JEAN-LUC

GODARD
Jean-Luc Godard (born
3 December 1930) is a
Franco-Swiss filmmaker
and a leading member of
the "French New Wave.
Known for stylistic
innovations that
challenged the
conventions of
Hollywood cinema, he is
universally recognized
as the most audacious,
radical, as well as the
most influential of the
Nouvelle Vague
filmmakers. His work
reflects a fervent
knowledge of film
history, a comprehensive
understanding of
existential and Marxist
philosophy, and a
profound insight into the
fragility of human
relationships.

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard

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BIOGRAPHY

A Happy Childhood

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in the seventh

arrondissement of Paris. His father, Paul Godard, a Swiss doctor, moved the
family to Switzerland four years later. His mother Odile Monod was from a
wealthy protestant French background. Her father Julien Monod was one of
the most prominent bankers in France and a well-connected figure in literary
circles whose closest friend was the writer Paul Valery. The couple had three
other children: Rachel, born January 1st 1930, Claude, born in 1933, and
Vronique, born in 1937.

The family settled in Nyon on the shores of Lake Geneva. Paul Godard
worked in a private medical clinic nearby. The family was prosperous and
cultured Godard later described his childhood as being like 'a kind of
paradise'. During World War II the family remained in Switzerland, though
they would make occasional trips across to the French side of the lake to visit
Julian Monods estate. Young Jean-Luc was already an avid reader who, by
the age of fourteen, had graduated from childrens adventure stories to works
by authors such as Andr Gide and Andr Malraux. He was also a keen sports
fan who played tennis, skied and enjoyed football.

The Black Sheep

In 1946 Godard went to study at the Lyce Buffon in Paris where he intended
to study advanced mathematics with the intention of entering engineering
school. Instead, he became hooked on the cin-club boom in the capital and
began watching movies day and night. As a result he failed his baccalaureate
exam in 1948 and returned to Switzerland where he studied at a high school in
Lausanne and lived with his parents. Relations between father and son were
strained so Godard spent most of his spare time hanging around with other
cinema enthusiasts in Geneva. He also tried his hand at painting after
becoming interested in modern art.
After finally passing his baccalaureate, Godard returned to Paris and enrolled
at the Sorbonne in 1949. He took courses in ethnology but soon abandoned his
studies and applied to become a student at the citys leading film school
IDHEC. The school rejected his application, so instead he studied film by
watching movies at Henri Langlois Cinmatheque Francais and the Cin-club
Quarter Latin where he first became friends with two other film
fanatics: Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. It was standard practice for
them to see three or four films per day, or to spend an entire day in a single
theatre. As Godard later wrote, 'the cinema screen was the wall we had to
scale to escape from our lives'.

What Is Cinema?
Post-war Paris was a place of great philosophical and political debate. The
dominant intellectual figure was Jean-Paul Sartre, a prolific writer and
advocate of Existentialism, who poured forth novels, plays, philosophical
essays, literary criticism and political commentary. Sartre believed it essential,
after the experience of the war, that writers become engaged with politics,
taking sides if necessary. In his case that meant siding with the far left. As a

keen filmgoer and commentator on cinema himself, Sartre was opposed, along
with most of the left, to the great influx of American films that flooded Paris
after the war, seeing it as a sign of American cultural imperialism. Orson
Welless Citizen Kane was one of the films he criticised for abandoning the
'realist naivet' of pre-war Hollywood, accusing Welles of making an abstract,
intellectual film not rooted in the concerns of the masses.
One critic who opposed this view was Andr Bazin, who, in an essay
entitled The Technique of Citizen Kane, praised the film for its artistic
richness, arguing that Welles reinvented the artform with techniques such as
deep-focus to tell the story. Bazin, who believed passionately in the 'objective
reality' of the film image, believed that long takes and the use of deep focus,
as opposed to the use of editing and montage, produced a more faithful vision
of the world. His emphasis on film technique and the aesthetic and spiritual
qualities of cinema put him in opposition to leftists like Sartre who were more
concerned with films social message.
While both these thinkers influenced Godard, a younger critic proved even
more of an inspiration. Maurice Schrer, born in 1920, was a teacher and film
enthusiast. He had made his name as a critic with three articles for the
magazine La Revue du cinema in which he attempted to formulate an
ambitious and comprehensive theoretical definition of the cinema. In these
articles he rejected Bazins emphasis on the depiction of uninterrupted threedimensional space, instead arguing that it was the way a director placed
objects within that space, including actors, which gave it meaning. He also
commended the use of actors speech and gesture as a crucial element in
bringing the filmed image to life. Having read these essays, Godard began
attending the Cin-Club du Quartier Latin where Schrer, often introducing
the evenings films and presiding over the energetic debates that followed,
was the main presiding figure. Towards the end of 1949 Schrer began
publishing a magazine called La Gazette du cinema writing under the
pseudonym of Eric Rohmer.
La Gazette du cinema lasted for only five editions before it folded. Godard
contributed to almost every issue. Still only nineteen years old, he was already
writing complex articles and reviews, which revealed an assured and original
view of cinema. In his longest article, entitled Towards a Political Cinema, he
argued that cinema was not just a representation of reality but part of the
reality itself. In another piece, he stated: 'At the cinema, we do not think, we
are thought'. For him, cinema had become a transformational experience in
which the distance between the viewer and what occurred on the screen no
longer existed; by watching films you were already part of them.

A Bohemian Life
But it wasnt enough for Godard and his friends to simply watch and write
about cinema, they wanted to make films themselves. Godard began by
assisting Rohmer and Rivette with their first short films. In the case of
Rivettes Quadrille, Godard provided the money to make it, later admitting
that the funds came from stealing and selling books from his grandfather
Julien Monods collection of Paul Valery first editions. In the meantime, he
lived a bohemian existence in the left bank Saint-Germain-des-Prs area,
moving regularly between the apartments of family friends and cheap hotel
rooms. Among his closest friends was the charismatic Paul Ggauff, a
flamboyant right wing writer whose devil-may-care way of living his life
exemplified a kind of daring individuality that Godard admired and aspired to
at this time.
In December 1950, in order to avoid the draft, Godard claimed Swiss
citizenship and joined his father on a trip to New York and from there on
through the West Indies to South America. Far from relishing these new
experiences, by all accounts he spent most of his time abroad alone in his
room reading. Nevertheless his wanderings in South America, which he never
spoke about, lent him an air of mystery and adventure when he returned to
Paris in April 1951. Truffaut was one of those who noticed Godard appeared
more taciturn and withdrawn than he had been before though passion for
cinema was just as strong as ever. He threw himself into helping others make
films, in particular working closely with Eric Rohmer on a short
entitled Prsentation(later re-titled Charlotte et son steak), in which he starred
as Walter, a young man who introduces one young woman to another in the
hope of making each jealous of the other.

Cahiers Du Cinma
For the time being Godard held back from making his own movies; instead he
devoted his artistic energies to writing for the new magazine set up by Andre
Bazin and his associate Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Amongst his most important
contributions toCahiers du cinma was an article that came out in the
September 1952 issue that amounted to a kind of personal theoretical
manifesto, as well as a counter argument to an earlier article written by Bazin
in which the critic attacked the 'obsolete play of shot-reverse shot' used in
many Hollywood productions. In the piece titled Defence and Illustration of
Classical Dcoupage, Godard, writing under the pseudonym Hans Lucas,
praised the use of shot-reverse shot as crucial to conveying a characters
mental point of view and their inner life. He accused Bazin of wanting to
sacrifice this essential technique, used so skilfully by directors such as

Howard Hawks, in the interest of theoretical prejudice. It was a daring move

from a young man to contradict the views of such an esteemed critic and
reflected Godards already strong sense of self-belief.

Switzerland and the First Shorts

Towards the end of 1952, tired of living from hand to mouth and hoping for a
more direct route into the cinema, Godard stole money from the Cahiers till
and made his way back to Switzerland, where, with his mothers help, he
managed to get a job with Swiss television in Zurich. However, after stealing
money from the company safe, he was sent, first to jail, then, after his fathers
intervention, transferred to a psychiatric clinic where he spent a couple of
weeks. Following his release he went to live with his mother, who, through a
friend, managed to get Jean-Luc a job doing manual labour on a dam
construction site. While working on the dam, Godard had the idea of making a
film about it. He financed the film from his wages, hiring a cameraman to film
it, and editing it and voicing the commentary himself. As he hoped, the
corporation behind the building of the dam bought the film for publicity
purposes and he was able to quit his job there.
With the money he earned Godard moved to Geneva and made a low budget
short, Une Femme coquette. The film, based on the story Le
Signe by Maupassant, tells the story of a married woman who imitates the
gesture of a prostitute in order it pick up a man. It starred Godards close
friend Roland Tolmatchoff as the man and Maria Lysandre as the woman. The
theme of prostitution was one Godard would return to again and again in his
career.

Rise of the Hitchcocko-Hawksians

With two films under his belt and some money in his pocket, Godard was
ready to return to Paris. On arriving in the city at the start of 1956, he
discovered things had changed profoundly for his circle of friends and
colleagues. Lead by Francois Truffaut they had established Cahiers du
cinma as the leading film publication in the country. Truffauts article A
Certain Tendency of the French Cinema had aroused shock and outrage
amongst the film establishment and made a star of its young author who was
now hammering out articles for a variety of publications. He and the other
critics at the magazine, who included Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and
Eric Rohmer, were known for their love of American cinema, especially the

work of hitherto unrecognised directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard

Hawks, and their promotion of the 'politique des auteurs'.
Godard wasted no time in contributing articles of his own to Cahiers on some
of his favourite auteurs such as Otto Preminger and Nicholas Ray. He also
continued his theoretical debate with Andr Bazin within the pages of the
magazine. While Bazin continued to commend the long take for its
approximation to physical reality, Godard praised editing for rendering the
subjective essence of reality. A well-edited film, he asserted, was more truthful
to life than the uninterrupted scene rather than portraying a close
representation of reality, it seemed to provide the experience of reality itself.
Keen to establish himself as a filmmaker in his own right, Godard had
returned to Paris with a 250-page screenplay under his arm entitled Odile (the
name of his mother who had recently tragically died in a road accident), but
the producer Pierre Braunberger read it and advised him it was unfilmable.
Instead, in common with his Cahiers colleagues, he took advice from Roberto
Rossellini, the Italian neo-realist director who had befriended the group,
exhorting them to follow neorealist principles and base their films on the
reality of their own lives.

Developing A Style
Working with Rohmer, Godard sketched out a series of short films revolving
around a pair of young women, Charlotte and Veronique. The first of
these, Charlotte et Veronique, ou Tous les garcons sappellent Patrick (All the
Boys are Called Patrick), was directed by Godard from a script by Rohmer
and featured Anne Colette and Jean-Claude Brialy as a young man who picks
up two women in quick succession. Unknown to him the two women are
roommates who discover his duplicity the next day when they are walking in
the park together and catch him picking up a third girl. A second
film, Charlotte et son Jules(Charlotte and her Jules), again starred Anne
Colette this time opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo, as the jilted Jules who berates
his lover when he thinks shes come back to him, only to discover that she
only returned to pick up a toothbrush. Both films are full of personal
references to Godards own life, although the womanizer of the first was
inspired by the exploits of Paul Ggauff rather than from his own limited
experiences.
Godards next short came to him unexpectedly. Truffaut had filmed an
improvised comedy in and around the floodwaters that briefly surrounded
Paris in February 1958. Embarrassed to be making a comedy amidst the
devastation and unsure how to finish the film, Truffaut handed it over to

Godard, who, later in the year, edited the footage into some kind of continuity,
and wrote dialogue and a voice over which was later dubbed. This text, rich in
puns, references and quotations, combined with unexpected editing and
soundtrack juxtapositions, made the film a surprisingly prescient forerunner of
his future film style.

A Waiting Game
While Godard experimented on shorts, his friends were making increasing
inroads into the professional film business. Chabrol, who had been working in
the publicity department of Twentieth Century Foxs Paris office since 1955,
quit his post after two year to make his debut feature Le Beau Serge. He
arranged to have Godard hired in his place, a move that proved fortuitous in a
number of ways. Working in the publicity department of a major studio,
Godard learnt the strategies that would help bout de souffle (Breathless)
become an unexpected success on its release two years later. He also met and
befriended the producer Georges de Beauregard, an association crucial to his
future career.
In the summer of 1958, after leaving Fox, Godard took over from Truffaut
who was about to make his own first feature as film critic at the
magazine Arts. Through other contacts he also picked up additional freelance
work as an editor and scriptwriter. However, finding anyone willing to fund
his own feature projects proved more difficult and as his Cahiers colleagues,
including now Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, went into production on their
own full-length films, he become increasingly frustrated at his lack of
progress.
Then, in the spring of 1959, everything changed overnight. At the Cannes film
festival Francois Truffauts Les Quartre cents coups (The 400 Blows) was
greeted with universal acclaim, winning the Best Director Award and
endorsements from a number of high profile figures. Suddenly everybody was
talking about a New Wave in French cinema. Sensing that Truffauts success
could open doors for him, Godard immediately took the train down to
thefestival.

Breathless
Two years before, Truffaut had sketched out an idea for a low budget film
based on the true-crime story of Michel Portail, a petty criminal who had
stolen a car, shot a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and hid out for

almost two weeks until he was found in a canoe docked in the centre of Paris.
One aspect of the story that had appealed to Truffaut was the fact that Portail
had an American journalist girlfriend he had tried to convince to run away
with him, who had instead turned him into the police. Truffaut had
collaborated with both Chabrol and Godard on the story but had failed to
interest any producers. Now Godard asked if he might revive the project as a
feature. Truffaut not only agreed but also helped to convince Georges de
Beauregard to produce the film. Beauregard, in debt after two flops, managed
to persuade a distributor to come up with a small amount of money with
which to make the film.
Returning to Paris, Godard immediately began casting for the film. He
suggested to Beauregard that they hire Jean Seberg, the young actress who
had made an uncertain start in pictures on Otto Premingers Saint
Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, as the American woman. While most critics had
disparaged both films, Godard had written admiringly about Seberg in the
pages ofCahiers du cinma. At their first meeting, Seberg was unimpressed by
the aspiring young director, describing him as 'an incredibly introverted,
messy-looking young man with glasses, who didnt look her in the eye when
she talked'. Nevertheless, she was encouraged by her husband, a French
attorney with directing ambitions of his own, to accept the role. Persuading
Columbia to lend her out for the film proved less easy, but again her husband
stepped in and managed to convince the studio to accept a small cash payment
for her participation. Opposite her Godard cast Jean-Paul Belmondo who
ignored the warning words of his agent who told him 'youre making the
biggest mistake of your life', and accepted the part.
With his cast in place, Godard set about knocking Truffauts story outline into
a screenplay. His original plan had been to use the outline as it was and merely
add dialogue to it. Instead he rewrote the entire story, shifting the emphasis
away from Truffauts portrayal of an anguished young man who turns to crime
out of despair to that of a young hoodlum with an existential indifference to
common morality and the rule of law. Most crucially, in Godards new
version, the American woman comes into the narrative near the beginning and
their love story dominates the film. On the page the screenplay resembled a
classic American film noir, but Godard, after years of making films in his
head, would transform it, principally through the way he filmed it, into
something radically different.
Filming took place over the summer of 1959. Behind the camera was Raoul
Coutard, originally a documentary cameraman for the French armys
information service in Indochina. Coutards background suited Godard who
wanted the film to be shot, as much as possible, like a documentary, with a
handheld camera and the minimum of lighting. This decision was taken for
both aesthetic reasons to make the film look like a newsreel and practical

reasons to save the time setting up lights and tripod. Flexibility was very
important to Godard who wanted the freedom to improvise and shoot
whenever and wherever he wanted without too many technical constraints. He
and Coutard devised ways such as using a wheelchair for tracking shots and
a specialist lowlight filmstock for night-time scenes to make this possible.
Godards method of directing bout de souffle was even more radical than his
technical innovations. Much to the producer Beauregards disapproval, he
often only filmed for a couple of hours a day. Sometimes, when lacking the
necessary inspiration, he would cancel the days filming altogether. Early on
in the shoot he discarded the screenplay he had written and decided to write
the dialogue day by day as the production went along. The actors found this
procedure strange and sometimes forgot their lines, however since the
soundtrack was to be post-synchronized later, when the actors were lost for
words, Godard would call out their lines to them from behind the camera. For
Godard the act of making a film was as much a part of its meaning as its
content and style. He felt a film reflected the conditions under which it was
made and that a films technique was the method by which a director made a
film personal.
Godards unorthodox methods continued in the editing suite. His first cut of
bout de souffle was two-and-a-half hours long but Beauregard had required he
deliver a ninety-minute film. Rather than cutting out whole scenes, he decided
to cut within scenes, even within shots. This use of deliberate jump cuts was
unheard of in professional filmmaking where edits were designed to be as
seamless as possible. He also cut between shots from intentionally
disorienting angles that broke all the traditional rules of continuity. By
deliberately appearing amateurish Godard drew attention to the conventions of
classic cinema and revealed them for what they were: merely conventions.
It wasnt only in the montage of images that Godard expressed his personality,
but also through the rich depth of references to cinema and literature. bout
de souffle abounded with quotations of movies by directors such as Samuel
Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, Otto Preminger and any number of classic film noirs.
The film is even dedicated to Monogram Films, an American B-movie studio.
There were also quotations and references from 'high-culture' figures such as
Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, and Louis Aragon, as well as painters like Picasso,
Renoir and Klee.
bout de souffle was an immediate success. In January 1960, just before its
release, the film won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded to young directors showing
an independent spirit and stylistic originality. The critics were unanimous in
their praise, describing the film as the greatest accomplishment yet to come
out of the New Wave; one wrote: 'the terms old cinema and new cinema
now have meaning with bout de souffle, the generation gap can suddenly

be felt'. When it opened in four commercial cinemas in Paris, it immediately

drew large crowds. In the end its profits were estimated to be fifty times the
original investment. Part of the films success was due to a carefully
orchestrated publicity campaign that made Godard himself the centre of
attention. Journalists visiting the set had written articles about this young
directors unusual methods, building up a legend around Godard before the
film was even released. After only one film he had established himself as an
important new director and an auteur in his own right.

