Best known for his iconoclastic, seemingly improvised shooting style as well as rigid radicalism, Godard made his mark with a series of increasingly politicized films in the 1960s, before enjoying an unlikely career revival in recent years, with films like Film Socialisme and Goodbye to Language as he experimented with digital technology. Born in Paris in 1930, Godard grew up and went to school in Nyon, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. After returning to Paris after finishing school in 1949, Godard found a natural habitat in the intellectual “cinema clubs” that flourished in the French capital after the war and proved the melting pot of the French New Wave. Having met the critic André Bazin and future fellow directors François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, Godard began writing for the new film magazines, including Bazin’s soon-to-be-influential Cahiers du Cinema. Godard struck a wild note from the start, championing traditional Hollywood filmmaking and promoting Howard Hawks and Otto Preminger as more modern figures. Godard also had a respect for Humphrey Bogart, which would show in his first feature, Breath, released in 1960. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless. Photo: Raymond Cauchetier/Courtesy James Hyman Gallery Before that, however, Godard eased his way into filmmaking through a series of short films, such as Charlotte and Veronica or All the Boys Named Patrick in 1957, that foreshadowed his relaxed, obviously slippery filmmaking style. An earlier idea by Truffaut, about a petty criminal and his girlfriend, had been abandoned, but Godard thought he could turn it into a feature and asked permission to use it. Truffaut, meanwhile, had achieved great success with his own film, The 400 Blows, and his influence helped Godard launch his project. Shot on the streets of Paris in 1959, with negligible use of artificial lighting and a script written daily, Breathless became a bona fide cultural phenomenon upon its release, making a star of Jean-Paul Belmondo and winning Godard for Best Director. at the Berlin Festival. Godard continued to make a series of important films in the 1960s at a furious pace. His next film, Le Petit Soldat, proposed that the French government condone torture and was banned until 1963, but it was also the film in which Godard met his future wife, Anna Karina, as well as coining his most famous aphorism, “Cinema is true at 24 frames per second.” Other highlights included A Woman Is a Woman, a self-referential homage to the Hollywood musical, which again starred Karina, alongside Belmondo, and won more Berlin awards. The outrageous , epic filmmaking Contempt, starring Michel Piccoli, Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Fritz Lang, and Alphaville, a strange hybrid of film noir and sci-fi. Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli in Contempt. Photo: Nana Productions/REX By 1965 Godard’s marriage to Karina had ended in divorce. Their last film together was Made in USA, an homage to American pulp fiction that ran into copyright issues in the US. By this time Godard had also fully identified with the revolutionary politics of the time, and his film production reflected this: he founded a film group named after Dziga Vertov, the Soviet director of Man with a Movie Camera, who helped close. at the 1968 Cannes festival in sympathy with the student riots in Paris and collaborated with the young Marxist student Jean-Pierre Gorin on Tout Va Bien, a study of a sausage factory strike with Jane Fonda. Godard also met, in 1970, the filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville, who would become a regular collaborator and later partner after the collapse of his second marriage to Anne Wiazemsky, who had starred in Godard’s 1967 study of radicals students, La Chinoise. Goodbye to Language. Photo: StudioCanal As the 1970s progressed, Godard’s harsh political and intellectual stances began to lose favor and his work waned in the 1980s – although, perhaps, his 1987 film King Lear reshaped as a post-apocalyptic farce featuring a gangster called Learo, it was financed by action specialists Cannon Films. His 2001 film In Praise of Love marked a comeback, selected for the Cannes festival, while the release of Film Socialisme in 2010 preceded the awarding in 2010 of an honorary Oscar (the citation read: “For passion. For confrontation. For a “new kind of cinema”). Typically, Godard failed to cash in on this in person. His 2014 film Goodbye to Language saw him win a major filmmaking award, the Cannes Jury Prize, and the Image Book, which was selected for the Cannes festival in 2018, won a “special Palme d’Or”.
