Jean-Luc Godard

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Jean-Luc Godard is cinema, its quintessence. Just turned 91, he has made more than 140 films. We hate him as much as we worship him. Where does his aura come from? From legendary films of course, but also from Godard himself. He is a public figure as much as a man shrouded in mystery. Everything and its opposite, he has taken all possible paths. It is not easy to seize such a legendary, enigmatic giant. Godard’s itinerary follows one direction only: a constant renewal of his art. He sees the creative act as a necessary act of criticism and deconstruction.” I always start from the negative. I am a positive man who starts from the negative”. The artist reinvents himself tirelessly, and inevitably destroys himself. This portrait wants to take us beyond the clichés of a myth that has sometimes become caricatural, to meet a man more sentimental than it seems, a man inhabited, sometimes surpassed, by his art. Because yes, Godard is human. Not just a machine who thinks and creates images.Read More »

This little film was shot by Jean-Luc Godard in 1981 when he was visiting Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, where Coppola was directing One from the Heart. It stars Andrei Konchalovsky reading a book about Cézanne, while a crew is trying to fix the light to film a painting by Georges de La Tour, Le Nouveau-né.

A few seconds of this film are included in Godard’s Les trois désastres.Read More »

Influenced and inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, some young french directors (Jean Eustache, Francis Leroi, Jean-Michel Barjol, Romain Goupil, Luc Moullet) are talking about their problems in producing less expensive and more free films in the french industry of cinema of the 60’s.Read More »

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In this radically unconventional television series, Godard and Miéville analyze the political economy of personal and mass media communications in relation to society, culture, family and the individual. Their inquiry focuses “on and beneath” communications in a provocative critique of the power of media images in contemporary culture and everyday life.Read More »

In 2009, in a small theater in Geneva, Switzerland, the film directors Marcel Ophuls and Jean-Luc Godard met for an unusual, surprisngly intimate and sometimes contentious dialogue with each other in front of a live audience. Luckily for us, it was filmedRead More »

In scenario du film Passion, Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of His 1982 film Passion. “I did not want to write the script,” he states, “I wanted to see it.” Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the “famous blank page of Mallarme” Godard uses video as a sketchbook with Which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema. directly quoting from and Further elaborating on the process and content of the earlier film – Which is itself about labor and creativity – Godard’s scenario is both rigorously theoretical and intensely personal.Read More »

Director Jean-Luc Godard died on Tuesday September 13 at the age of 91. In April 2019, Elisabeth Quin traveled to Switzerland to speak with the filmmaker on the occasion of the release of his film “Le Livre d’image”. (Re)discover the most illustrious Franco-Swiss artist.
(arte.tv)Read More »

As a model, one can see working the essential virtues of the Godardian question in a relatively unknown work from 1978 [recte 1976]—a two-minute video clip for a popular song by Patrick Juvet, Faut Pas Rêver.

As is the case with all the brief forms invented by Godard, this little opus is not in the least a minor work. It is made up of two shots: first, a medium fixed shot of a little girl who is eating an apple for her afternoon snack after coming home from school; she is responding to her mother, whom we don’t see (the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville is recognisable) and who asks her about her day, while the little girl watches, distractedly, a television set that is supposedly broadcasting the song of Patrick Juvet (whom we don’t see either) In this everyday dialogue, we find the emergence of a fundamental critical question that, in the mid-1970s, must have been perceived as quite violent (at that time we were right in the middle of the Giscardian regime, and it would take seven more years for the left to come to power).Read More »

PLOT: The protagonist is Carmen X (Maruschka Detmers), a female member of a terrorist gang. She asks her uncle Jean, a washed-up film director (played by Jean-Luc Godard himself) if she can borrow his beachside house to make a film with some friends, but they are in fact planning to rob a bank. During the robbery she falls in love with a security guard. The film intercuts between Carmen’s escape with the guard, her uncle’s attempt to make a comeback film, and a string quartet attempting to perform Beethoven.Read More »