Anna and Le Petit Soldat

Even before the success of bout de souffle, Godard had been anxious to sign
up with Beauregard for a second film. He had already announced the project
in the press: 'Ill shoot my next film in Switzerland. With three times less
money: an assistant, a cameraman, thats all. It will be something about
torture'. Beauregard stepped up the advance publicity by placing an ad in the
trade journal La Cinmatographie francaise proclaiming in Godards
distinctive handwriting: 'Jean-Luc Godard, who has completed Breathless and
is preparing Le Petit Soldat, seeks young woman between 18 and 27 to make
her both his actress and his friend'. In fact the ad was more of a stunt than
anything because the director already had a firm idea in mind of the actress he
wanted to star in his next movie, a young woman who had rejected a role in
bout de souffle Anna Karina.
Godard had first seen Danish-born Anna Karina, then a successful young
model, in a soap ad for Palmolive in 1959. She had come to Beauregards
office in response to his telegram for an interview but had turned down the
small part he offered her in bout de souffle (the role instead went to Liliane
David) when she learned she would have to appear topless. Now Godard sent
her a second telegram: Mademoiselle, this time its for the principal role'.
Anna was initially reluctant, but on the advice of a friend who had seen an
early screening of bout de souffle, she went to the audition, at which Godard
looked her up and down and told her to come back the next day to sign a
contract. She could not sign, however, because she was only nineteen and a
minor under French law, so Godard arranged for her mother to fly down from
Denmark to sign it on her behalf.
The film that Godard was preparing to make, and in which Karina would costar, concerned Frances war in Algeria. A French colony since 1830, Algeria
was in a state of revolt with militants fighting a guerrilla war for independence
since 1955. The position of French citizens and soldiers in the country was
becoming increasingly difficult as they came under sustained attack from
these 'freedom fighters'. The army responded with escalating brutality as did

the militantly nationalist OAS who were determined that Algeria would
remain French. Godards total absorption in the cinema in the 1950s meant
he'd remained largely oblivious to what was going on in Algeria until now.
This lack of engagement did not go unnoticed by the intellectual left
whoattacked the early films of all the New Wave directors for their narrow
concern with private and intimate matters. Truffaut, Chabrol and Godard's
friendship with right-wing figures like Lucien Rebatet and Paul Ggauff had
even lead to accusations from some quarters that they were supporters of
extreme rightism. Godard himself had been attacked by at least one critic
for bout de souffles 'fascist arrogance'. Aware that at the very least the New
Wave was perceived as lacking any political commitment, Godard took it on
himself to make a film reflecting on the Algerian situation.
Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier) was shot in the spring of 1960 in Geneva.
Its protagonist is Bruno Forestier, played by Michel Subor, a supporter of the
right-wing OAS who is on the run in France and engaged in an undercover
war in Switzerland. Anna Karina plays Veronica Dreyer, a pro-Algerian
activist who falls in love with him. Bruno is blackmailed into committing an
assassination but before he can carry it out, he is captured and tortured by
Algerian militants. Inspired by Arthur Koestlers anti-totalitarian
novel Darkness at Noon, Godards theme was the nature of freedom, 'My
prisoner is someone who is asked a thing and who doesnt want to do it. Just
doesnt want to, and he resists, on principle. Thats how I see liberty: from a
practical point of view. Being free is being able to do what you want, when
you want'. It was this broader question, rather than the storys particular
political context, which he was most interested in exploring.
The production was long and drawn out with Godard often calling off the
days filming owing to a lack of inspiration. Some observers believed Godard
was taking his time so that he could spend more time with Karina. Things
came to a head in the middle of the shoot when the whole crew came together
for a dinner in Lausanne. Annas boyfriend, who had been employed as the
unit photographer, was at one end of the table with Godard on his left and
Anna on his right. Halfway through dinner Anna felt Godard's hand grasp hers
under the table and put a piece of paper in it. He then stood up and said he was
leaving. Rushing into the next room, desperate to see what he had given her,
Anna read the message on the paper, which said: 'I love you. Rendez-vous at
the Caf de la Paix at midnight.' When she arrived at the caf, Godard was
reading a newspaper. She sat down in front of him and waited. Finally,
lowering the paper, he said: 'So here you are. Lets go.'
For the rest of the shoot the couple were inseparable and when it wrapped
Anna moved into The Alesia, the hotel on the Rue Chateaubriand where
Godard lived. After a few weeks, he asked her to find them an apartment.
Their first year together was the happiest of their relationship; they would

drive or walk around Paris at night, watch movies and visit friends. At the
same time character traits emerged Godards jealousy and Karinas
desperate need for affection which would ultimately tear them apart. Anna
later recalled that Godard wanted her to give up acting completely after they
moved in together, however when the mainstream director Michel Deville
offered her a leading role in the comedy he was about to start filming, she
jumped at the chance and accepted. Godard was contemptuous of the
screenplay for Ce Soir ou jamais (Tonight or Never, 1961), nevertheless he
drove her to the set each day and when he saw the rushes realized that she
would be perfect for his next film too.

Une Femme est une Femme

After a crime thriller and a spy film, Godards next film was a surprising
change of mood. Une femme est une femme (A Woman is a Woman) was a
musical comedy with a realistic setting and an unsentimental storyline about a
stripper who is determined to have a baby and blackmails her boyfriend into
committing to marriage and parenthood by having an affair with his friend.
The film was budgeted at 2,177,00 francs (more than four times the budget
of bout de souffle), and would be Godards first Cinemascope and colour
film. Taking the three staring roles were Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and
Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Production was originally to begin on November 21, 1960, in a real apartment
on the Rue St. Martin, but when the owners discovered what changes were
planned for their home they refused permission, and the shoot had to be
relocated to a studio. Godard again wrote the characters' dialogue at the last
minute, although this time he was unable to call out the lines to the actors
from behind the camera because they were recording direct sound. This meant
the actors had to learn their lines immediately, which, when combined with
the pressure of limited studio time, made for a demanding shoot. The stress
was further heightened by the stormy relationship between Godard and
Karina. 'They tore each other apart,' Brialy later recalled, 'argued, loved each
other, hated each other, screamed at each other.' Godard had sketched out the
scenerio to the film long before he met Karina, originally intending it to be a
light-hearted comedy, but the adjustments he made during filming made the
story much more autobiographical, especially in regard to their relationship.
The parallels between real life and the movie were further underlined when
Karina became pregnant. A wedding in Begnins, Switzerland on March 3,
1961, was hastily arranged, followed three weeks later by another in Paris for
the benefit of the couples Parisian friends and the press. The couple now had
a regular social life, frequently visiting friends like Agnes Varda and her

husband Jacques Demy to play cards on Sundays, and joining Karinas friends
on trips to nightclubs. Godard often seemed uneasy in these gatherings and
rarely spoke. Obsessed with work, he would spend his time at
the Cahiers offices, or say he was going out for some cigarettes and return
three weeks later. As a consequence Anna was often left alone in the
apartment waiting for the phone to ring. One night in the spring of 1961,
Godard returned home to find her in great distress and covered in blood. She
had miscarried, and her health was in danger. After recuperating in hospital,
she returned home. Unable to deal with the situation, Godard left her in the
care of friends for several weeks. On his return, he tried to make amends by
renting a villa in the south of France, but while driving there he turned the car
around saying he didnt have time for it as he had too much work to do.

End of the Honeymoon

Une femme est une femme premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in June 1961.
Both Karina and the film won prizes. Positive reviews did not, however,
translate into box-office success. Godards unorthodox approach to genre and
audacious mix of sound and image perplexed mainstream audiences. Its
failure came at a time when the New Wave was coming under increasingly
hostile attacks in the press for being overhyped and willfully obscure. In this
climate, Godard struggled to set up his next movie; a number of projects fell
through, including a collaboration with Richard Burton and Jeanne Moreau.
To add to his difficulties, Le Petit Soldat was banned from release in France
and abroad by the Commission de contrle on the grounds that it showed
torture and because it was perceived to be pro-Algerian (the ban was finally
lifted in December 1962 and the film released the following month).
While Godard battled the censors, Anna Karina continued to establish herself
as an actress. In September 1961, she started work on Le Soleil dans
loeil (Sun in the Eyes) directed by Jacques Bourdon. During the course of the
shoot, she began an affair with her co-star Jacques Perrin and decided she
wanted to marry him. When she told Godard of her intention to leave him, he
destroyed all their possessions and left the apartment. Later that night she took
an overdose of barbiturates. She was found by Perrin who called an
ambulance. After a few days in hospital she was released. The papers reported
that Godard and Karina would divorce and that Karina would marry Perrin.
But in January of 1962, it was announced that Godard and Karina had
reconciled and that he would direct her in a new film.

Vivre Sa Vie

Filming began just six weeks later on a low budget of 400,000 francs. The
genre this time was tragedy: the bleak tale of a young womans descent into
prostitution and eventual murder. Godard conceived the film as a showcase for
Karinas talent; an attempt also, perhaps, to save their marriage through
cinematic collaboration. At the same time, after a year of indecision in which
he had increasingly begun to question and criticize his own filmmaking
methods and the content of his work, the movie provided Godard with the
opportunity to redefine his new cinematic and philosophical vision.
From the opening scene, made up of long, carefully composed shots of
Karina's character Nana, showing her only from behind at the bar of a caf as
she tells her husband she is leaving him, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, 1962)
marked, for Godard, the start of a significant new technical and aesthetic
approach to filmmaking. Feeling now that he had moved the camera too much
in bout de souffle, Godard, and long-time collaborator Raoul Coutard, used
heavier equipment under more traditional conditions, lit locations correctly,
and captured direct sound on location, rather than overdubbing later. These
more conventional methods required a larger crew, which made each set-up
more time consuming to prepare. To save time they shot longer takes, many
lasting more than three minutes. Godard told an interviewer that he wanted 'to
shoot on location, in natural settings, but without making a film of reportage.
It will rather be a film in the theatrical spirit'. This way of filming, he knew
would allow Karina to give a sustained performance, which the camera would
frame and allow to unfold in its own time. The statement also acknowledges
the key influence of the German playwright and theatrical theorist, Bertolt
Brecht. Godard got the idea of dividing the narrative into twelve distinct
chapters or theatrical tableaux from The Threepenny Opera and Brechts
concept of epic theatre and his use of 'distancing effects' would become
increasingly important in Godards work from this film onwards.
Vivre sa vie proved a breakthrough for Godard. It differed radically in subject
matter, style, form and technique from his first three films, but in the long run
would prove almost as influential as his much-heralded debut. At the 1962
Venice Film Festival, despite being booed after the screening, the film won the
Critics Prize and the Special Jury Prize. Most critics immediately recognized
the films achievement. One heralded the film as 'a new masterpiece' and
ranked it alongside the films of Rossellini and Bresson, while another called it
'the first absolute flawless film by Godard'. The films brilliance put the
director at the forefront of the New Wave and helped to re-establish the
movement as an intellectual and aesthetic force just at the moment when its
future seemed most in doubt.

Division and Collaboration

At the same time the original members of the New Wave were no longer as
close as they had once been, a fact acknowledged by Godard in a postcard he
sent to Truffaut sometime in 1962 in which he wrote: 'We never see each other
any more, it's completely stupid. Yesterday I went to see Claude shoot, it was
terrible, we had nothing to say to each other. Like in the song: in the pale light
of dawn there isn't even any friendship. We've each taken off for our own
planet and we no longer see each other in close up but only in long shot.'
In a variety of publications a debate took place between Truffaut and Godard
over what in fact the New Wave was and what could and should be done to
rescue it. Truffaut argued that the application of the Hollywood formulas that
he and the otherCahiers critics had adsorbed was the only way for the New
Wave to reach the mainstream. For Godard, the historical and critical
orientation that defined the New Wave was a contradiction. 'At the moment
that we can do cinema, we can no longer do the cinema that gave us the desire
to do it,' he wrote. For him the cinematic canon defined by Hitchcock and
Hawks was a point of departure, a lost paradise that could never be regained.
One of the former colleagues who Godard did continue to see regularly was
Jacques Rivette who was at this time attempting to raise money for a
cinematic adaptation of Diderots La Religieuse (The Nun). Wanting to help
Rivette and promote his wife's desire to become a serious actress, Godard paid
for a theatrical staging of the work at the Thatre des Champs-Elyses in the
autumn of 1962. Anna's performance was a triumph, winning prizes and
compliments from leading theatrical lights.
In order to pay for the staging, Godard had signed contracts with three
different producers and now proceeded to film the three commissions in quick
succession. The first was a short film Le Nouveau Monde (The New World) for
an Italian compilation called RoGoPaG (1963) after the four directors
involved Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Gregoretti. Godards
contribution, set in Paris after a nuclear explosion, tells the story of a man who
notices strange changes in all the people around him, including his girlfriend.
The second film, Les Carabiniers (1963), based on a stage play and co-written
with Rossellini, was about the horror and pointlessness of war and again
showed the influence of Brecht. Its two peasant protagonists enlist in the army
of the king to pillage the world. They send postcards home to their wives
telling tales of their exploits but gradually become disillusioned as they find
themselves still poor and now wounded. The third project a medium length
film, Le Grand Escroc(The Great Swindler) was made for another
compilation film Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du monde (The Greatest
Swindles in the World, 1963) and featured Jean Seberg as a cinema
verit director who is arrested for passing on a counterfeit note.

