Line #5 Creator/JeanLucGodard


1	[[quoteright:310:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/1282834651-jean-luc-godard_3160.jpg]]
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3	->''"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."''
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5	Jean-Luc Godard (3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French-Swiss filmmaker.
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7	He grew up in UsefulNotes/{{Switzerland}} but was born in UsefulNotes/{{Paris}} and made his career as a film critic there, writing for André Bazin's influential magazine ''Les Cahiers du Cinéma'' and belonging to a circle of friends that included Creator/EricRohmer, Creator/FrancoisTruffaut, Creator/ClaudeChabrol, Jacques Rivette [[AndZoidberg and others]]. Together they dreamed of shaking up what they felt was the inferior French films of the '50s, taking inspiration from the American, Italian and Japanese films they eagerly devoured at the city's Cinemathèque Française and believing the director was the artist and that it was possible to make films which were as personal as a book was to an author. The [[MediaNotes/FrenchNewWave Nouvelle Vague]] was born, along with the concept of MediaNotes/TheAuteurTheory.
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9	Godard became something bigger. He might be to the movies what Creator/JamesJoyce is to literature, Creator/PabloPicasso is to painting, and Music/DavidBowie or Music/BobDylan to popular music. These artists had a firm awareness of the history of their mediums, a huge range of references and a strong intellectual vision and they expanded the medium to areas never before seen, inventing new techniques that were controversial at the time but eventually provoked [[FollowTheLeader many imitators]] who tended to be more successful than their inspirations. Godard was no different.
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11	His films are studied and viewed around the world. They are taught in film schools whose graduates go on to create ad films and music videos or go into other fields but who follow his inspiration or react against it one way or another. He had a huge following among the MediaNotes/NewHollywood. Creator/FrancisFordCoppola at one point presented his films in America for release and he and Godard planned to collaborate. Creator/MartinScorsese has always testified to his influence as well. That said, in later years, he became very unflattering to American films and especially the films of Creator/StevenSpielberg though he liked Creator/WoodyAllen enough to make a movie about him (''Meeting WA'') and cast him in one of his works. In Europe, he's an inescapable influence with directors dividing movies pre and post Godard with his MeaningfulName and his own love for puns leading to the easy word association of God/Art, and basically anyone wanting to go to the most elitist film schools in France must have watched and dissected several of his films.
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13	He's famous in America primarily for his [[TheSixties '60s]] films which strongly influenced college students and rock musicians at the time. He collaborated with Music/{{The Rolling Stones\|Band}} and captured the original recording sessions of "Sympathy for the Devil" for ''Film/OnePlusOne''. During this period he made many radical films which were [[GenreDeconstruction Genre Deconstructions]] of FilmNoir, [[BMovie B-Movies]], ScienceFiction, TheWestern, and TheMusical and even made a film about film-making (''Film/{{Contempt}}'', starring Creator/BrigitteBardot and director Creator/FritzLang AsHimself). ''Film/{{Breathless}}'' pioneered the JumpCut which was later adopted and overused by later directors and ironically in the kind of action films and music videos which were worlds away from the kind of films Godard made. He himself became involved in radical leftist political causes which, made him unfashionable in the United States and a divisive figure throughout the rest of the world. In spite of this, he remained active right up until the end of his life, still as untamed and unpredictable as ever.
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15	Godard was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions ahead of the 2010 UsefulNotes/{{Academy Award}}s, presented at the Governors Awards event rather than the main ceremony. Godard refused to attend, partly because (as he put it) [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks "It's not the Oscars!"]] and partly due to his [[{{Pun}} contempt]] for awards in general.
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17	Godard also had a history of collaboration with his romantic partners. His first wife was the actress Creator/AnnaKarina, who served as his muse during the sixties and acted in some of his most famous films. His second wife was the actress Anne Wiazemsky (who starred in ''Film/AuHasardBalthazar''). He also had a relationship with filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville, who collaborated with him behind the camera, co-writing several of his movies.
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19	With the deaths of Jacques Rivette in 2016 and Creator/AgnesVarda in 2019, Godard became [[LastOfHisKind the last surviving director of the French New Wave]], until his death by assisted suicide in 2022 at the age of 91, at his home in Rolle, Switzerland (it is legalized there). The company that helped him end his life indicated that he chose to do so because he suffered from multiple kinds of pain due to his old age.
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21	Creator/MichelHazanavicius directed a {{biopic}} in 2017, titled ''Redoubtable'' (''Le Redoutable''), about Godard's affair with Anne Wiazemsky.
