Jean-Luc Godard

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