Bardot and Le Mepris

Towards the end of 1962, Georges de Beauregard learned that Frances
biggest movie star, Brigitte Bardot, had expressed a desire to work with
Godard. The producer offered her the lead role in Godards adaptation of
Alberto Moravias novel Le Mepris (Contempt), about a screenwriter and his
failing marriage. Bardot signed the contract in January of 1963 to play the part
of Camille, the screenwriters wife. With such a huge star attached Beauregard
and his Italian partner Carlo Ponti were able to raise a budget of $1 million,
much of it from the American producer Joseph E. Levine. For Godard the sum
was unprecedented but meant working within the constraints of a normal
production, as well as dealing with the intense press and media activity that
surrounded Bardot.
In the event, the shoot, which took place in and around Rome and Capri,
proved much more difficult than anyone could have anticipated. Bardot was
the principle target of Italys paparazzi who created relentless commotion
around the set. Meanwhile the mutual appreciation between star and director
soon turned to disillusionment. Bardot felt unable to forge any kind of
personal relationship with Godard and detached herself by locking herself in
her hotel with her friends and entourage. Godards relations with Jack
Palance, who played the fictional producer Prokosch, were even worse. The
American actor became frustrated by Godards hands off method of directing
actors and openly voiced his exasperation to a journalist, 'We never know in
advance what were going to do. Theres almost no dialogue. Its the worst
experience Ive ever had! Its madness!' Palance eventually refused to speak to
Godard, passing his remarks through an Italian set decorator who spoke no
English instead.
Godards stormy relationship with Karina added to his woes. During the shoot
she visited him in Rome, where one evening they went to a nightclub.
Someone invited Karina to dance and when she sat back down, Godard gave
her a slap in the face in front of everyone. Their experience of marriage
became the inspiration for the fictional characters in the film. Indeed the
character of Camille was determined more by Karinas personality than
Bardots and many of the lines spoken by the character were things that
Karina herself had said to her husband. In one scene Godard had Bardot wear
the short dark wig that Karina had worn inVivre sa vie and Godard even asked
her to walk like Karina. At the same time Michel Piccoli, who played the
husband, looked and behaved like Godard, even down to wearing his clothes.
When the producers saw the first cut of the film they were disappointed. In
particular they were disappointed that Bardot was not shown in the nude often
enough. After a protracted battle lasting several months during which the
producers threatened to re-edit the film to their own satisfaction, Godard

finally agreed to shoot some new scenes for the film. At a cost of twenty
thousand dollars an exact studio replica of the apartment in Rome where he
had filmed was created. Here he shot the opening scene in which Camille lies
naked on the bed and names the parts of her body and asks her husband
whether he loves them all.
Le Mepris was the closest thing to a conventional movie that Godard had
made and has remained one of his best- known and most celebrated works. As
a reflexive commentary on the end of Hollywoods classic era, it represented
Godards view that the golden age of auteur directors working within the
studio system was over. 'Our tragedy,' he commented, 'was thinking that we
were coming in the middle of something when in fact we were coming at the
end of it.'

A Story of Gold
Late in 1963, Godard and Karina again separated and again sought
reconciliation through a shared film project. It had been almost two years
since they had worked together in Vivre sa vie. Since then she had appeared in
a number of commercial vehicles and had become a well-known actress.
However she was by no means a star, and despite the acclaim she had received
for some of these roles, had failed to reach the artistic heights achieved
through collaborations with her husband. The new film,Bande part (Band of
Outsiders), based on an American crime novel called Fools Gold, had much
riding on it for Godard. Success would help to establish his new production
company Anouchka Films, as well as re-establishing him as a commercial
director. Even more importantly it would give Karina the kind of success she
craved, and by doing so, he hoped, would help secure their marriage.
That winter, as Godard worked on pre-production for the new
film, Karina tried again to commit suicide. This time she was alone for a
whole weekend and would have died if the Italian painter who was decorating
the house had not forgotten his keys and come back to retrieve them. At this
point Godard had her committed to a mental hospital. After a nightmarish
spell inside, she found herself talking with a doctor about why she wanted to
die and for the first time began to come to terms with the death of her child.
When Godard picked her up at the end of February, he told her they would
begin shooting the new movie in three days.
Staring alongside Karina were Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey, as a couple of
petty criminals searching for a big score. Shot in stark black and white on
location in a grey, wintry Paris, the film is rooted in the concrete reality of
billboards, cafs and the metro, and yet has an exuberance in keeping with the

movie-inspired fantasies of the three lead characters. The films freewheeling,

casual air was no accident however. According to Sami Frey, 'Everything was
very precise, decided in advance even the details'. This included the famous
sequence in which the three leads dance 'the Madison' in a caf (the actors,
who were not skilled dancers, rehearsed daily for a month to get it right).
When the film was shown at the 1964 Cannes Festival, Godard, in his role as
producer, promoted it dutifully but couldnt disguise his personal feeling that
he had compromised himself to please other people. In an ad in Le Film
Francaise he wrote: 'What does the movie-going public want? said Griffith. A
revolver and a girl! It is in response to this desire that I have shot and
Columbia is distributing Band of Outsiders, a story of gold which will sell lots
of tickets'. However, when the film was released in the summer of that year,
not only did it fail at the box office, but it was rejected by critics, including
those who had previously championed the directors work.
During the making of Bande part, Godard and Karina reconciled, moving
into a new apartment in the Latin Quarter. Karina continued working,
accepting a supporting role in Jean Aurels De lamour, filmed in April 1964,
and a starring role oppositeMaurice Ronet in Le Voleur de Tibidabo (The Thief
of Tibidado). During filming Ronet and Karina had an affair, and in the
resulting fallout, Godard and Karina separated and filed for divorce.

A Modern Love Affair

While at Cannes the programmer of the Venice Film Festival had told Godard
how disappointed he was that Bande part had premiered there instead of at
his festival. In response Godard offered to make another film that would be
finished in three months in time to debut at Venice. He then took a germ of an
idea he had about a married woman having an affair who becomes pregnant
and wonders who the father is, and, according to Raoul Coutard, made Une
Femme marie (A Married Woman) from first day of pre-production to final
edit in a month.
Taking the classic love triangle as his theme for the film, Godard created an
unequivocally modernist film, substituting melodrama for a startlingly
abstract style of filmmaking. It was his most openly philosophical film to date,
depicting ideas familiar from the work of Antonioni, such as communication
breakdown and identity crisis, and setting them against the modern malaise of
consumerism and advertising. It also represented Godards own anguished
feelings about infidelity and contained a number of personal references to his
own marriage.

When Une Femme marie was shown at the Venice festival it was very well
received. French critics fell over themselves to hail the film as a major
achievement. When it was released nationally in December 1964, Georges
Sadoul of Les Lettres francaisespraised the film extravagantly and proclaimed
Godard to be both a great artist and one of the most important thinkers of the
age. He wrote: 'It is even more by his ideas than by his rhetoric that Godard
belongs, profoundly and consciously to our times. Yesterday, he asked himself
questions. Today, he answers them'. Yet, ironically, despite the acclaim,
Godard felt increasingly lost as a filmmaker. Just at the moment when he was
becoming progressively more engaged with the political, social and
intellectual concerns of the time, he was becoming increasingly unsure of how
best to portray them on screen.

American Acclaim
In America Godards reputation was in the ascendent too. The esteemed critic
Pauline Kael had praised his early films, as had Andrew Sarris whose
influential 1962 article in Film Culture, 'Notes on the Auteur Theory', was
inspired by the Cahiers du Cinma critics and their view that popular directors
such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray were as much
artists as any of the more traditionally revered art film directors. In September
1964, Godard came to New York to presentUne femme est une
femme and Bande part at the Philharmonic Hall to great acclaim. Les
Mpris and Une femme mariewere released for the first time in America soon
after.
Many young filmmakers in America were already looking up to Godard as the
most important director of his generation. Two of them Robert Benton and
David Newman asked him to direct their screenplay about the outlaws
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Godard liked the script and was ready to
commit to begin filming almost immediately but it turned out the producers
didnt have the money in place and Godard had to return to France to make his
next film (it eventually went into production two years later with Arthur Penn
as director and its star Warren Beatty as producer).

City of Pain
The film that Godard made instead of Bonnie and
Clyde was Alphaville (1965) an audacious mix of the Sci-Fi and Film Noir
genres that would become one of his most iconic movies. The film
starred Eddie Constantine as the trench-coat wearing secret agent Lemmy

Caution, who travels to the dark, dystopian city of Alphaville, where life is
governed by a giant computer and emotion is a crime punishable by death.
Although set in the future, the film was actually shot in various locations in
contemporary Paris such as the studios of French national radio, the vast
computer research complex of Bull, the new modern office and residential
complex of La Dfense, and on newly built roads running through tunnels
glowing with eerie banks of lights. Adding to the otherwordly atmosphere,
Godard asked Raoul Coutard to create a look of extreme high contrast without
using any lights regardless of low-light conditions. Indeed much of the film
was shot at night adding to the sense of alienating darkness. 'I wanted an
expressionistic style,' Godard explained. 'In filming things that we see every
day, I wanted them to arouse fear. Without cheating. The things are there. One
looks at them. And suddenly, one discovers that they are not at all as one
thought.'
Just a few weeks before filming began on Alphaville, Godard and Karinas
divorce was finalized. Despite this Karina remained as the films female lead,
Natasha, and once again Godard instilled the story with his own personal
concerns. Lemmy Caution, the tough guy secret agent, turns out to be a
romantic who seeks to liberate a ruthlessly logical, yet misguided woman,
from the external forces that have control over her mind, and in so doing,
teach her what it feels to truly love someone. In other words, it was an
allegory for how Godard saw his own struggles with Anna Karina. His next
film would be an even more explicit outpouring of his feelings about his exwife.

Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou (1965) was based on a novel by Lionel White. Jean-Paul
Belmondo took the title role of Ferdinand/Pierrot, who runs away from his
comfortable but boring bourgeois life in Paris with the family babysitter
played by Anna Karina, who herself is being pursued by Algerian gangsters.
Travelling south in stolen cars they reach the sea where they find sanctuary on
an island, but their idyllic life is soon threatened by their conflicting desires.
Godard declared that, in making Pierrot le fou, he felt as if he were making
his first film; tearing up the old road map and setting out for unknown
territory. Despite this declaration of a new beginning, however, Pierrot was in
many ways a culmination of everything that had come before. Once again the
story concerned a love affair that leads to disillusionment and death, and
featured quotations from literature, other movies, musical interludes, selfreferential jokiness, coloured filters and car crashes. Characteristically Godard
filmed the genre elements of the story with a conspicuous lack of interest,

focusing instead on the creation of unforgettable images and arresting

sequences. He described the creation of the film as completely unconscious
and the shoot as a kind of happening. The freedom of this approach allowed
Godard to turn a standard pulp thriller into a deeply personal and emotionally
raw statement about the state of the world, the nature of art, and most
importantly, the breakdown of his own marriage.
That the film turned out as well as it did was something of a miracle
considering the difficulties of the shoot. Godard later recalled: 'When I
began Pierrot le fou, one week before, I was completely panicked. I didnt
know what to do. Based on the book, we had already established all the
locations, we had hired the people and I was wondering what we were
going to do with it all'. Complicating matters, Godard had chosen to film in
Techniscope, a new widescreen process that brought with it many
inconveniences, including the need to shoot with high-contrast side-lighting in
order to give the image definition. The resulting constraints slowed down the
production and restrained Godards spontaneity. The director, known for his
irritability on set even at the best of times, was unusually bad-tempered
throughout the shoot. He was particularly venomous towards Karina at one
point during a scene she asked him what she should do and he answered: 'You
have a mouth to talk with, dont you?' Belmondo described them as 'like a
cobra and a mongoose, always glaring at each other.'
Pierrot le fou was booed when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival and
unsuccessful at the box office when released in Paris in 1966, though it was
not without its supporters. Michel Cournot described it as the most beautiful
film Ive seen in my life'. Andrew Sarris, writing in 1969, called it the kind of
last film a director can make only once in his career'. With the benefit of
hindsight, the film now looks like Godards fond farewell to the first part of
his career, a last madcap romantic escapade before engaging with more
serious concerns. It is also a farewell to Karina, and in a way a resigned
acknowledgement that they were never meant to be together. Although
Marianne betrays Ferdinand there is no malice in her portrayal, and in the
final voice-over there is a suggestion that perhaps they are together in eternity.

The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

Underlining the fact that Pierrot marked a break with the past, Godards next
film found him working with a new producer (Anatole Dauman), new actors
(Jean-Pierre Leaud and Chantel Goya) a new cameraman (Willy Kurant) and
production team.Masculin Fminin (1966) was based on two Guy de
Maupassant short stories, but for Godard, the real motivation for making the
film was the chance to explore the lives and attitudes of the younger

generation. 'I chose young people because I no longer know where I am from
the point of view of cinema. I am in search of the cinema. I have the sense of
having lost it. Chatting with young people to find myself again was easier than
with adults, because adults have too many personal problems and to get to the
bottom of things there is an immense amount of work that one doesnt have
time to do in the course of a film This film is thus a need to speak with
people who are more open. Who have their lives before them.'
Godard cast Jean-Pierre Laud, the star of Truffauts Les Quatre Cents
Coups (1959), as Paul, a romantic young idealist and writer who chases
budding pop star, Madeleine (Chantel Goya, a real life Y-y girl). Despite
markedly different musical tastes and political leanings, the two soon become
romantically involved and begin a mnage quatre with Madeleines two
roommates, Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport) and Elisabeth (Marlne
Jobert). Within the simple narrative framework, the film mixed off-the-cuff
reportage, inventive mise en scne, satire and tragedy, to create a strikingly
honest portrait of youth and sex in mid-60s Paris. Pauline Kael, writing in
the New Republic, pointed out the difference from the earlier films: 'Using
neither crime nor the romance of crime but a simple kind of romance for a
kind of interwoven story line, Godard has, at last, created the form he needed.
It is a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, news and portraiture, love
lyric and satire.'

Double Visions
Soon after Masculin Fminin, Godard made another film with producer
Anatole Dauman that took this new conception of cinema another stage
further. Deux ou trios choses que je sais delle (Two or Three Things I know
About Her, 1967) was inspired by a magazine story about a new breed of parttime amateur prostitutes women living in the vast housing complexes
springing up around Paris who had begun selling themselves to help pay for
bills and the consumer goods, which, according to advertisements, were
absolute necessities of modern life. The story Godard outlined for the film
was built around a day in the life of a young woman, Juliette, who lives in a
new apartment complex with her husband and young children, who prostitutes
herself by picking up men from a luxury hotel. Marina Vlady, an established
star, was cast as Juliette.
As the project advanced toward production, Godard was approached by
Georges de Beauregard to make another film. Beauregard was deeply in debt
but eligible for loans and credits if he made a film, therefore he needed to start
shooting something immediately. He flattered Godard with the claim that he
was the only director capable of conceiving and setting up a film quickly

enough. Godard took up the challenge, disappearing into a bookshop and

emerging with a detective novel by Richard Stark called The Jugger about a
tough criminal named Parker who goes looking for an old associate who
knows too much. Godard described the film, renamed Made in USA, as 'the
conjunction in my mind of three desires: to do a favor for a friend, to highlight
the Americanization of French life, and to make use of one of the episodes in
the Ben Barka affair'. This last reference was to a left-wing Moroccan
dissident who had disappeared from the streets of Paris. The rumors were that
the French secret police had conspired with the criminal underworld to deliver
Barka to Moroccan agents.
Both films went into production almost simultaneously in the summer of
1966. For several weeks Godard was shooting Made in USA in the morning
and Deux ou trois choses in the afternoon. While Made in USA was a
conscious farewell to Anna Karina who stars as the trenchcoat-wearing
detective hero of the story, Deux ou trois choses que je sais delle had been
planned as a showcase for the new woman in Godards life, Marina Vlady.
However the actress used to working in the mainstream cinema found
Godards style of direction very difficult. He wanted her to behave as naturally
as she did in real life. When he called cut she relaxed and became more
open, but he was unable to get her in this state during the shoot. Instead she
appeared tense and unconvincing on camera. The best scenes in the film didnt
feature her at all but focused instead on cityscapes and objects. The films
most famous scene was a series of extreme close ups of a cup of bubbling
espresso, seen from above, evoking a cosmos in microcosm with Godard
himself speaking the voice over.
Despite the problems of its production, Deux ou trous choses received good
reviews when it was released. One reviewer recognized it as 'a painful
confession, a contained rage, an anguished reflection'. Godard later referred to
it as his first film not dominated by the previous history of cinema. Made in
USA was also well received in most publications with one commentator
comparing it to Picassos Guernica. However Godard himself felt the film had
been rejected by the audience he most wanted to reach: the young left. They
included the new generation at Cahiers du cinma whose response had been
much more reserved. The young Bernardo Bertolucci called Made in USA 'a
film that betrays politics, that is paralyzed in its great liberty by ideological
conformism'. With hindsight the film can be seen as less about politics and
more of an allegory of Godards romantic trials with Anna Karina.
Paradoxically, despite his great bitterness towards her, the only images in the
film that he put real creative energy into were the many extreme, beautifully
composed colour close-ups of her. Nevertheless the mood on set continued to
be difficult and many bitter words were spoken between them; their troubled
relationship was finally over.

