Jean Luc Godard

Born in Paris (December 3, 1930), he is of Swiss origin (his father was a Protestant doctor and his mother, the daughter of bankers). He studied Ethnology at the Sorbonne University and was a renowned film critic for Cahiers du cinéma. In 1954 he made his debut as a documentary filmmaker with Opération Béton , and subsequently directed four short films. His break with the traditional syntax of the Seventh Art made him famous throughout the world, influencing other contemporary filmmakers. It can be said that after Godard, the rules of film language have been practically abolished; hence he has as many detractors as supporters.

He is an anarchic author, former Marxist-Leninist and existentialist training. Aggressive and uneven work, Jean-Luc Godard has a very unique style: continuous improvisation, enormous inventiveness and imagination, with insolent reflections, alogicism and unconventional framing. There are also certain deliberate digressions, a bitter sense of humor, constant surprises and formal findings with reference to the indigenous culture of cinema. His amoral tone reaches the point of provocation and cynicism, with gratuitous scenes of intellectual and anatomical display, and with signs and minority cult quotes, which sometimes irritate the public. We find all of this in his extensive work ( At the end of the escapade , A woman is a woman , Pierrot, the madman ,Masculin-Féminin , Origen USA , Deux ou trois choses que je sait d’elle , La chinoise (La China) , Week-End ), which has been awarded several times.

Through his films, a certain romantic rebellion and a search for an unstable balance between the central character and the world that surrounds him and his intimate evolution ( Une femme mariée and Vivir su vida ) can also be appreciated. For some theorists, her aesthetic is influenced by Eisenstein’s famous “montage of attractions” and pop-art. Before the aforementioned Pierrot, the madman(1965), Godard had a devotion to Hollywood cinema, but within a great freedom of interpretation of the genres. In the second stage of his work, cinema is between art and life, the intellectual is presented as opposed to the petty-bourgeois spectacle of Hollywood; Well, in the credits it doesn’t say “directed by” but “composed by” or, sometimes, it doesn’t even appear. Jean-Luc Godard understands the film as a mosaic of fragments of life that he simply puts together.

With his bitter and pessimistic criticism, he falls into the absurd, as a method of demolition of the established order. Thus, Godard offers in his films psycho-sociological and perhaps philosophical-existential studies that are very difficult to be understood by the general public, who, sometimes, remains in the lurid subject or in the obscenity of the images. It is possible that this author goes further, but also due to his peculiar cinematographic language –or traditional anti-cinematographic one– he barely manages to communicate efficiently with the viewer. That is why many of his tapes are pedantic, boring and even produce anger or a certain boredom in the conventional public.

As for the meaning, the influence of his cinema will have to be better sought in the values ​​that it shamelessly destroys or calls into question. Marriage, family, morality, religion, social life, patriotic sense, authority, party politics, education… are overthrown through the stories it tells, without proposing any new order. There is also evidence of a predominance of the spontaneous, of doing things or acting for mere pleasure, overcoming what for this author are prejudices and inhibit the natural development of the person.

After the French May, Jean-Luc Godard dedicated himself to militant cinema –apart from the industry, associated with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the “ Dziga Vertov Group ”–, within its materialist dialectic and influencing scandal and revolutionary action . In 1979, disillusioned with the postulates of 1968 and after a stage of experimentation in video, he would return to his traditional work ( Sálvese quien puede, la vida , 1979), reflecting on his habitual themes and methods of creation ( Passion (1982) ), at the same time that he would evoke the principles of the French New Wave – which he helped create with François Truffaut – in his film Nouvelle vague (1990). After his uniqueHistoire(s) du cinéma , received an honorary Hollywood Oscar for his career.