The Franco-Swiss director, author of ‘At the End of the Escape’ and ‘Alphaville’, revolutionized cinema language from his first films in the Nouvelle Vague
His name eventually became synonymous with barren and experimental cinema. His latest feature films have hardly had a commercial in our country, apart from film clubs and museums. His own figure has been surrounded by a halo of secrecy in recent years. The gruff and brilliant Jean-Luc Godard always went against the grain, even in the time of the Nouvelle Vague, where he had a confrontation with the other great director who emerged from the movement that revolutionized the Seventh Art, his friend Francois Truffaut. For once, it’s no ’boutade’ to affirm that the death of the author of ‘At the End of the Escape’ and ‘Alphaville’ leaves behind an orphaned art that is today plunged into industrial transformation. His relatives have confirmed to the French newspaper ‘Libération’ that the legendary director passed away this Tuesday at the age of 91.
In the eyes of the cinephile, Jean-Luc Godard remains in the Olympus of the directors of the Nouvelle Vague, which adopted an “authorship policy” whose echoes reach our days. Fernando Trueba always remembers that his most famous title, ‘At the End of the Escape’, was the result of “Godard’s utter ignorance of cinema”. “Truffaut wrote the plot and put in the money he had earned with ‘The 400 Blows’. The result is one of those key films of modern cinema, which managed to connect with the mental state of the European youth at the time.
It is unfair to limit the filmmaker’s earnings to one title, but the truth is that in Spain his films are only continuously shown in film libraries and film clubs. Born in Paris in 1930, although raised and reinvented in Switzerland, Godard, like many of his contemporaries, began writing reviews in ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ and capturing a concept of cinema in short films, summarized in quotes from him who have become part of the manuals : “Travel is a moral issue” and “Photography is true, therefore film is true 24 times a second” are among the luckiest.
Aesthetic radicalism, political involvement with his time and a constant questioning of cinematographic language characterize the work of Godard, who usually sows his films with endless cultural quotations. Initially, he is influenced by the American classics (Ford, Fuller) and crime novels. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg and their muse, Anna Karina, populate the lists of ‘At the end of the escapade’, ‘Living his life’, ‘Pierrot the madman’ and ‘Alphaville’.
His militant podium in the Dziga Vertov group ended with pieces heir to Soviet propaganda cinema: ‘Pravda’ and ‘La Chinoise’ proclaim that films serve to educate the masses. Finally, the immense legacy left by the author of ‘El desprecio’ and ‘Histoire(s) de cinéma’ since the 1980s calls on the possibilities of television, video and digital image.
‘At the end of the escapade’ (A bout de souffle) is now part of pop memorabilia. Jean-Paul Belmondo, Pigalle’s sleazy mobster, runs his thumb over his lips in a gesture imitated by Bogart and copied by the Martini man; Jean Seberg, her to the ‘garçon’, shouts “New York Herald Tribune!” along the Champs-Elysées and look out for as many photos and posters as Audrey Hepburn. It has been 62 years since Jean-Luc Godard signed the business card of the Nouvelle Vague. A revolutionary film shot from the audacity that came after Truffaut shocked Cannes with ‘The 400 Blows’.
His partner in the magazine ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’ is looking for a producer at the festival and manages to convince Georges de Beauregard. There is only one problem. It has no script and has never picked up a camera. Truffaut had written the draft of a thriller years ago and his friend asks him to flip through a few pages of the script. “The theme will be the story of a young man who thinks about death and that of a girl who does not think about it,” Godard wrote to Truffaut on the eve of the shooting. “I will tell the adventures of a car thief who is in love with a girl who sells the ‘New York Herald Tribune’ and goes to French civilization class. What annoys me is that I had to insert some of my ideas into a script that belonged to you.
Godard’s feature film debut sums up the admiration that the ‘Young Turks’ in ‘Cahiers’ feel for the noir genre and for American directors such as Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, hitherto largely ignored by critics. There are no longer any ambitions to create social realism or to adapt prestigious literary texts. Seasoned war reporter, photo director Raoul Coutard camouflages himself in the streets of Paris with his small camera to follow the actors. With the Nouvelle Vague, the paraphernalia of filming, sets and spotlights disappeared.
Godard breaks all the rules. Write a dialogue as you go and let accidents change the script. In one scene, Jean Seberg, an aspiring journalist, would interview Roberto Rossellini; if this fails, Jean-Pierre Melville appears. When he has finished filming, the director has an image of two and a quarter minutes. And he decides to cut drastically without taking into account the traditional principles of assembly. There are internal breaks in the sequences, skipping the ‘chord’ or continuity in time and space of classical grammar. There are scenes where the characters wander without, seemingly, any narrative function. They even look at the camera destroying the sacred mechanism of fiction.
They are innovations of the cinematic language used in every advertisement today. But in 1960, they formed an aesthetic manifesto and laid the foundation for the “author policy,” where only the director is responsible for the film. ‘At the end of the escapade’ captured the spirit of today’s European youth. It ushered in a revolution that is still going on.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