Anne Wiazemsky and Le Chinoise

Godards close relationship with Marina Vlady also came to an end when she
had turned down his proposal of marriage. Consolation came in the form
of Anne Waizemsky, the eighteen-year-old star of Robert Bressons Au
Hasard Balthazar. Godard had first seen a photograph of her on the set of
Bressons film and was intrigued enough to arrange a visit to the set to meet
her. She was wary at first but became fascinated by him after seeing Pierrot le
fou and Masculin Fminin. By the late summer of 1966 they were a couple.
He would drop her off and pick her up each day from Nanterre University on
the outskirts of Paris where she was studying philosophy. In the evenings he
would take her to the cinema where they would watch movies. Through
Wiazemsky, Godard met a new breed of radicalized students deeply
dissatisfied with the society in which they lived and the university in which
they studied. Some of these labeled themselves Anarchists. Others were
turning to the teachings of Mao Tse Tung, whose Cultural Revolution in China
they saw as being closer to true Marxist-Leninism than the Soviet Unions
brand of communism. Godard, who now defined himself as an artist of the
left, in opposition to the Vietnam War and American influence in politics,
economics, and culture, became intrigued by these students and their beliefs
and decided he would make his next film about them with Anne Wiazemsky
as the star.
La Chinoise (1967) focused on five university students lead by Veronique
(Wiazemsky) and Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Laud), who spend their summer
vacation in Paris holed up in an apartment borrowed from a friends wealthy
parents. They spend their time studying political texts, delivering lectures to
each other, and eventually plan and carry out an assassination. The film was
shot with a wildness unusual even for Godard. Many scenes were improvised
and reshot a number of times, allowing a wide range of choices in the editing
room. Godard explained in an interview that the film was 'exclusively a film
of montage', and added that 'I shot autonomous sequences, without any order,
and I organized them later'. It was an approach that worked perfectly for the
films subject matter, emphasizing the rebellious attitude and moral confusion
of the five protagonists.
Stylistically La Chinoise was exhilarating and provocative. Portraits of Marx
and Mao, modernist paintings, political slogans and an engraving from Alice
in Wonderland are just some of the flood of images cut into the action like
some kind of cinematic Pop Art montage. In line with Brecht the fourth wall is
frequently broken as actors address the camera head on. Adding to the
reflexivity, Godards own voice can be heard offscreen on several occasions
asking the actors questions, the opening slate is left in a number of shots and

Raoul Coutard is shown onscreen filming the action. It was, in every way, a
radical work of cinema and marked a turning point in Godards work. The
romanticism and genre playfulness of his earlier films would henceforth be
replaced by a commitment to exploring political ideology in an increasingly
abstract and fragmented style.
In between shooting La Chinoise in the spring of 1967 and its screening in
Venice in August, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky were married in
Begins in Switzerland. The marriage hit the headlines when Wiazemskys
mother announced it in the populist newspaper Le Figaro. The prospect of the
36-year-old revolutionary of French cinema who had recently been revealed to
be an extreme leftist, getting married to the teenage daughter of Francois
Mauriac, a scion of right wing Gaullism, lead to much comment in the press.
Wiazemsky hated the intrusion into her personal life, having already dropped
out of university to pursue her acting career, she accepted an invitation to go
to Italy to act in Pier Paolo Pasolinis new film, Teorema.
While making La Chinoise, Godard said that the most important thing about it
was 'what young people will make of it'. It soon became clear that those he
had most wanted to impress were less than happy. The Marxist-Leninist
students who had inspired it were furious with Godard for making them look
ridiculous; others called the film 'a provocation', which showed Maoists to be
irresponsible terrorists. Older critics were more enthusiastic: Jean de
Baroncelli in Le Monde wrote that the film illustrated 'the eternal revolt of
youth, of that irresistible lan for an ideal of purity, propriety, and nobility,
that is the trait of all the adolescents of the world (at least, of those who have
some soul and some heart)'.

End of Cinema
After contributing two politically charged shorts to the compilation films Far
From Vietnam and Vangelo 70, Godard began shooting his next feature
entitled Weekend in September 1967. If La Chinoise took a romantic view of
how idealists might change future society, Weekend offered a nightmarish
vision of contemporary society on the verge of total collapse. The story
follows a bickering bourgeois couple traveling by car from Paris to the
countryside to ensure their inheritance through murder. Along the way they
encounter cataclysmic traffic jams, rape, murder, pillage and cannibalism.
Godard called the film 'closer to a cry' than a movie. It depicts a France in
which people murder each other over right of way or the latest consumer
goods, where blood-soaked automobile wrecks are commonplace and people
are as indifferent to the suffering of others as they are to the music of Mozart.

The film was indeed a cry of pain and despair at the casual cruelty of
contemporary society from a man who felt hed reached the end of the road.
Weekend concluded with the statements 'end of story' and 'end of cinema'. This
was no act of mere artistic provocation; Godard was serious. At the end of the
shoot he gathered his crew together and told them they should look for other
work, because he was going to stop making films for a while. He had come to
the conclusion that the world as it was had to change and as the commercial
film industry was part of that world he no longer wanted to contribute to it.
The years of uncertainty and despair in which he had increasingly questioned
the value of what he was doing were over. Now he had a cause to believe in
and a renewed sense of purpose in his work. A chapter in his life had ended
and a new one was about to begin. As it turned out this was true, not just for
Godard, but also for France and the rest of the world too.
1968
The events of 1968 gave Jean-Luc Godard the opportunity to prove both his
commitment to the radical politics he espoused and his allegiance to the young
activists he now associated himself with. Despite his avowed withdrawal from
cinema, he in fact went on making films at an even faster rate than before.
However the films he now produced, often in collaboration with his comradein-arms Jean-Pierre Gorin under the nom de plume 'Dziga Vertov', were made
at the service of his political beliefs alienating many, inspiring some.

Lessons in Aesthetics
The first of these films came about as the result of a commission from an
unexpected quarter: French television. Le Gai savoir(Joyful Knowledge, 1968)
was based on Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Emile though bore very little
resemblance to its source material. It starred Jean-Pierre Laud and Juliet
Berto as two students engaged in a series of discussions about the creation,
analysis and re-composition of some basic images and sounds in an effort to
understand cinema better. This concern with the language of cinema would be
a central theme of Godards work in the years to come, as would the films
funding and ultimate rejection by a television company.
A Supportive Friend
Paradoxically, Godards withdrawal from commercial cinema came at a time
when the other best-known New Wave filmmakers
Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Rivette were enjoying new levels of
success and stability in their careers. Godards friendship with Truffaut was
still strong at this time and he continued to see Rivette regularly. His vigorous

defence of the latters breakthrough film Le Religieuse, which was initially

banned by the French censor for its perceived anti-catholic sentiment, saw him
orchestrate a campaign in support of the film and publish a letter to Minister
of Culture, Andr Malraux, in which he described the celebrated writer as a
coward for not speaking out against the ban.
Early in 1968, Godard joined his erstwhile colleagues in the crusade to
reinstate Henri Langlois to post as director of theCinmathque, after he was
sacked by government officials unhappy with his disregard for administrative
norms. This resulted, the officials claimed, in deficits, unexplained expenses
and chaotic warehousing of films. Within hours of Langloiss sacking,
filmmakers from France and abroad made their support for Langlois clear by
refusing to allow their films to be shown at the Cinmathque. On February
14, 2,500 people protested the removal of Langlois, with Godard and Truffaut
in the front lines. Police charged and in the ensuing mle Truffaut was
clubbed on the head and Godards glasses were broken. At a press conference
two days later, Godard suggested that if the new administrators dared to
reopen the Cinmathque audience members should engage in 'perpetual
sabotage'. The mounting pressure from all parts of the motion picture industry
finally paid off: on 22 April an extraordinary general assembly reinstated
Langlois.
Ideals into Action
In late February Godard, accompanied by his wife Anne Wiazemsky, flew to
New York to begin a lecture tour of American universities organized by the
documentary filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Godard was
the cinematic idol of American university students, and the tour, coinciding
with screenings of La Chinoise, was a great success. A young George Lucas
interviewed by a Newsweek correspondent voiced what many felt: 'When you
find someone whos going the same direction as you, you dont feel so alone'.
At Berkeley, La Chinoise played to twelve sold-out houses and Godard was
cheered for commenting that he wouldnt try again to get a visa to go to North
Vietnam 'because I think that the North Vietnamese will have won the war
before I get it'.
During May 1968, as France erupted in a series of strikes and violent
confrontations between students, workers and the police, Godard threw
himself into the centre of the action. He took part in demonstrations and
filmed them, contributing to the multi-authored Film-tracts short 3 minute
films of still photographs designed to contribute directly to the struggle. He
also made a film called Un Film comme les autres (A Film Like The Others,
1968), which recorded workers and students discussing their views on the
political situation.

Cannes 68
The Cannes Film Festival became part of the protests when most of the
filmmakers in competition withdrew their films and Louis Malle, Roman
Polanski, Monica Vitti, and Terence Young resigned from the jury. Godard and
Truffaut were amongst those who took part in a debate in the main hall calling
for the festival to be shut down. Godard argued that instead of showing
festival films, the forum should be used to screen militant films and
documentary footage of the events taking place. When the festival
administration decided that a screening of Carlos Sauras Peppermint
Frapp would go ahead as planned, Godard, Truffaut and Saura himself
jumped up on the stage and held onto the curtain to prevent it from opening.
Ultimately their protest succeeded and the festival was abandoned, but this
would be the last time Godard and Truffaut would join together in a common
cause. That summer there was a very violent argument between them when
Godard tried to persuade Truffaut to lend his backing to the campaign to close
the Avignon festival. Truffaut refused, citing his friendship with the director of
the festival Jean Vilar, and pointing out that he could not support bourgeois
students against working-class National Guardsmen. Godard became furious
saying: 'I thought you were a brother, you are a traitor'. He also broke off
relations with old friends and collaborators Antoine Bourseiller and Suzanne
Schiffman at this time.
Postcards from the Counter-Culture
In between taking part in demonstrations in Paris, Godard prepared his next
project: a film set in London examining the rock and roll culture that
fascinated him. Originally he wanted to work with The Beatles but the project
fell through when a suspicious John Lennon vetoed the idea. The Rolling
Stones proved more enthusiastic and a deal was struck with producers Iain
Quarrier and Michael Pearson to make a film centered around the musicians.
Godard spent five days in Olympic Studios In London during the summer of
1968, filming the band writing and recording the track Sympathy for the Devil.
These scenes were juxtaposed with a series of other fabricated sequences
showing Black Power revolutionaries in a car junkyard, readings of Mein
Kampf in a pornographic bookshop and a series of interviews with a character
called Eve Democracy played by Anne Wiazemsky.
The production was marked by conflict between Godard and producer Iain
Quarrier. In Godards final cut of the film, which he titled One Plus One, we
never see a full and final version of Sympathy for the Devil. This was
intentional he wanted it to be incomplete so that the audience might
participate in the creative process themselves. This, however, proved too
radical for the producers who retitled the film Sympathy for the Devil and re-

edited it with a complete take of the song at the end. On the opening night of
the London Film Festival, Godard disowned the producers cut and invited the
audience to see his own version of the film being projected outside. On the
way out he punched Quarrier in the face.
As the protests lost momentum in France, Godard travelled back to the United
States where a new project brought him back together with the Direct Cinema
documentary pioneers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker. Their aim was
to capture a portrait of an America on the threshold of revolution. The film
featured recitations by actor Rip Torn dressed as a Native American and
interviews with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, a Wall Street banker and a
student activist. It all culminated in a performance by Jefferson Airplane on
the roof of the Schuyler Hotel. Leacock and Pennebaker financed the project
through their production company and acted as cameramen on the shoot.
Godard complained that he didnt know which camera was shooting what and
later in the editing room found himself unable to finish the film which had the
working title One A.M. (One American Movie). Pennebaker later re-edited the
footage himself to create his own version, One P.M. (One Parallel Movie).

The Dziga Vertov Group

Godards next eight films were made under the collective identity of the Dziga
Vertov Group, named after the 1920s-30s Soviet filmmaker David Abelevich
Kaufman who went under the pseudonym Dziga Vertov and whose work
emphasized both editing and the importance of the class struggle. The Dziga
Vertov Group films were defined primarily for Brechtian forms, Marxist
ideology and a lack of personal authorship. By any criteria these films were
unconventional and for some unwatchable; a recurring theme was of the
image as an unreliable representation of reality, while sound is foregrounded,
not merely as a complement to the image, but as an autonomous element.
The first film, British Sounds (1969), was made in Britain, financed by
television and composed of six long sequences: a car production line; a naked
woman walking around a house as a feminist text is read out on the
soundtrack; a right-wing condemnation of immigration; workers discussing
capitalism; a group of students trying to produce radical lyrics for a Beatles
song; and a bloody hand reaching for a red flag. Throughout sound takes
precedence over image, carrying as it does the lecture or message that Godard
wanted to convey.
Godard shot his next film in Czechoslovakia and this time the commission
came from a West German television station. Pravda(1969), after the Russian
word for truth, featured shots of Western billboards and company logos with a

highly acerbic commentary critical of the revisionism occurring in the

country. This reflected Godards increasingly hardline communist ideology,
while his refusal to translate the conversations of Czech workers showed a
disdain for conventional documentary practice.
While editing British Sounds and Pravda, Godard spent a great deal of time
discussing them with a young Maoist, Jean-Pierre Gorin. The two men had
met at a party two years previously and had since spent a great deal of time
together discussing cinema. Gorin was a brilliant student and a passionate
cinephile, thoroughly versed in the radical new philosophies coming out of the
universities. Godard considered him 'better than me in thinking and
philosophy'. Godard invited Gorin to come to Italy to help him on his next
project Vent dest (Wind from the East, 1970), which starred Anne Wiazemsky
and Gian Maria Volont.
Originally envisioned as a leftist spaghetti western by anarchist revolutionary
Daniel Cohn-Bendit who originally proposed the idea to Godard the
production of Vent dest had quickly descended into chaos. The money to
make the film had been provided by a radical Italian millionaire but much of it
was being siphoned off to unrelated causes, including a transsexual bar in
Milan. Most disastrously, it had been decided to make the film
'democratically', that is, by mass meeting. At these meetings the anarchists, led
by Cohn-Bendit, generally opposed the approach of the Maoists and vice
versa.
The stalemate was resolved when Godard and Gorin took control of the film.
Under Gorins influence, the film was elevated from fiction to a manifesto
asking the question: 'what it is to represent any strike in images?' The final
section, headed Civil Violence, featured footage that Godard and Gorin shot in
Paris, teaching militants how to buy weapons and assemble the materials
needed to make homemade bombs.
So enthusiastic was Godard about the collaboration with Gorin that he decided
to continue the partnership. It was the beginning of several years of intense
discussion, experimentation and close collaboration between the two
filmmakers. Gorin brought a new philosophical perspective to Godards work,
encouraging him to reconsider cinema from a historical perspective and
placing increasing emphasis on sound over image. Meanwhile Godard and
Wiazemskys marriage was falling apart although they wouldnt finally
break up until 1971. She blamed Godards complete immersion in Maoist
politics and the influence of Gorin. 'Gorin brought out the worst in him,
dragged him toward a cinema that was not his own,' she later claimed.
In December 1969, Godard and Gorin received financing from Italian
television for a film called Luttes en Italie (Struggles in Italy), which they

filmed almost entirely in Godard apartment. The story, divided into three
parts, was based on a text by Louis Althusser and concerned a young womans
realization that her political commitment is less revolutionary than she had
come to believe. Each of the three parts is almost identical in content,
although the soundtrack differs. The sequences of the young woman in her
home are deliberately banal and unrelentingly dull to watch, unsurprisingly
therefore it was never broadcast on Italian television.
Dziga Vertovs next project was a commission from the Arab League to make
a film about the Palestinian struggle for independence. The title Jusqu la
victoire (Until Victory) was taken from a Palestinian militant slogan. Godard
and Gorin and cameraman Armand Marco travelled to Jordan, the West Bank,
and Lebanon, several times throughout 1970, collecting footage, much of it
consisting of military parades, children reciting propaganda, and soldiers
receiving orders. Unable to complete the film due to lack of funds, the pair
agreed to a month-long lecture tour of American universities, but Godard
found the students much more hostile this time than on his previous trip. In
Berkeley, where he showed British Sounds and Pravda, he and Gorin were
pelted with tomatoes.
By contrast, some of Americas leading film critics were effusive in their
praise for Godards recent output at a time when he was largely ignored in
France. Le Gai Savoir played to great acclaim in New York in September
1969, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her was praised highly when it
opened in April 1970. The same month One Plus One garnered excellent
reviews in The New York Times and Newsweek, and in May British
Sounds and Pravda opened and received an in depth analysis from Penelope
Gilliatt in The New Yorker. Later in the year Vent dest played at the New York
Film Festival captivating Vincent Canby of The Times amongst others.
While in America the pair also managed to find a new source of financing
from publisher Barney Rosset, who gave Godard a five-picture deal for an
investment of twenty-five thousand dollars per film. The first project to come
out of the agreement wasVladimir and Rosa (1970), a film about the trial of
the Chicago Eight, which had begun that spring. Filmed mostly in the
filmmakers editing room in Paris, it featured a series of simple Brechtian skits
against blank walls satirizing the ongoing trial of the American militants.
Despite the unrealistic approach, this was the first time since denouncing
mainstream filmmaking that Godard had managed to convey characters as
complex human beings rather than just ideological abstractions.
One of the driving ideological forces behind Dziga Vertov was the importance
of continuous production, but up until now their films had been largely
unseen. Early in 1971, with the help of the producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, they
set up the much more commercial feature Tout va bien (Alls Well, 1972),

