Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022)!
Godard’s work was always fast, furious, but also serene and with time it became more perverse; his seriousness and commitment bothered. His point of view always bore a kind of seduction of bad boy and a visual aesthetic superimposition that highlights a glamour without equal.
Godard was alive but trapped by a universe of philosophy and comparison, and one could say that he was one of the pioneers of modernist cinema; in the middle of his career, he also tried a similar approach of Bertolt Brecht, but this time it’s in the cinema, But it didn’t really work if you can judge it that way.
He was a very knotty provider of erudite futility. His mind was full of intellectual order, and a system of defense of a sensitive young loner, certainly he was protected by his references but also locked on himself. It could have lasted forever, and it almost lasted, but Godard chose to leave. According to his own words via assisted suicide: “It was his decision and it was important for him that it be known,” reads a statement from his collaborator and third wife Anne-Marie Miéville.
Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie” (1962)
In this movie, which is perhaps the most elaborate or the most sensitive of Godard’s early films, Anna Karina plays a girl who stares at Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and wants to be in a film, but she’s not; the irony is that Karina’s character is herself in a movie, but she’s not aware of it.
But Godard is. And that explains his deep secret and secret satisfaction and why he made as many films as he did, as if he had found a secret of eternal life for himself and for Karina, his girlfriend.
She struggled with her own passivity and finally needed the strength to escape her gaze, even if she was forever marked by it, and not necessarily unhappy. Karina spoke about Godard in interviews in later years.
Godard and Karina were not only lovers but also collaborators during the 1960s. But generally in the films of Jean-luc we find an absurd intention of “how I can or must love Karina” and “how it always failed”, and this more depressing when dealing with such a personal subject, because this lack of feeling and the fact that they are aware of it, explains everything else in their work together. His character in “Vivre Sa Vie” gets shot in the end, like in a cheap gangster movie.
We can say There was a little romantic who lives in Godard, but this lonely young romantic was childish and like a UFO, even in his old age…
At all stages of his long career, Godard makes us aware of the film as a film and does not feel the need to create us “a non-captive copy” of reality.
His films talk about films and how life is not up to the task or even absurd. In many of his (well-developed) scenes, he plays soft and emotional music on the soundtracks but suddenly he cuts it off abruptly, as if he says “you don’t deserve it”. (Beethoven’s string quartets are perceived by Godard as one of the highest artistic achievements.) The fact that the music turns on and plays without interruption after the power outage at the end of “Vivre Sa vie” is a sign from Godard that death could be more beautiful or higher. that life has been.
Jean-Luc Godard died on 13 September 2022 at the age of 91 in Rolle, Switzerland. The director used assisted suicide, a legal and supervised practice in Switzerland. His body will be cremated on September 15, and his ashes will be given to his widow.
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