Jean-Luc Godard made films as a way of writing criticism
Jean-Luc Godard started out attacking French cinema in print, then picked up a camera to prove his point. Breathless, in 1960, made him a star of the New Wave. Decades later he still insisted he was a critic, only one who now argued with films instead of essays.
Godard was a Parisian by birth, arriving on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement, but grew up largely in Switzerland. His father was a Swiss doctor; his mother came from a prosperous Protestant banking family, her father having helped found Banque Paribas. When the family moved to Switzerland in 1934 he went to school in Nyon, and the Second World War found him briefly stranded in France before he made his way back.
He was no film buff as a boy. He credited an essay on cinema psychology by André Malraux, and a revived film magazine, with opening his eyes. He failed his baccalauréat in 1948, painted abstract canvases at his sister's urging, passed on a second attempt and returned to Paris in 1949, where he signed up for anthropology at the Sorbonne and never went to class. Instead he haunted the ciné-clubs of the Latin Quarter, including the Cinémathèque Française, meeting Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. Cinema, he later said, mattered to them as much as bread; they felt like early Christians hiding in catacombs.
Writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, he mocked the polished French Tradition of Quality and praised Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. His own films broke rules of continuity, sound and camerawork. Politics ran through them: a reader of existentialism and Marx, he co-founded the radical Dziga Vertov Group in 1969, before later work took a more humanist turn.
He married three times, including the actress Anna Karina, whose films with him such as Pierrot le Fou are often called hugely influential. Critics ranked him third among directors in a 2002 Sight and Sound poll, and he received an honorary Academy Award in 2010. Some critics have accused his films of misogyny; the feminist theorist Laura Mulvey found that tension revealing rather than disqualifying. He died on 13 September 2022.
Source: Jean-Luc Godard