financed by Gaumont and starring Yves Montand and Jane Fonda. Such was
the actors respect for Godard that they agreed to work for no fee upfront and
a share of the profits. However, just weeks before production was to begin,
disaster struck. Godard was involved in a serious motorcycle accident that left
his pelvis broken, his skull fractured and his body lacerated. It took six days
for him to recover consciousness and he would be in and out of hospital for
another two years receiving physiotherapy.
For a while it looked like Jane Fonda would back out of the film but Gorin
flew to meet her and persuaded her to honour her commitment by explaining
that if she dropped out the movie would collapse and Godards medical bills
would no longer be covered. By December Godard was ready to start
shooting, but because of his poor physical state Gorin did most of the
directing. The plot centred on a strike at a sausage factory witnessed by an
American reporter and her French husband, a filmmaker, who, along with the
manager of the factory, are held hostage by the workers. The film is among
Godards most pessimistic, implying that nothing, not even left wing idealism,
can prevent modern society descending into soulless commercialism. Again
the style is explicitly Brechtian in its formal qualities featuring a factory set
consisting of a cross-section of the building across which the camera tracks
back and forth from room to room. However, despite the star names, the film
was a critical and commercial disaster.
After completing Tout va bien, Godard and Gorin made a fifty-two minute
cinematic essay to accompany it at the New York Film Festival. Titled Letter
to Jane: an investigation about a still, it consisted of an exhaustive critique of
a still photograph of Jane Fonda taken in Vietnam on her visit to advocate
peace during the Vietnamese War that had originally been published
inLExpress. The commentary spoken by Godard and Gorin analyses the
photograph in terms of the contemporary medias depiction of the world,
while also referencing film history, in particular Fondas resemblance to her
father Henry, an actor synonymous with liberal America at the time of
Roosevelts New Deal. It was the last time Godard and Gorin worked together.
They briefly set up a company together but the venture fell through after
Gorins debut as a solo director, Ailleurs, collapsed during production. Gorin
fled to California and the Dziga Vertov group was history.

Starting Over
Anne-Marie Miville was born on 11 November 1945 in Lausanne,
Switzerland. She moved to Paris as a young woman where she enjoyed a brief
career as a singer. Godard met her in 1970, by which time she had become a
photographer and had a young daughter. Their close relationship deepened

after Godards crash, when she gave him much needed support. They became
partners, both personal and professional -- an alliance that has continued to the
present day.
Between 1972 and 1974, Godards usual rate of productivity stalled as he
recuperated from his accident, set up a new production company called
Sonimages, relocated to the provincial town of Grenoble with Miville, and
began putting into practice the video techniques and methods that would
inform his work in the future. Godards fascination with the possibilities
presented by video would transform his work from this time forward. He
believed video was a superior medium because editing on film was limited to
placing images sequentially, whereas video allowed the possibility of
superimposing multiple images. This, he felt, was essential to visual analysis,
since it permitted 'thinking two aspects together, to think montage, to think
mixing'. Video was also a cheaper medium to work in and would therefore
allow him to make more personal stories.
The brilliant inventor Jean-Pierre Beauviala, whose company Aaton was based
in the town, became an important collaborator at this time. Godard was so
impressed with Aaton that he planned to make a film about the company but
financing fell through. Instead, he and Miville began trawling through
abandoned footage from Jusqu la victoire shot by himself and Gorin in
1970. The film they created from the fragments, Ici et ailleurs (Here and
Elsewhere) took the form of a conversation between a man and a woman as
they discuss the images that unwind on the screen. Intercut with the scenes
from the Middle East, Miville and Godard added footage of contemporary
France: a working-class man, woman and their children in a mundane modern
apartment. The implied suggestion being, that in order to understand the
'elsewhere', we need to first understand the reality of 'here'. In form and
substance, Ici et ailleurs marked a transition from the radical-era films to the
more personal, video-centred work that was to follow.
Feeling that he had become isolated from the wider filmmaking community,
Godard sought out a dialogue with Francois Truffaut, but if his wish was to
reconcile with his old cinephile comrade his approach was singularly
unsuccessful. In a three-page letter he called Truffaut a 'liar' for what he had
chosen to leave out of Day for Night (1973), and demanded money to make a
film in response. 'You should help me, so that viewers dont think that films
are only made your way,' he wrote. Truffaut responded with a twenty-page
letter in which he gave vent to years of unexpressed bitterness towards
Godard. He brought up offhand remarks Godard had made years previously
that had stung him, accused Godard of hypocrisy and political publicityseeking, criticized him for his treatment of actresses and crew, of not turning
up at film festivals he had promised to attend, of calling producer Pierre
Braunberger a 'dirty Jew', and of chickening out of selling the newspaper La

Cause du people when there was danger of arrest. He reproached Godard for
being both jealous and envious of him, despite his own desire to remain
friends, and offered a ruthless critique of Tout va bien, which he compared
unfavourably to A bout de souffle. The two men were never on friendly terms
again.
Towards the end of 1974, the producer Georges de Beauregard went to
Grenoble to meet Godard and to propose they remake bout de
souffle (Breathless). Godard accepted. Beauregard raised the money from
distributor Ren Pignires who had financed the original film. Godard,
however, had no intention of filming a remake. In an interview with a French
publication in March 1975 he talked about the project: 'To the contrary of
what has been announced, the film will not be called Breathless Number
Two but rather Number Two (Breathless). I am not doing a remake, but I am
posing a reflection on the basis ofBreathless'. As it turned out the film was as
far from the directors 1960 debut as anyone could have imagined. Using nonprofessional actors and video technology, Godard made what amounted to a
home movie on the subject of modern family life, examining the relationship
between love, work, sex, gender and children. Shot on video and then
transferred to film, multiple images and voices are shown and heard, often
simultaneously on the screen, leading to multiple interpretations of the story.
After completing Numro Deux, Godard and Miville made a second film
financed by Beauregard, Comment ca va? (Hows It Going?), which
examined, through a long discussion between a communist newspaper editor
and his typist, the use of the image in society. Their disagreements about how
to edit a video for their newspaper leads onto an extended conversation about
how images are chosen by the media and the differences between words and
pictures.
Television
While Godard and Mivilles three recent films received approval in the pages
of the newly revitalized Cahiers du cinma, their failure to produce anything
resembling a remake of bout de souffle, or any degree of commercial
success, signalled the end of Beauregards support. Instead Godard accepted a
commission from French non-commercial television channel, FR3, to make
six 100 minute programs within a very short space of time in order to fill slots
in the schedule in the summer of 1976.
Godards initial idea was to do six live interviews and discussions, but he was
told the programs had to be recorded. Instead he divided each time slot into
two parts, the first 'a little more composed', the second 'simply someone
talking'. He called the whole series Six fois deux/Sur et sous la
communication. Each of the films was based on a different theme:

unemployment, montage, journalism, photography, childhood, and love. The

first part of each program took the form of a video essay, while the second
featured an interview with an unemployed person. FR3 were pleased with Six
fois deux which, despite low ratings, gained the station a lot of publicity. Le
Monde published a long interview with Godard, and Cahiers du
cinema and Libration discussed the series at length.
When Henri Langlois died in 1977, Godard took over the classes he had been
teaching at a university in Montreal and it was here he first established his
approach to the subject of cinema history that would bear fruition 20 years
later in the epicHistoire(s) du cinema. His plan was to analyze cinema
utilizing video editing effects, which would crucially allow him to show
images within images and to write directly onto the screen techniques he
had been experimenting with for some years already. The intention was to
produce ten hour-long videocassettes that would be bought and used by
universities teaching cinema studies.
For the moment this project was put on hold as Godard and Miville accepted
a commission from a television channel, Antenne 2, to make an adaptation of
a childrens book first published in 1877 called Le Tour de la France avec
deux enfants (All Around France With Two Children). The adaptation was to
comprise twelve broadcasts of 26 minutes each, which would be shown each
evening during the 1977 Christmas season. Although the commission was for
a dramatic film based on a fictional period piece, Godard, who renamed the
project France detour deux enfants (France Tour Detour Two Children), reenvisioned it as a documentary about two children who would not be
travelling around France, but would instead be living in one place: Paris. Each
of the films consisted of in depth interviews with the two children and
documentary footage focusing on the minutiae of the their lives. He later said
he made it in order to understand children better, but the programs also offer a
consistent critique of modern family life, especially the pervasive cultural
influence of TV in the family home.
Return to 'Cinema Cinema'
For ten years, between 1968 and 1978, Godard spoke of television as a
preferable alternative to film. But now, encouraged by Miville to make a
return to cinema, Godard accepted an invitation from Francis Ford Coppola to
join him in America at Zoetrope Studios, where the director of The
Godfather and Apocalypse Now was attempting to put together a studio built
on talent rather than a desire for profit. Godard had become obsessed with the
story of Bugsy Siegel, the mobster who built Las Vegas, and proposed a film
project inspired by his life and nefarious career. He produced a number of
scripts for the film, which he called 'The Story', however the project fell
through due to a lack of commitment from initially enthusiastic stars such as

Diane Keaton. Instead, Godard returned to Europe where he was already

preparing the film that would re-establish him as a leading director.
In mid-1977, Godard and Miville had moved to the town of Rolle in
Switzerland, midway between Geneva and Lausanne. Having failed in his
attempt to make a film in Hollywood, Godard teamed up with a young
cinephile producer, Alain Sarde, and raised the budget for a deeply personal
feature film drawing on aspects of his own life. Collaborating with acclaimed
screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrire on the script and gathering three admired
young actors Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, and Jacques Dutronc in the
lead roles, Godard set himself on course for a return to what he called 'cinema
cinema' movies with stories and stars. The film would be called Sauve qui
peut (la vie) (Everyman For Himself / Slow Motion, 1980).
The star of the story, in this case, is one Paul Godard, an inactive filmmaker,
separated from his wife and daughter and breaking up with his long-time
girlfriend Denise. A parallel storyline revolves around a prostitute played by
Isabelle Huppert, who, while plying her trade and looking for a flat to live in,
becomes involved in the filmmaker and his girlfriends lives.
Prior to production Godard used video as a kind of sketchpad: researching
locations, practicing gestures, shooting tests. This attention to detail resulted
in a more classical, composed kind of cinema in contrast to the more
impressionistic style of his 60s work. At the same time Godards new editing
method the decomposition of motion into successive freeze-frames added
an almost surreal element. He described this technique as 'Slowing down in
order to see'.
As unorthodox in his methods as he had been on bout de souffle, Godard
was intent on making the film on the basis of an ongoing dialogue between its
participants. After much hesitation he decided to shoot on film rather than
video and hired two cameramen: longtime collaborator William Lubtchansky
who had worked on all his productions since Ici et ailleurs, and Renato Berta.
This unusual decision, he hoped, would mean that during the shoot he 'could
listen calmly, ask them some questions, and even see them each give a
different answer, like doctors to a sick person'.
Despite his best intentions, however, Godard was often extremely difficult
with his cast and crew, arguing bitterly with Lubtchansky on a number of
occasions and reducing Nathalie Baye to tears. Nevertheless, the result that
emerged from this fractious collaboration proved to be amongst the directors
most original and coherent works. Wonderfully acted, cinematically inventive
and often very funny, its portrayal of three characters trying to come to terms
with their disordered lives in a society in which nobody is free but everybody
is trying to save themselves, is both deeply pessimistic and visually stunning.

However at its premiere at Cannes on May 21, 1980, Sauve qui peut was
booed. Some spectators responded angrily to the films sexually provocative
scenes shouting 'Filth!' and 'Degenerate!' at Godard during the post-screening
press conference. when the film was released that October, the French critics
declared it a masterpiece. Le Monde featured three rave reviews on the same
day. It was also a great financial success, rivalling that of bout de souffle. In
the US, the film was equally well received, Andrew Sarris of The Village
Voice wrote: 'No Godard film since Pierrot le fou has excited me as much
as Sauve qui peut (la vie)... it is more like a piece of music than a movie'.
Godard promoted the film enthusiastically in the press and on television and
was rewarded with his biggest hit in America since his debut.

Art and Commerce

After the success of Sauve qui peut (la vie), Godard again spent time in Los
Angeles at the new Zoetrope Studios where Coppola still planned to produce
Godards next film, although the two mooted projects: the long awaited The
Story, and an adaptation of Jack Kerouacs On The Road, never made it to the
green light. While there, in January 1981, Godard first met the German
actress Hanna Schygulla and persuaded her, on the basis of a three page
synopsis, to star in what would become his next feature film, Passion.
The original scenario for Passion was set around a small factory behind a train
station and involved a German woman, a French woman and a foreign man
'neither refugee nor immigrant' who is killed at the end by a stray police
bullet. Over the course of the year the story developed into something far
more ambitious, bringing together work and love, politics and art.
The inspiration for this reimagining came out of the experience of a day
filming on the set of Coppola's new film One From The Heart. when he was
given the opportunity to use the studio and crew to film several tableaux
vivants, or living pictures, inspired by famous paintings. Godard decided to
incorporate the staging of historical and mythological scenes from classic
paintings into the centre of his new film. Video taped interviews and extensive
rehearsals with the three lead actors Hanna Schygulla, Jerzy Radziwilowicz
and Isabelle Huppert provided Godard with enough ideas to sketch a loose
narrative involving a Polish film director making a film in France whose lack
of inspiration is reflected in the film he is trying to make.
Filming finally began in December of 1981 and reunited Godard with Raoul
Coutard for the first time in a decade after a number of other
cinematographers refused to accept Godards insistence on shooting using

available light. Despite a budget of twelve million francs, the shoot again
proved difficult. Coutard found Godard more indecisive than he had been in
the 60s and lacking 'the certainty he had before that things should be made in
this or that way'. In the end filming took four months.
Passion premiered at Cannes and immediately went on general release.
Reviews were harsh. The critic for Le Monde called it 'the profoundly
discouraging film of a solitary man, jealously closed in on himself'. Audience
figures were also disappointing, considering the budget and the stars involved.
Godard blamed the cast and crew for the failure.
A change in government in France in June 1981 brought about new policy
regarding the arts that proved highly favourable to the New Wave directors
who were held in high esteem by Francois Mitterrands government. Minister
of Culture, Jack Lang, idolized Godard and his patronage boosted the
directors status to that of an artist of great prestige. Suddenly financing was
easier to come by for Godard and his pace of filmmaking accelerated from
this time onwards. His next project, an adaptation ofCarmen, was to have
starred Isabelle Adjani, but after one week of filming she left the set in tears,
complaining to journalists that Godard wouldnt let her wear make-up and
Raoul Coutard 'was a misogynist and didnt know how to photograph women'.
Maruschka Detmers, an inexperienced twenty-year-old Dutch actress, was
hastily recast in the title role. Initially enthusiastic, Godard soon became
disappointed by her traditional approach to acting. As a director he
discouraged any form of psychological interpretation from the actors he
worked with, preferring precise physical behaviour and a performance that
reflected the actors real personality. Another cast member, Jacques Bonnaff,
described the conflict between the director and his cast, 'if we tried to
understand, to analyze our characters psychology, Godard got angry, he
stopped us at once. He said that destroyed expression, which should remain
intuitive and free. We lived in a climate of tension. Wanting us to share his
concerns, his creative anxieties, he left us on the tightrope'.
The film that resulted from this climate of tension was Prnom Carmen (First
Name: Carmen, 1983), which intercut parallel stories concerning a quartet
rehearsing Beethoven and a gang of youths robbing a bank to get the funds to
make a movie. Designed to resemble a string quartet in cinematic terms, the
film explores the lives of young people in the 1980s and the eternal
incompatibility between art and commerce. Godard himself makes an
appearance as a burnt out filmmaker languishing in a lunatic asylum.
Resembling, in its freewheeling style, the directors classic New Wave films
of the 60s, Prnom Carter ends with the epitaph: 'In memoriam small movies'.
Its qualities were recognised by the 1983 Venice Film Festival jurors who
awarded it the Golden Lion. Audience response was correspondingly

enthusiastic.
Yet, despite his success with Prnom Carmen, making it had been another
painful experience for Godard; the kind of collaborative effort he was looking
for still eluded him. In an interview he gave to the magazine American
Film soon after Venice, he made his feelings clear, 'the crew were against the
movie, so we made the movie against the crew. Like the captain of a ship, like
Captain Ahab'. More than anything, Godard wanted more time while making a
film to reflect and experiment but found it impossible because of the pressure
of working with a tight budget. In time, as he built up his own stock of
equipment and resources, his dream of a more considered filmmaking method
would become possible.

