Jean-Luc Godard was the North Star of cinema

Godard was also one of the most important media artists of the 1960s who, no less than the Beatles or Andy Warhol, recognized the echoes of celebrity and art and brought them together in his cinematic and socially transformative activities. (He admitted that he likened his own artistic and personal career to that of Bob Dylan.) Yet, like many artistic heroes of the sixties, Godard found that his public image and his private life, his fame and his ambitions conflict. He took drastic measures to escape his legend as he pursued and developed his art in ways that puzzled many of his admirers and those in the press who expected nothing less than his return—especially to those styles and methods that had made him made known. In the late sixties, he withdrew from the film business under the influence of left-wing political ideology and activism. In the seventies he left Paris for Grenoble and then moved to the small Swiss town of Rolle. When he returned to the industry, he did so by exploring his personal life and the history of cinema together, through an increasingly daring implementation and reimagining of new technologies. What he retained until the very end of his career (his last feature film, The Image Book, was released in 2018) was his sense of youth and his love of adventure. In old age, he remains more playful, more provocative and simply younger in spirit than younger directors.

Godard was brought up in bourgeois comfort and propriety – his father was a doctor, his mother a medical assistant and the scion of a large banking family – and his artistic interests were encouraged, but his journey into the cinema was a self-conscious rebellion against his cultural heritage. He was looking for his own culture, and with his largely self-taught passion for movies he found one that was decidedly modern – and which, with his intellectual fervor, he helped to elevate to equality with the classics. Godard’s name and work are, of course, inseparable from the French New Wave, a group of directors who began as critics in the fifties (especially in cinema notebooks, which was founded in 1951). Instead of going to a film school (such a thing already existed in France), they learned by watching films – new in theaters and at press screenings and classics at the Cinémathèque and in the film clubs of Paris. Godard, along with his friends and colleagues Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer (who was also the elder statesman of the group) shared a Catholic love of movies. They recognized the genius of directors (such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks) who were then often considered either anonymous craftsmen or vulgar showmen, largely scorned or ignored by established critics. At the age of twenty-one, Godard published a theoretical treatise in Notebooks, “Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” which is one of the great manifestos of strictly grounded artistic freedom; at twenty-five he wrote an instant classic essay on film montage, or “montage,” a word that came to define his career. Although all his best New Wave cohorts were critics, Godard was the only one who openly and explicitly turned his films into living works of film criticism—who made his filmed fictions overlap with his theoretical inclinations and passions to viewing.

Many of the commonplaces of modern cinema bear Godard’s watermark, starting with one he himself had trouble getting over — the jump-shot director he used on Breathless when he had to cut it down to ninety minutes. He preferred simply eliminating segments of footage to eliminating entire scenes. Before Godard, the jump was a mistake, a sign of amateurism; in his hands it was a crash of cymbals announcing that the rules of cinema were to be broken. He gave collaborative cinema its modern primacy when he joined forces with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the late 1960s and then with his partner (now his widow), Anne-Marie Miéville, in the 1970s. Beginning in the same decade, he introduced video into his films, and with Miéville made two extensive television series (one lasting about five hours, the other about ten) – for which he invented hybrid essay-like forms that pushed the outer limits of creative non-fiction . In his return to professional features, 1980’s Every Man for Himself, he created a kind of analytical slow-motion based on video methods that he integrated into filmed fiction. And as prolific as he was during his first burst of artistic fervor, he was even more so by the time of his comeback—although he made fewer feature films (‘only’ eighteen from 1980 onwards), he also created video essays, including the monumental “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which were crucibles, epilogues, and living notebooks for his features.

From the beginning, Godard’s work was politically engaged; his second feature, Le Petit Soldat, 1960, about espionage battles during France’s war in Algeria, was banned by France. Even after abandoning the Marxist orthodoxy of his work in the late sixties and early seventies, he never abandoned politics: his 1987 King Lear was rooted in the Chernobyl disaster; his 1996 film “Forever Mozart” dramatized the civil war in the former Yugoslavia; and his 2010 feature film is titled Film Socialisme. However, having jumped off the sixties bullet train, Godard never fully returned to the center of time. His later films are, in my opinion, even more innovative, even more original than the ones that made his name. They are also more challenging. If his earlier films show that anything is possible, his later ones push the possibilities so far that they practically prevent younger directors from even trying. His way of maintaining his own cinematic youth was largely to captivate the new generation of young filmmakers with his own artistic power. There is a lofty malice in his later work that comes out similarly in interviews (of which he was a deft dialectician throughout his career). It comes off not as a grumpy old man’s rejection of his heirs, but as eternal youth’s struggle for a place in the world and a chance to make it a little better than it found it. After moving to the periphery, he became an outsider again and lived, worked—and fought—as one. To the end of his life, he was still struggling to work his way up and in, even from the heights of cinema history he had climbed.