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It just wouldn’t be a Queen Libby death without someone who would otherwise claim the month as their own dying right after…
French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard has exited the world as he made his career, jump cutting to his end via assisted suicide aged 91 rather than gradually and seamlessly waiting for natural causes to sink in its talons. His bold approach to filmmaking inspired legions of directing heavyweights from Scorsese to Tarantino, and given his assertion that “a film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order”, we can only assume Morecambe and Wise too. He was picked by two teams, both themes. Not the type of name you’d expect to be exclusively picked by themes, but so it goes!
Jean-Luc Godard
3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022, aged 91
2 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀 + 😲 = 8 POINTS)
Okay, that jump cut went a little too far, let’s rewind a bit…
Godard first ventured into the world of film as a critic under the wings of magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and built ties with rising New Wave icons such as François Truffaut. He soon eyed the director’s chair, and dabbled in short films that presaged his groundbreaking cinematic approach. He made major splash with his debut feature film, Breathless, which starred Jean-Paul Belmondo as a Humphrey Bogart-modeled petty criminal on the lam and Jean Seberg as his American girlfriend. Laden with references to literature and other films (Godard’s admiration of Bogie particularly worn on its sleeve), Breathless shredded the cinema rule book through its unconventional and bold style, using eye-catching jump cuts to progress the story. The film put Godard (and Belmondo, a Godard regular in the coming years) on the map.
Godard himself would craft a personal mystique, with a sunglasses-and-cigarettes visage that oozed cool. His next film, The Little Soldier, scathingly critiqued the Algerian War and portended recurring political themes in Godard’s oeuvre. It also introduced a neophyte Anna Karina, who shortly became Godard’s muse and wife. Karina was at the forefront of some of Godard’s most acclaimed films in the early 60s, including Pierrot le Fou (where a pair of runaways turn to a rollercoaster crime spree) and A Woman Is a Woman (an ode to the Hollywood musical). Contempt, a filmmaking drama starring Brigitte Bardot, was another of his most venerated films from this era and includes Godard hero Fritz Lang as himself. The Godard-Karina marriage itself was stormy, fraught with fighting and Godard often MIA for weeks, and it collapsed in 1965. Karina died in 2019, and the pair talked to each other as often as Cliff Richard during their final decades.
The May 68 social unrest that froze the French economy had a marked effect on Godard, who led protests to shut down that year’s Cannes Film Festival. His overtly-political experimental works of the era captured the zeitgeist of the tumult though lacked the reach of his earlier films. By this point the cultural legacy of Godard and the other French New Wave directors was already apparent, with New Wave movements cropping up all over the world, such as the American New Wave that included the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, Jaws, Blondie, the Go-Go’s… wait, I’m getting my New Waves mixed up.
Godard himself withdrew into cranky seclusion, feuding with many in the industry – along with the aforementioned Karina, he punched the producer of his Rolling Stones documentary in the face over creative differences, and his friendship with Truffaut collapsed in the 70s during a vicious spat that never saw them reconcile. He jeered modern Hollywood and scoffed away awards. There was a cloud of anti-Semitism suspicions, though it’s ambiguous whether this was actual anti-Semitism or just him thinking the Israeli government were a bunch of shitters. Careerwise, from the 80s on, he largely returned to the conventional (by his standards), though continued to experiment and provoke. Histoire(s) du cinema, a chronicling of the history of film, took a decade to complete and became the best regarded of his later work. He tinkered with 3D in the 2010s, and his final feature film was released in 2018.