Mystery Stories
For some time Godard had wanted to make a film about fathers and daughters.
'Since I have no daughter, Ive wanted to have a daughter,' he explained. 'I
thought for a while that I would make a film about Freud and his first patient:
on the problem of the father. Then, I looked at it with regard to God the
Father. And I came upon the story of Mary'. Godard himself would be the
powerful off-screen presence of God the Father, Joseph would be played by a
young inexperienced actor named Thierry Rode, and Myriem Roussel, who
had appeared in supporting roles in Passion and Prnom Carmen, would play
Mary.
At this time, Godard and Myriem Roussel were extremely close. He later
grouped her with Karina and Wiazemsky as 'those who had counted in the
image'. Their preparation for the film was intensive. He had her keep video
equipment in her Paris apartment where he filmed her living her daily life. He
also had her read the Bible, gave her dossiers of images and text to think about
and instructed her to watch films by directors such as Dreyer, Scorcese and
Rohmer. At the same time, he wrote to her constantly, between three and five
letters a day. 'Through working, rehearsing scenes, and rigorously questioning
ourselves about these relationships, it ended up resembling an authentic
psycho-analysis,' Roussel later recalled. 'It was exhilarating and exhausting'.
Godard himself was having trouble getting started on the film; the grandeur
and significance of the story appeared to have inhibited his self-belief. Again
he sought a dialogue about the subject matter with his cast and crew but was
disappointed and blamed this failure for his difficulties in making the film. He
shot everything repeatedly, doing many more takes than he usually did and
refilming the entire story four or five times. He was meticulous in his framing,
demanding that cameraman Jean-Bernard Menoud replaced framings with

'centers' places in the frame on which to focus.

All the reshooting and indecision inevitably upset the actors. He kept Roussel
in isolation, driving her to the location himself. She recalled: 'He picked me
up every day by car, and would talk to me. He put me in the state of mind for
the scene we were going to shoot. It might be gentle, it might be violent. He
did not like actors who... had training. He wanted to put me back in the state
of acting for the first time'. In the end he got what he wanted. By avoiding
traditional actor direction and wearing her down through numerous retakes,
Godard removed any trace of theatrical expression from Roussels
performance and returned her to the completely naturalistic presence she had
been when he first met her.
Updating the virgin birth story from the New Testament to the present day, Je
vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary) offended some Christians. At a pre-release
screening at a cin-club in Versailles on January 22, 1985, members of a
protest group were there. When Marys naked body appeared on screen, they
disrupted the showing, shouting and throwing stink bombs. Catholic groups
insisted that the government either outlaw the film or excise scenes showing
Mary naked. Jack Lang defended the film but still a lawsuit was filed to ban it.
Finally, on January 28, the courts ruled that the film was free to be shown
without cuts.
The protests continued with demonstrations in the streets of Paris and
Versailles. Pope John Paul II criticised the film saying it 'deeply wounds the
religious sentiments of believers'. Controversy spread abroad, leading to
further protests in Germany, Spain, Greece and Australia. In America, angry
crowds surrounded the theatre in New York when the film premiered there at
the New York Film Festival and tried to prevent anyone entering. Police
parted the crowd and ticket holders had to brave the wrath of jeering
protestors.
Many reviewers were also scathing, although most acknowledged the films
stunning cinematography. For Godard, the film merely added to his already
legendary status. Although remote from the machinations of the French film
industry, he had little trouble finding favourable sources of finance. He could
now take more time developing his films, meditating on his approach and
making changes along the way.
Even before Hail Mary had gone into production, Godards producer Alain
Sarde had proposed he make a much more commercial project a neo-noir
thriller featuring big name stars. Godard agreed, partly out of the need to pay
for the long, drawn out production schedule of Hail Mary. The film,
titled Detective (1985), takes place in a Parisian hotel where two detectives
are investigating a murder which took place two years before. It reunited the

director with Claude Brasseur, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Nathalie Baye, and
featured 60s Rock and Roll legend Johnny Halliday. Godard managed to
create an original spin on the conventions of the genre, employing a battery of
cinematographic devices to upset any semblance of a linear narrative.
However, unsurprisingly, considering his lack of interest in the story, many of
these techniques felt like tired imitations of his earlier work and resulted in an
already complicated story becoming virtually incomprehensible.
Detectives premiere at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival began inauspiciously
when Noel Godin, a philosophical provocateur, threw a cream pie in Godards
face. The director managed to take it in good humour and at the subsequent
press conference called the assault 'a homage to silent film'.
However, Detective received a similar fate in the screening, being booed by
viewers expecting a more traditional film noir. Critics were similarly
disapproving. A film undertaken as a commercial venture proved, in the end, a
failure at the box office.

At Home with the Godards

Whilst filming Hail Mary, Godard had also agreed to make a project for
Channel Four in the UK, who had invested one hundred thousand dollars
towards the films completion. To fulfil that commission, Godard and Miville
now made a fifty-two minute video at home in Rolle called Soft and
Hard (1985). It showed the couple in their apartment engaged in tasks such as
arranging flowers, ironing, miming with a tennis racket, watching television,
reviewing footage from Detective, and talking on the phone to a producer. In
between the couple discuss at length the meaning and mythology of cinema
and their, often differing, views of the medium. It was the first in a series of
explicitly biographical projects that Godard would produce in the coming
years.

Screwball
Godards next film was the closest he ever came to making an out and out
comedy. Soigne ta droite (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), inspired by the cinema
of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, starred Godard himself as a director
guaranteed financing for a film as long as he delivers it within 24 hours. His
character, known as both 'the Idiot' and 'the Prince' (in homage to
Dostoevsky), in a desperate effort to deliver the film on time, takes a surreal
plane journey that ultimately ends with the film handed over but the director
lying dead on the runway. Intercut with this main storyline are two others. In

one, a pop band, Rita Mitsouko, rehearse and record their latest album. In the
other, a Belgian man called only 'the individual' (played by French comedian
Jacques Villeret) is deported from the country by the secret police.
Soigne ta droite was well received by critics and audiences in France. Michel
Boujut described the film as 'a filmed poem, a soft electroshock, a Dadaist
collage where what remains on the retina is nothing but light, movement, and
emotion'. It was number one at the Paris box office in its first week and shared
the Louis Delluc prize the most prestigious French film award with Louis
Malles Au revoir les enfants.
Though often hilariously funny, a number of the characters in Soigne ta
droite end up dying. Godards preoccupation with the subject may have been
prompted by the recent deaths of two of his once closest colleagues. In
September 1984 Breathlessproducer Georges Beauregard died and Godard
wrote an enigmatic memorial to him in Le Film Francais. When Francois
Truffaut died from a brain tumour the following month Godard wrote another
eulogy in which he praised Truffaut as a critic, but disparaged him as a
filmmaker. He wrote: 'We knew that a film had to be made alone... but we
were four... so it took us some time to admit it... then some of us recanted... in
our case, the screen was the judge'. It was Truffauts passion for books that
lead him astray, Godard suggested, even implying that this had caused his
death as both a filmmaker and a person: 'too much information... it went to his
head.'

Powerplay
From the moment Godard and genre producer Menahem Golan signed a
contract on the back of a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985, King
Lear was an unlikely proposition. The film's long and often tortuous path to
the screen was beset by frequent clashes of will and often calamitous
misunderstandings. Such difficulties were highly appropriate considering the
events of the play and, knowing this, Godard made the making of the film an
intrinsic part of the film itself, so that the behind the scenes struggles became
part of the onscreen action. When he first pitched the idea 'to do King Lear as
King Leone, as a sort of patriarch-gangster... like a godfather' to Menahem
Golan, the producer agreed as long as he work with a high-profile
screenwriter. Godard suggested Norman Mailer and Golan gave his approval.
Although reluctant at first, Mailer agreed as part of a two-picture deal with
Cannon Films that would enable him to direct an adapation of his own
novel Tough Guys Dont Dance. Preliminary meetings between the celebrated
director and the celebrated writer did not go well. Mailer found his

discussions with Godard vague and unproductive. He would just sit there in
this depression that was so heavy you could almost reach out and touch it,'
Mailer recalled, 'and then at the end of the lunch hed say: "I think Im going
back to France again, I will see you all in another month or so, and then we
will go look for a place to shoot the film".'
In September 1986, without a script and with little idea of Godards plans,
Mailer flew with his daughter Kate to Switzerland where it had been decided
that the film would be shot. Godards plan was to feature Mailer in the film
and he began shooting almost immediately after he arrived. Mailer felt
uncomfortable, however, appearing as himself and speaking lines given to him
by Godard. After only two days, director and writer had a terrible row.
Filming was abandoned and Mailer and Kate flew back to America. According
to assistant Herv Duhamel, 'Godard had just begun and he didnt really know
what he wanted to do. He had to do something quickly, to calm Golan... A guy
like Mailer asks a lot of questions. They had a long discussion, which Godard
doesnt like. Godard started out in a very bad mood'. Mailer later admitted he
felt uncomfortable with the incestuous implications Godard appeared to be
pursuing.
For some months, work on King Lear was halted. Godard approached other
actors to play Don Learo including Tony Curtis, Lee Marvin and Rod Steiger,
but each either made unreasonable demands or backed out. Then Tom Luddy,
the American associate producer of the film, had the idea to bring in theatre
director Peter Sellars, an expert on Shakespeare, who he felt could be
Godards guide to the play. It proved an inspired decision as Sellars motivated
Godard to take the film in a new offbeat direction. In Godards new
conception Sellars played 'William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth', who has
been commissioned by the Queen of England and the Cannon Group to
attempt to rediscover the works of his ancestor, which have been lost in the
catastrophe of Chernobyl. Godards King Lear would be a symbolic, rather
than literal adaptation of the play, drawing out those themes and elements that
interested him most.
Filming began again in January 1987 with veteran Burgess Meredith in the
title role and Hollywood teen star Molly Ringwald as Cordelia. By now
Godard was on a tight schedule having promised Golan that he would
premiere the film at that years Cannes Film Festival. Fortunately filming
went far more smoothly this time thanks to Sellars efforts. The diverse cast
included director Leos Carax as Edgar (Poe), Julie Delpy as Virginia (Woolf),
and an uncredited cameo by Woody Allen as a film editor named Mr Alien.
Footage of Norman Mailer was also incorporated. Godard himself played
Professor Pluggy, a gravel-voiced inventor with a headdress of video wires,
for what he calls 'the first image'.

Initial reactions to King Lear at Cannes were mixed. While some recognised
the imaginative conception behind Godards playful adaptation, the majority
found it incomprehensible. Menahem Golan was outraged by the inclusion of
his private telephone conversation in the film, complaining that Godard had
'spit in his own soup', while Norman Mailer later commented that working for
Godard on King Lear was 'probably the most disagreeable single experience
Ive had in all these years as a writer'. The film had its commercial premiere in
New York on January 22, 1988. American critics were also harsh in their
assessment: Vincent Canby called it 'lifeless'; Time magazine correspondent
Richard Corliss described it as 'cynical'. After one week in a mostly empty
theatre, the film closed.
In more recent years King Lear has been reappraised by some of Godards
more perceptive critics and is considered by some to be one of his true
masterworks. In particular the complex soundtrack, mixed down to a flat
mono on its original release but later restored, has been praised for its richness
and beauty.
Magnum Opus
From the mid-70s onwards Godard had been talking about making a personal
history of cinema but did not start work on the project until after signing a
contract with Gaumont in 1985. By then his conception of the project had
developed to include key historical events of the twentieth century, in
particular the Holocaust and World War II 'because thats where everything
(the cinema) came to a halt'. This historic break in the history of cinema came
about, in his view, because 'nobody filmed the concentration camps, no one
wanted to show them or to see them'. This failure, he contended, resulted in
'the death of the European cinema and the triumph of the American cinema'.
Documentary realism and the recording of history had been superseded by the
grand spectacle of Hollywood. This rejection represented, in Godards view,
the end of cinema an assertion that became the central theme of the eight
episodes of Histoire(s) du cinema.
With full access to the Swiss film archives, Godard assembled a vast quantity
of film clips and still photographs, which he then edited, using the latest in
video technology and optical effects, with on-screen texts, music, and shots of
himself and others speaking or reciting. The result, created over a period of
ten years, was an extraordinary and very personal rumination on the concept
and meaning of cinema and its interrelationship with 20th century history.
The culmination of years of thought and experimentation, Histoire(s) du
cinema, released two episodes at a time between 1989 and 1998, was a poetic
funeral oration to cinema whose dense, superimposed layers, and interplay
between alternating images was both a search for truth and a homage to the

those cinematic forebears, such as Henri Langlois, who had influenced

Godard so much as a young man. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum declared it to be
'the culmination of 20th century filmmaking'. Other critics were similarly
impressed when the first two episodes were broadcast on Canal Plus in 1989
so that, despite low viewing figures, Godard was commissioned to continue
his creation of the series to its conclusion and further acclaim.
A Twice Told Tale
At the 1987 Csar Awards, Frances equivalent of the Oscars, Godard was
given an honorary award in tribute to his contribution to French cinema. The
same day, at the suggestion of producer Marin Karmitz, he agreed to write and
direct a feature film about an actor that would star Marcello Mastoianni. It
would be another three years before the film was released, by which time the
producer, actor and story concept had changed. In the interim, Godard took
what he described as 'a vacation from fiction', by creating promotional videos
for the fashion designers Marith and Francois Girbaud, the appliance store
chain Darty, France Tlcom, and Le Figaro. With running times of between
thirteen and fifty minutes, these were more than mere commercials,
resembling in style Histoire(s) du cinema, and making only oblique mention
of their clients who were happy to simply have somebody of Godards cultural
status associated with their company. The last film, Le Dernier Mot (The Last
Word), a promotional film for Le Figaro, was a particularly striking short film,
based on a true story about a violinist shot by German troops during the
Second World War.
Filming of Nouvelle Vague, now starring Alain Delon, began on September
4th 1989 in a large mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva. The story, about a
man who may or may not have returned from the dead and his love affair with
a wealthy industrialist, suggested an allegorical reading in which the mans
first incarnation represents the Old Wave (Classic era directors like Griffiths
and Welles, revered and then disposed of by the system), while his later
incarnation is the New Wave (directors like Godard himself, all too aware of
the fate of their predecessors). Opposite these two incarnations is the woman,
representing the movie business.
The shoot, lasting two months, was as fraught as usual. Delon, used to
learning his lines well in advance, had to adjust to Godards method of
changing dialogue at the last minute, leading to bitter arguments between the
two of them. Relations with his cinematographer William Lubtchansky were
even worse. Nevertheless, together they produced some of the most beautiful
visuals in all of Godards work. He modelled the estate on the chateau in Jean
Renoirs The Rules of the Game, as well as his own childhood home, creating
an isolated place of grace and grandeur that recalled the Hollywood studios of
yore, as did the sweeping camera movements. His expectation was that 'the

fluid aspect of social and worldly movements, transmitted by the motion of

the camera, would bring out the love relationship as a solid entity, a little as if
music brought forth sculpture'. The soundtrack was similarly eloquent,
combining resonant music, ambient sounds, and dialogue loaded with
quotations from classic writers such as Hemingway and Faulkner, to create a
dense stereophonic soundscape.
Nouvelle Vague, shown for the first time at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival,
was immediately hailed a masterpiece. Its reception at the New York Film
Festival later that year was similarly enthusiastic, though its commercial
fortunes in America died after Vincent Canby of the New York Times gave it a
damning review, calling the film 'featherweight', comparing its visual style to
'a feature-length lipstick commercial', and stating that that there was little 'to
occupy either the mind or the eye'.

