98) is an extremely personal meditation on the history and nature of cinematic art. Godard's 21st-century films include In Praise of Love (2001), a mournful study of the precarious nature of historical memory in a mass-media age and the three-part Notre Musique (2004), which uses the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy to examine humanity's thirst for destruction and document the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Bibliography

See his autobiographical film, JLG/JLG (1994); Godard on Godard (1968; tr. 1972, repr. 1986), a collection of early writings; T. Mussman, ed., Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology (1968); C. MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2004); studies by C. Barr (1970), R. Roud (1980), C. MacCabe (1981), Y. Loshitzky (1995), W. W. Dixon (1997), K. Silverman and H. Farocki (1998), and D. Sterritt (1999).

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Godard, Jean-Luc

(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).

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Godard, Jean-Luc 

Born Dec. 3, 1930, in Paris. French motion picture director and scenario writer.

Godard is one of the founders of the movement in French motion pictures called the new wave. He is an ethnographer by education. He began to work in motion pictures in the 1950’s, gaining renown through the film Breathless (1959). In the films Le Petit Soldat (1960), My Life to Live (1961), Les Carabiniers (1962), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), and others, the director sought to prove the impotence of individuals pitted against capitalist society and the futility of their efforts to oppose it. Godard’s heroes (or, by definition of the new-wave theorists, his antiheroes) are alienated from the bourgeois world, but they also repudiate socialism, preferring their own anarchic, individualistic concept of personal freedom. The rhythmically impulsive montage, the frequent use of a hand-held camera and unposed shots, which create the impression that the film is a documentary of events, and the use of collage methods, borrowed from modernistic painting, create the peculiar style of the director’s films. At the end of the 1960’s, Godard made films in which he sought to reflect acute problems of contemporary life (Made in USA, La Chinoise, Weekend, One Plus One, Truth, Le Vent d’est, and others), but the deliberately underscored equivocation of Godard’s ideological position, which is an expression of typically petit bourgeois anarchistic rebelliousness that in most cases is coupled with outright anticom-munist tendencies, devaluates the social and artistic importance of these efforts.

REFERENCES

Collet. J. Jean-Luc Godard. [Paris. 1968.]
Eberhard. K. Jan-Luc Godard. Warsaw, 1970.

S. I. IUTKEVICH