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23	!!Works by Jean-Luc Godard with their own trope pages:
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25	[[index]]
26	* ''Film/{{Breathless}}'' (1960)
27	* ''Film/UneFemmeEstUneFemme'' (1961)
28	* ''Film/VivreSaVie'' (1962)
29	* ''Film/{{Contempt}}'' (1963)
30	* ''Film/BandeAPart'' (1964)
31	* ''Film/{{Alphaville}}'' (1965)
32	* ''Film/PierrotLeFou'' (1965)
33	* ''Film/MasculinFeminin'' (1966)
34	* ''Film/TwoOrThreeThingsIKnowAboutHer'' (1967)
35	* ''Film/{{Weekend\|1967}}'' (1967)
36	* ''Film/OnePlusOne'' (1968)
37	[[/index]]
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39	!!Tropes associated with Godard:
40	* AnachronicOrder: Though Godard was famous for saying, "Every film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end - but not necessarily in that order", oddly enough, for the most part, his movies were an aversion of this trope, as most of them went from beginning to end, even if the stories weren't straightforward. There are exceptions, as with the deaths of [[spoiler:Camille and Prokosch]] in ''Film/{{Contempt}}'' possibly being a FlashForward, and the sequence in ''Film/Weekend1967'', when the two garbagemen deliver monologues while Godard [[{{Flashback}} flashes back to earlier scenes]] and also [[FlashForward shows us bits of upcoming scenes]], but that's about it.
41	* CoolShades: The man himself and a number of his characters are frequently seen sporting them.
42	* {{Deconstruction}}: As mentioned above, his 1960's movies (up through ''Film/Weekend1967'' took various genres and turned them inside out. ''Film/{{Breathless}}'', for example, showed what would happen in RealLife to someone who tried to live as if they were in a gangster film.
43	* HesBack: After over a decade of making either experimental films or essay films (with the exception of ''Tout Va Bien'', starring Creator/JaneFonda and Creator/YvesMontand), Godard returned to more conventional filmmaking in 1980 with ''Every Man For Himself'' (starring Creator/IsabelleHuppert), which he considered his second "first" film.
44	* TheMovieBuff: Godard, of course, started out as a movie critic, and most of his movies in the 1960s contain numerous movie references, as in ''Film/{{Breathless}}'', when the main character sees a poster of Creator/HumphreyBogart for his last movie, ''Film/TheHarderTheyFall1956'', and says in a reverent tone, "Bogie".
45	* ProductionPosse: In addition to working with each of his wives (Creator/AnnaKarina, Anne Wiazemsky, and Anne-Marie Mieville) several times (Karina appeared in seven of his films and Wiazemsky in eight, while Mieville worked with him on a number of films), Godard also worked with Creator/JeanPierreLeaud on nine films, Laszlo Svabo on seven films, and Creator/JeanPaulBelmondo on three feature films.[[note]]as well as the short film ''Charlotte and her Jules''[[/note]] In the 1960's, he also worked frequently with cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who worked with other MediaNotes/FrenchNewWave directors such as Creator/FrancoisTruffaut).
46	* TakeThat: For all the vocal reverence and influence acknowledgement many contemporary US directors have had towards him (such as Creator/StevenSpielberg, Creator/MartinScorsese and Creator/QuentinTarantino), he didn't think much of it and even loathed the way they saw/did cinema. In one of his last films, a soulless movie production company that's eager to acquire the rights to a book is named "Spielberg".
47	* TrackingShot: Used in many of his films, particularly the EpicTrackingShot of the traffic jam in ''Film/Weekend1967''
48	* WeUsedToBeFriends: Godard and Creator/FrancoisTruffaut were close when they both were critics and then started out as filmmakers. However, things became strained between them when Godard moved further to the left politically (while Truffaut joined Godard in protesting at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1968, he did so out of solidarity with Henri Langlois, the Cinematheque Theater curator who had been ousted by the French government, and [[NotInThisForYourRevolution not because of the political turmoil of the time]]. Things fell completely apart between the two of them after Truffaut's ''Film/DayForNight'' came out in 1973 - Godard wrote an article where he accused Truffaut of being a liar, while Truffaut countered that Godard was a dilettante. The two never made up, though after Truffaut died, Godard did write a tribute where he recalled seeing movies with Truffaut when they were both younger.
49	* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
50	** After Creator/FrancoisTruffaut turned down ''Film/BonnieAndClyde'', Godard was offered the film, but after he and the producers reached an impasse (he wanted to set the film in the present day and make it on the cheap, while the producers wanted to keep it true to the period), he dropped out.
51	** Before he decided to make ''Every Man for Himself'', Godard was considering making a movie about Bugsy Siegel, with Creator/RobertDeNiro (as Siegel) and Creator/DianeKeaton, and produced by Creator/FrancisFordCoppola, but when Keaton decided not to do the film, Godard dropped out as well.[[note]]Ironically, just as Creator/WarrenBeatty went on to appear in ''Film/BonnieAndClyde'' after Godard left, he also appeared in his own film about Siegel, ''Film/{{Bugsy}}''.[[/note]]
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Context Creator / JeanLucGodard