The Last Spy

Godards next film, Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), reunited him with
Eddie Constantine, once more in the role of Lemmy Caution, in a film
commissioned for television exploring the subject of solitude. 'I didnt want to
make a film on a lovers or a drug addicts solitude,' he explained later. 'I
rather wanted to concern myself with the solitude of a country, of a state, of a
group. I said to myself: why not East Germany?'
Taking to the road with a small crew of eight people, a loose narrative 'I had
this idea of an old spy from the West who finds himself all alone in the East
after the fall of the Wall, and who tries to return to the Occident' and a
notebook full of sketches, Godard improvised scenes based on locations they
came across on their journey, many of them significant places of German
culture such as the statue of Schiller in Leipzig and Goethes oak in
Buchenwald. The dialogue and voice over commentary were comprised of
literary references from German literature or from writings about Germany by
foreigners. Later, in the edit, Godard used clips of classic German films and
newsreel as a kind of visual punctuation. Ending poignantly with Lemmy
Caution returning to the West where he must face the banality of consumerist
culture, Godard appears to view the overthrow of the Soviet Union with regret
rather than celebration.

A Failed Experiment

In 1986 culture minister Jack Lang had sought to revitalize the French
national film school IDHEC by renaming it La Fmis (Foundation
Europenne des metiers de limage et du son the European Foundation for
Image and Sound Trades) and inaugurating a curriculum that would teach, not
just the trade of filmmaking, but the art as well. As a great admirer of the New
Wave, Lang hired Godard to lecture there, and sought to further formalize his
involvement by brokering a five year deal for Godard and Miville to
establish a studio on the schools premises in Paris for the purpose of
producing films in which students would participate. Their company would
receive three million francs as part of the deal.
Langs hope was that Godard would create 'a sort of studio for
experimentation'. Godard developed ideas for projects on which to work with
the students, including a four part series called Science sans
conscience (Science Without Conscience) and an adaptation of
Racines Brnice, as well as a planning his studio that would include an
editing room, an office, and a library with a wall against which to hit tennis
balls. Ultimately, however, the studio and Langs other plans to relocate
Frances film institutions never materialized due to lack of funds and
institutional resistance. Godard blamed the breakdown of his project with Le
Fmis on its failure to live up to the title of European: 'The day that every
television station in Europe regularly broadcasts a Greek, Portuguese, or
Slovakian film, whether insipid or not, Europe will be made. Otherwise, it will
remain American.'

'Quit Talking, Start Chalking'

Godard first met Grard Depardieu after seeing his performance in Maurice
Pialats 1987 film Under the Sun of Satan and writing him a letter praising his
performance. They agreed to work together on a future project, and after
completing Germany Year 90 Nine Zero, Godard approached him again. Once
Depardieu agreed, financing came easily; Godard, however, had yet to come
up with a script.
His source of inspiration came in the form of the Greek myth telling the story
of Amphitryon in which Zeus assumes the shape of the eponymous hero, so
that he can experience the pleasure of physical love by sleeping with his wife
Alcmene. In Godards version, titled Helas Pour Moi (1993), a character
called Klimt arrives at a bucolic, lakeside Swiss village to explore rumours of
a divine visitation involving a couple, Rachel and Simon, and in a series of
flashbacks attempts to piece together what has happened to them. His
perplexity is mirrored in the confusion felt by the viewer as Godard introduces
layer after layer of philosophical quotations, deliberate non-sequiturs, and

references to film, painting, poetry and history.

The production was a difficult one even by Godards standards. Lead actress
Joanne Ter Steege was let go prior to filming amidst rumours that Miville
had intervened after the actress had fallen in love with her director. Godard
replaced her with Laurence Masliah, but he was dissatisfied. He had also lost
faith in his own detailed screenplay and had no idea what he wanted to do. He
told his producers that the production was heading toward 'a sure catastrophe'
and that he wanted to delay, but Depardieu had other commitments so he was
forced to press on. Relations between director and his cast and crew turned
from bad to worse. Godard complained that Depardieu 'could not stay in one
place. He makes phone calls, he moves around, he cant work'. After Godard
lost his patience with supporting actor Roland Blanche, Depardieu told him,
'If you talk like that again to Roland, Ill hang you up on that tree'. At the end
of the shoot, Godard was so displeased with the footage that he cut it down to
a mere one hour. To augment it, he shot further scenes to create the framing
story featuring the character of Klimt.
Hlas pour moi was released in September 1993 to surprisingly favourable
reviews. Jean-Michel Frodon of Le Monde praised its philosophical
exploration and its 'melancholy beauty'. However, although Godard did
extensive publicity for the film, it fared poorly with the public. While
audiences remained fascinated by Godard the man, they were becoming less
and less interested in his films, which they often found incomprehensible. For
his next project the director decided to take advantage of this interest by
pointing the camera at himself.
Self Portrait
To coincide with a retrospective of Gaumont productions at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1994, the French company commissioned Godard
to make a film about himself to premiere there. The result was JLG/JLG, a
sixty-minute cinematic self-portrait filmed mostly in the directors own home,
in which he watches films, reads, writes, engages in business, plays tennis,
and reflects on the state of cinema and the world. It is a funny and often
moving film that fulfils Godards ambition to create, not autobiography, but
something more akin to a painters self-portrait. Constantly referring back to
an image of himself as a young boy, Godard wonders why he appears so
sombre, 'I was already in mourning for myself, my sole companion, and I
suspected that the soul had stumbled on the body and that it had left again
without offering its hand'. His mourning, he speculates, was an unconscious
mourning for the murdered victims in the concentration camps.
Godards preoccupation, indeed obsession, with the Holocaust had become a
central feature of his work. His belief that the failure of cinema to document

the concentration camps was its greatest failing had been a central theme
of LHistoire(s) du cinema, while questions of Jewish identity and history had
infused Helas pour moi and would become even more central toEloge de
lamour (1991). Paradoxically, he and Mivilles longstanding support for the
Palestinian cause, opposition to Isreali government policy and his reported
remarks about Jewish producers caused some, then and now, to label the
director anti-semitic.
The truth suggests something much more complex: raised during the war in
Vichy occupied France and neutral Switzerland in a family where anti-semitic
viewpoints were commonplace, Godard as a young man remained resolutely
apolitical. His conversion to radical leftist politics during the 60s went hand in
hand with a fierce anti-Americanism that found an outlet in the Palestinian
cause and attacks on Hollywood. At the same time, as early as 1963, Godard
had talked of making a film about the concentration camps but thought that it
could never be made because 'it would be intolerable'. He had publicly
criticised Claude Lanzmanns epic Shoah because of its lack of footage of the
camps themselves and the killing of inmates. He was even more hostile
towards Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List (1993) for recreating the camps in
a fictional representation of events. His response to both was LHistoire(s) du
cinemas lament for cinemas failure to stop the Holocaust at the time. As he
said in his acceptance speech after receiving the Adorno philosophy prize
for LHistoire: 'The concentration camps have never been shown. Basically,
they have been talked about, but nothing has been shown... No one wanted to
show them. They preferred talking, saying: Never again. And it started again,
so to speak, Vietnam, Algeria its not finished Biafra, Afghanistan,
Palestine.'

Love and War

Godard got the idea for his next film after reading an article in Le
Monde which criticised Susan Sontag for her 1993 production of Waiting for
Godot in the besieged city of Serajevo. The journalist pointing out that
'theyre already miserable enough. She shouldnt put on Beckett over there.
She should do Marivaux'. This gave Godard the idea to make a film about a
production of a Marivaux play in the city, although he later changed the author
to Musset and his play One Doesnt Trifle with Love.
The shoot for what would become For Ever Mozart began in January 1996
and proved gruelling. The weather was icy as Godard choreographed complex
action scenes in a forest on the banks of Lake Geneva and around the
decaying ruins of his maternal grandparents old house. His two lead actors,
Frderic Pierrot and Brangre Allaux were stripped to their underwear and

had to walk on the cold hard ground barefoot. Godard took charge of the
battle scenes involving tanks and scores of extras; in one shot he can be seen
firing off a mortar himself.
The second narrative strand the making of The Fatal Bolero took place
near Bordeaux later that month. This was Godards most direct depiction of
the travails of movie making since Le Mpris. Its portrayal of a grizzled old
directors attempt to make great cinematic art is both funny and deeply
pessimistic. In one of the most cutting sequences, the director meets with his
producer in a casino where slot machines are whirring and a woman is
solemnly transcribing the spoken text of a violent porn film. Later, when the
film opens, the people lining up are disappointed to discover that there are no
bare breasts onscreen, leaving instead to see Terminator 4. The films most
beautiful scenes featured Brangre Allaux on a beach in a crimson ball gown,
shouting to make herself heard as she is buffeted by a driving wind.
By all accounts, during the shoot, Godard had developed a strong affection, if
not obsession, for Allaux. They spent time together at her family home but she
was uncomfortable with the situation. As she later recalled, 'I did not need
either a father or a grandfather or a boyfriend, and he wanted to be all three'.
Godard tried to set up another film that would keep them connected through
work. The project the director had in mind was an adaptation of a novel
called Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq in which a young woman who works
in the perfume industry slowly transforms into a pig. Godard later abandoned
the project when it seemed too expensive to make.

In Praise of Love
After the failure of For Ever Mozart at the box office, the close relationship
between Godard and Allaux began to break down. Another project involving
Allaux and other students from her acting class working on a film with
Godard also foundered due to their lack of interest. The name 'Godard' meant
little to their generation, with some complaining that they would rather make a
film with Tarantino. The last film Godard tried to set up with Allaux was
called Eloge de lamour (In Praise of Love) in which 'an older man leaves a
younger woman for an older one and is happier'. Ultimately this collaboration
too would fail when, during an early casting session, Godard demanded that
she strip naked. She complied but afterwards told the director she refused to
do the film. They argued and did not see each other again. However she
continued to inspire Godard, leading him to rework the screenplay that would
become Eloge de lamour so that it reflected on their close relationship.
Eloge de lamour was as radical a departure for Godard as Sauve qui peut (la

vie) had been in 1979. While continuing with many of the philosophical
explorations and meditations flowing through Histoire, this time the medium
was fictional and combined classical black and white cinematography with the
most modern video technology. Again memories of the Holocaust were a
central theme and his method of dramatizing it in images rather than
testimony, but without reconstructing real events was, at last, his chance to
creatively respond to Claude Lanzmanns Shoah and Steven
Spielbergs Schindlers List.
The long evolution of Eloge de lamour, from original impulse to first
screening, was unprecedented in Godards work. The screenplay went through
a number of drafts during which the story changed drastically; preparatory
work between director and actors was equally extensive, and for once
mutually fulfilling for both parties. The shoot itself went on for longer than
any in his career. This exacting development process and close attention to
detail resulted in one of the boldest, most thought-provoking films in Godards
long career.
And yet the story was relatively simple. Divided into two contrasting parts, it
follows a young Parisian scriptwriters struggle to create a project about the
four stages of love (meeting, passion, separation and reconciliation). He
manages to get financial backing but struggles to find an actress to play the
female lead. When he finally finds the right person, she dies soon after. This
part of the film was shot in dazzling black and white, reminiscent not just of
the early years of the Nouvelle Vague but the glamorous American cinema of
the 1940s. In the second half, the writer looks into his own past and recalls a
time two years previously when he met an elderly couple who were
attempting to sell their wartime experiences in the French Resistance to
Hollywood. It was here he met the young woman for the first time. In this
second half, the visual style changes abruptly to stunning, almost otherworldly
saturated colour.
The films dialogue and soundtrack is as rich as the visuals. There are some
hilarious moments the best example being the two young girls gathering a
petition to get The Matrix dubbed into Breton while the philosophical
observations are as pointed and abundant as in any of the directors films. The
young writer at the centre of the story is a clear stand in for Godard and
through his internal reflections we get an absorbing insight into the directors
views on art, life and cinema. The film's anti-Hollywoodism is explicit with
one character commenting: 'the Americans of the North. They have no
memory. Their machines do, but they have none personally. So they buy the
past of others. Especially those who resisted'.
Expectations for Eloge damour ran high. It premiered in competition at the
Cannes Film Festival in May 2001 where it received favourable reviews,

though few seemed to comprehend quite what the director had achieved. The
films controversial attacks on Spielberg became a key talking point at the
expense of the romantic quest at the storys heart. Godard and the films star,
Bruno Puzulu, did extensive publicity for the film in advance of its release,
and yet the film failed to draw in the crowds. Only in time, with the benefit of
repeated viewings, has the film grown in stature and come to be seen as one of
Godards best films.
Leading Roles
While editing Eloge de lamour, Godard had taken time out to act in AnneMarie Mivilles film Aprs la reconciliation(After the Reconciliation, 2000)
in which he and Miville play a couple forced to confront the contradictions
and suppressed desires threatening their relationship when they encounter a
younger couple in a trip into the city. This followed their earlier
collaboration Nous sommes tous encore ici (Were Still Here, 1997), a
similarly themed portrait of a fractious but deeply devoted couple. In both
cases Godard played an irascible intellectual called Robert, stepping in to
replace a more established actor who had pulled out at the last minute.
Miville did not hesitate to use her life with Godard as the raw material for
her screenplays, laying bare the tensions at the heart of their own relationship.
In both cases playing a character very close to himself, Godard proved himself
an able and courageous actor, unafraid to reveal some of the more painful
aspects of his private life.

Cine-poems
Godard and Miville collaborated again on The Old Place, a commission from
the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create an essay on the role of the
fine arts at the end of the 20th Century. Drawing on a wide variety of imagery,
including nature footage, classic film clips and famous photographs, as well as
quotations from writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Mann and Henri
Bergson, the result was a perceptive insight into art and the politics of
suffering. These themes were explored further in a second short film, Dans le
noir du temps (In the Dark of Time), commissioned this time by British
television producers for a series called Ten Minutes Older, in which a number
of directors made a film of their choice exactly ten minutes long. Godard used
clips from his own films to illustrate 'the last minutes' of essential qualities of
existence. A third short, The Origin of the 21st Century, commissioned by the
Cannes festival, utilised film clips, newsreel footage, quotation and a haunting
soundtrack to explore the fantasy world of cinema and the political reality of
the twentieth century, moving backwards in time from the final years to the
euphoric beginning. In these three poetic essays Godard succeeded in creating

some of the most compelling and lucid cinematic statements of his career.

'Violence Leaves a Deep Scar'

As so often the case with Godard, the film he titled Notre Musique (Our
Music), went through a number of conceptual transformations before going
before the cameras. When he originally announced the project at the premiere
of Eloge de lamour, it was to be about Manfred Eicher and his company
ECM records who had been creating music for Godards films since Nouvelle
Vague. He later changed his mind and decided the film would be a new
adaptation of by Vercors, written in 1943, which had been the basis for JeanPierre Melvilles first feature film in 1947. However, rather than being about a
German officer quartered in the house of a French family during World War II,
it would instead take place in modern day Palestine.
Then, by chance, he was invited to attend a literary conference in Sarajevo in
2001, a city still trying to recover from the brutal civil war in the early 1990s.
Here he presented Eloge de lamour and held several seminars with young
film students. He returned the following year to present the premiere of his
new short film, Libert et patrie (Freedom and Fatherland). This twenty-one
minute adaptation of the Swiss novel, Aim Pache, Painter from the Vaud by
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz from 1911, was about a local artist who goes to
Paris for his education and then returns home. Godards visits to Sarajevo
made a strong impression on him, leading to a reimagining of Notre Musique.
Divided into three sections or 'kingdoms' Hell, Purgatory and Heaven
Notre Musique opens with Hell, a fast-paced tableau of war scenes culled
from documentary footage of twentieth century conflicts and clips of
Hollywood battle scenes. Purgatory takes place in the beleaguered city of
Sarajevo where a disparate group of writers, journalists, filmmakers and
refugees exchange ideas on identity, conflict and culture. The final episode
takes place in a verdant Paradise, albeit one guarded by American marines.
Godard plays himself in this mix of documentary, fiction and montage. His
ostensible reason for being in Bosnia is to deliver a lecture on shot/counter
shot that is, the cinematic device usually used when two people are talking
to each other on camera. Godard builds on his analysis of the convention to
suggest the way cinema can portray opposite tendencies in human nature and
society.
Notre Musique asks the question: Can there be meaning in the apparent
meaninglessness of war? Taking the Palestine and Israeli conflict as an
archetypal and seemingly unresolvable struggle, Godard examines the duality
at the heart of human nature and reaches a pessimistic conclusion, though the

rebuilding of Sarejevo seems to offer some hope for the future. The films
ambiguous tone showed the distance he had travelled from the simplistic
certainties of his Maoist period.
Notre Musique showed out of competition at Cannes in 2004, although it
didnt win a prize it received some of the best reviews of Godards career. The
film was also nominated for two awards at the European Film Awards and
won the Film of the Year award at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It was
equally well received in New York, though some reviewers such as Andrew
Sarris were critical of what they perceived as its anti-Zionist and antiAmerican prejudice. The same apparent perception made the film popular
with a large proportion of French intellectuals and a younger French
generation opposed to the war in Iraq.
Godards next project took him on a new departure into an art gallery space.
The exhibit entitled Voyage(s) en utopie(Voyage(s) in Utopia), Godard 19462006, took place at the Pompidou Centre and featured three rooms filled with
images and documents, as well as a new video Vrai Faux Passeport (Real
Fake Passport) playing on a screen. A complete retrospective of the directors
work ran concurrently with the exhibition and was a great success.
Two years passed before Godards next film a 63 second trailer made for the
Viennale festival titled Une Catastrophe(2008). Opening with a clip from the
Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925) and moving swiftly
to images of war and then to images of a slow motion kiss taken from the
German romance Menschen am Sonntag (1929), it's a poignant meditation on
the potential transformation of hatred to love through the medium of art.

Lost at Sea
There were rumours in the lead up to the premiere at Cannes of Godards most
recent feature film, Film Socialism (2010), that it would be his last. Released
as it was in his 80th year, this was no idle speculation, however the rumours
did not originate with the man himself and those who have followed his work
most closely have learnt to expect the unpredictable.
Shot mostly on board a cruise ship and in various locations around the
Mediterranean Sea, the film was Godards first in HD video and he made great
use of the medium, capturing images of pristine beauty. Divided into three
sections, the story, as it is, begins aboard the ship among a disparate group of
passengers, among them a war criminal, a former United Nations official, a
Russian detective, and rock star Patti Smith, who gamble, dance and converse.
The middle section takes place in a provincial gas station and examines the

lives of the family who run it. The final section revisits the cruise ship, this
time intercutting historical footage and a montage of cinema clips. In
characteristic style, Godard loads the soundtrack with an abundance of
quotations from writers and philosophers.
Reaction to the film was sharply divided between those who found the film
incomprehensible and those discovering personal meaning in the madness.
Todd McCarthy of IndieWIRE wrote: 'This is a film to which I had absolutely
no reactionit didnt provoke, amuse, stimulate, intrigue, infuriate or
challenge me. What we have here is a failure to communicate.' Peter
Bradshaw of The Guardian was more positive, describing the film as 'a
complex fragmented poem of a movie, flashing up on the screen images,
sequences, archive-reel material and, as ever with this film-maker, gnomic
slogans and phrases... On paper, these elements sound exasperating, baffling
and banal and thats certainly how they were received by some. But I found
their confrontational quality, and the bold juxtapositions, very resonant.'

A Controversial Award
Opinion was even more divided over the decision to award Godard an
honorary Oscar late in 2010. In America newspaper editorials condemned the
bestowing of such an honour on a man considered by some to be anti-Semitic.
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post compared Godards accolade to the
award of an Oscar in 1926 to the director DW Griffith: 'Just as no one in the
film industry could look a black person in the eye after giving an award to
Griffith, so it should be just as hard to honour Godard and look history in the
eye,' Cohen wrote. This followed an article in the Jewish Journal that
examined the evidence. It looked at Godards support of the Palestinians in
films such as Jusqu la victoire (Until Victory, 1970), and drew the
conclusion that Godards support for that cause had crossed the line from
being critical of Israel to being anti-Semitic. The Jewish Journal even went as
far as sending a list of Godards supposedly anti-Semitic statements to the
Academy. Other writers defended Godard, most notably the directors
biographer and New Yorker columnist Richard Brody, who wrote: 'Godard is
the filmmaker who, more than any other beside Claude Lanzmann, has
approached the Holocaust with the greatest moral seriousness.' He also
pointed out: 'in such films as Helas pour moi and Eloge de lamour, Godard
creates a cinema that is deeply infused with the spirit of Jewish thought,
identity, tradition, and history.'
In the event, after much speculation, Godard failed to turn up for the Awards
ceremony. In an interview he said the award meant nothing to him but 'if the
Academy likes to do it, let them do it'. He also commented: 'I think its

strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually
know my films?' He said he never intended to collect his honorary Oscar
personally and attend the award ceremony because he did not want to fly so
far. The Academy posted the award to him in Switzerland instead.
Goodbye to Language
It was while he was attending the 2010 Cannes Film Festival that Godard
announced his next film would be called Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to
Language) and would be about 'a man and his wife who no longer speak the
same language. The dog they take on walks then intervenes and speaks'. He
also expressed his interest in making the film in 3D.
Filming took place in Switzerland, including Nyon near Lake Geneva and at
Godard's home in Rolle, with minimal equipment and a small crew. All the
equipment fit into a single van and included two 3D cameras, a handheld
camera which Godard operated, a sound recorder and an umbrella. Godard's
key collaborator was Swiss cinematographer Fabrice Aragno with whom he
had worked on Film Socialisme. To create certain effects in the 3D film,
Aragno built his own camera rig in order to allow the 3D image to appear as a
double exposure in each of the spectators eyes. Aragno said that he and
Godard did not want to use 3D as a typical special effect or gimmick. Instead,
they wished to use it 'to express new things'. The film's footage was shot over
a four-year period.
Adieu au Langage premiered in competition at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
It received a fifteen minute standing ovation and won the Jury Prize. In
America it won Best Picture at the 2014 National Society of Film Critics
Awards. It received many good reviews and was listed as one of the best films
of the year by several prominent critics. Some critics praised its visual style
while others criticized its plot as incomprehensible. David Bordwell said it
was the best 3D film that he had ever seen. Antoine De Baecque said that the
film remained faithful to the ideals of the French New Wave by being
'absolutely contemporary' and telling the truth of the modern age. The film
was voted by many critics as the best film of 2014 including J. Hoberman,
Jonathan Rosenbaum and Amy Taubin, while the staffs of Cahiers du
cinma, Film Comment, and Sight & Sound all listed it in 2nd place.
Godard at 85
Now in his 80s, Jean-Luc Godards status as one of the greatest film directors
is secure. A recent poll of filmmakers, writers, actors and critics
for MovieMaker magazine voted Godard the fourth most influential director of
all time after Alfred Hitchcock, D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles. Little did the
group of movie-mad young critics writing for Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s

imagine that one of their number would one day take his place amongst such
illustrious company, but such a high estimation is no exaggeration. At the
vanguard of the French New Wave Godard authored a torrent of
groundbreaking cinematic works in the 1960s, unprecedented in their range
and originality. In doing so, he ushered in a new era of cinema at a time when
the studio system was crumbling. His work and the example he set had an
enormous influence on, not only European and American filmmakers, but also
the emerging national cinemas of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Yet, despite his achievements, Godard remains a controversial figure who
divides both critics and audiences. While some await the arrival of each new
film with excited anticipation and sympathetic engagement, others dismiss the
directors work as pretentious, inscrutable, boring and lacking in emotion.
Perhaps it is inevitable that an artist who has consistently sought to challenge
audiences, never resting on his laurels but continually looking for new means
of expression, while always remaining focused on his own personal
obsessions, should alienate those who might prefer a more predictable genius.
But predictability is not and has never been a part of Godards make-up.
Driven by his keen intelligence, a love of spontaneity and a refusal to produce
the straightforward narratives demanded by producers, Godard, in every way,
fulfilled the promise and potential of the New Wave, revolutionizing cinema
in the process. His filmography (over seventy works, from shorts and feature
films to television series) will be studied, analysed, loved, criticised, and
appreciated for many generations to come.
FILMOGRAPHY

As Director:

French Title

English Title

Year

1954

Type of
Film

documenta
ry

Operation beton

Operation Concrete

Une femme coquette

A Coquettish Woman 1955

short

"Charlotte et Veronique,"
ou "Tous les garcons
s'appellent Patrick"

"Charlotte and
Veronique," or: "All
1957
The Boys Are Called
Patrick"

short

Une histoire d'eau

A Story of Water

short

1958

Notes

codirected

with
Francois
Truffaut

Charlotte et son Jules

Charlotte and Her

Boyfriend

1958

short

A bout de souffle

Breathless

1959

feature

Une femme est une femme

A Woman Is a
Woman

1961

feature
from
anthology
Les Sept
peches
capitaux
(The
Seven
Deadly
Sins)

"La Paresse"

"Sloth"

1961

short

Vivre sa vie

My Life to Live

1962

feature

"Il Nuovo mondo"

"The New World"

1962

short

from
anthology
RoGoPag

feature

produced
in 1960
but not
released
until 1963
from
anthology
Les Plus
belles
escroqueri
es du
monde
(The
World's
Most
Beautiful
Swindlers)

Le Petit Soldat

The Little Soldier

1963

"Le Grand escroc"

"The Big Swindler"

1963

short

Les Carabiniers

The Riflemen

1963

feature

Le Mepris

Contempt

1963

feature

Bande a part

Band of Outsiders

1964

feature

Une femme mariee

A Married Woman

1964

feature

Alphaville: une etrange

aventure de Lemmy
Caution

Alphaville: A
Strange Adventure of 1965
Lemmy Caution

feature

"Montparnasse"Montparnasse-Levallois"
Levallois"

1965

short

Pierrot le fou

1965

feature

Crazy Pete

from
anthology
Paris vu
par (Six in
Paris)

Masculin Feminin, 15 faits Masculine Feminine:

1966
precis
15 Precise Facts

feature

Made in U.S.A.

Made in U.S.A.

1966

feature

2 ou 3 choses que je sais

d'elle

2 or 3 Things I Know
1966
About Her

feature

"Anticipation: or
"Anticipation, ou: l'amour
Love in the Year
en l'an 2000"
2000"

1967

short

La Chinoise

1967

feature

"Camera-oeil"

The Chinese
"Camera-Eye"

1967

short

from
anthology
Loin du
Vietnam
(Far from
Vietnam)
from
anthology
Amore e
rabbia
(Love and
Anger)

"Love: Departure
"L'amore (Andate e ritorno
and Return of the
dei figli prodighi)"
Profession"

1967

short

Week End

Week End

1967

feature

Le Gai savoir

Happy Knowledge

1968

feature

Cine-tracts

Un Film comme les autres

One Plus One

Cine-tracts

A Film Like the

Others
One Plus
One/Sympathy for
the Devil

from
anthology
Le Plus
vieux
metier du
monde
(The
World's
Oldest
Profession
)

documenta
ry

Godard
directed
several of
the 41
short films
by various
directors
each
lasting 2
to 4
minutes
each

1968

feature

co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin and
the Dziga
Vertov
group

1968

feature

1968

two
versions
exist:
Godard's
version
and a

second
version
recut by
the
producer

One A.M.

British Sounds

Pravda

Le Vent d'est

Lotte in Italia

One American Movie 1968

documenta
ry

unfinished
,
incorporat
ed into
One P.M.
(One
Parallel
Movie/On
e
Pennebake
r) movie
by D.A.
Pennebake
r in 1972

British Sounds

documenta
ry

co-director
with JeanHenri
Roger

documenta
ry

co-director
with the
Dziga
Vertov
group

feature

co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin and
the Dziga
Vertov
group

feature

co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin and
the Dziga
Vertov
group

feature

co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin and
the Dziga
Vertov
group

1972

feature

co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin
co-director
with JeanPierre
Gorin

Pravda

Wind from the East

Struggle in Italy

Vladimir et Rosa

Vladimir and Rosa

Tout va bien

Everything's All
Right

1969

1969

1969

1971

1971

Letter to Jane

Letter to Jane

1972

documenta
ry

Numero deux

Number Two

1975

feature

co-director
with
AnneMarie

Mieville

documenta
ry

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

1976

documenta
ry

incorporat
es footage
filmed in
Palestine
in 1970
and Paris
in the
early 70s.
Codirected
with JeanPierre
Gorin,
AnneMarie
Mieville,
Dziga
Vertov
group

1978

documenta
ry

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

France/tour/detour/deux/en France/Tour/Detour/
1978
fants
Two Children

documenta
ry

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

A Few Remarks on
Quelques remarques sur la
the Direction and
realisation et la production
Production of the
1979
du film "Sauve qui peut (la
Film "Sauve qui peut
vie)"
(la vie)"

short

Six fois deux (Sur et sous

la communication)

Ici et ailleurs

Comment ca va?

Six Times Two: On

and Beneath
Communication

Here and Elsewhere

How's it Going?

1976

Sauve qui peut (la vie)

Every Man For

Himself/ Slow
Motion

Lettre a Freddy Buache (la

propos d'un courtmetrange sur la ville de
Lausanne)

Letter to Freddy
Buache Regarding a
1982
Short Work About the
Town of Lausanne

documenta
ry

Passion

Passion

1982

feature

1982

documenta
ry

1982

documenta
ry

Scenerio du film "Passion"

Changer d'image

To Alter the Image

1979

feature

Prenom Carmen

First Name: Carmen 1983

feature

Small Notes
Petites notes a propos du Regarding the Film
film "Je vous salue, Marie" "Je vous salue,
Marie"

1983

documenta
ry

Je vous salue, Marie

Hail Mary

1985

feature

Detective

Detective

1985

feature

Soft and Hard

Soft and Hard

1985

documenta
ry

Grandeur et decadence
d'un petit commerce de
cinema

Grandeur and
Decadence of a
Small Movie
Concern

1986

short

Meeting Woody Allen

Meeting Woody Allen 1986

documenta
ry

"Armide"

"Armide"

1987

short

King Lear

King Lear

1987

feature

Soigne ta droite, ou Une

Place sur la terre

Keep Your Right Up:

1987
A Place on the Earth

feature

On s'est tous defile

1988

short

Puissance de la parole

1988

short

Le Dernier mot/Les
Francais entendus par

Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague

"Pour Thomas Wainggai,

Indonesie"
Allemagne 90 neuf zero
Je vous salue, Sarajevo

Germany Year 90
Nine Zero

from
anthology
Aria

short

from
anthology
Les
Francais
vus par

1989

short

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

1990

feature

1988

Le Rapport Darty

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

1991

short

1991

feature

1993

short

Sketch for
television
programm
e Contra
l'oubli

Les Enfants jouent a la

Russie

1993

short

Helas pour moi

1993

feature

JLG/JLG - autoportrait de
decembre

1994

documenta
ry

Deux fois cinquante ans de 2 x 50 Years of

cinema francais
French Cinema

1995

documenta
ry

For Ever Mozart

1996

feature

For Ever Mozart

Histoire du cinema

1998

documenta
ry

De l'origine du XXle siecle

2000

short

The Old Place

The Old Place

2000

documenta
ry

Eloge de l'amour

In Praise of Love

2001

feature

Liberte et patrie

Freedom and
Fatherland

2002

short

from
anthology
"Dans le
noir du
temps"

Ten Minutes Older:

The Cello

2002

short

Notre musique

Our Music

2004

feature

Vrai faux passeport

2006

documenta
ry

Une catastrophe

2008

short

2010

feature

Socialism

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

co-director
with
AnneMarie
Mieville

Ten Minutes Older: The

Cello

Film socialisme

consists of
4 chapters,
each
subdivided
into two
parts,
making a
total of 8
episodes,
made over
a ten year
period.

Major Acting Credits:

French Title

Presentation ou
Charlotte et son
steak

English Title

Presentation, or
Charlotte and
Her Steak

Les Fiances du
pont MacDonald

Year

1951

Director

Role

Eric Rohmer

Walter

1961

Agnes Varda

The man in
the dark
sunglasses

Vladimir et Rosa

Vladimir and
Rosa

1970

Dziga Vertov

Vladimir
Lenin

Prenom Carmen

First
Name:Carmen

1983

Himself

Oncle Jeannot

King Lear

King Lear

1987

Himself

Professor
Pluggy

Soigne ta droite

Keep Your Right

Up

1987

Himself

The Idiot and

the Prince

Notre musique

Our Music

2004

Himself

Himself