Jean-Luc Godard
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Les enfants de Marx et Coca Cola"--Masculin Féminin "With typically playful perversity, Godard uses nudity to serve as ideological statement, surrealist and "obscene" in its unexpected transposition of Freud with brain and Marx with sex. These two names also denote the true parameters of Godard's universe and his determination to destroy illusionism by introducing lettering into the visuals."--Film as a Subversive Art (1974) by Amos Vogel on an image, featured in the film Joy of Learning, of a woman lying spread-eagled on the beach with a Sigmund Freud-arrow pointing to her head and a Karl Marx-arrow pointing to her genitals, at the beginning of the section "The Attack on Puritanism: Nudity". "Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge educated by the mass media. Godard’s “critiques” never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comedians or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same drugstore paperbacks." --Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966) "... it is harldy surprising that [Godard] was dismissed as an imbecile by many of those from the avant-garde milieus connected to lettrism. [...] The ardour of Guy Debord and his associates on the subject of Godard stems directly from the fact that Jean-Luc was providing the bourgeoisie with a middlebrow commercialization of avant-garde cinema. Indeed, the invocation of the penal code during the discussion of prostitution in Vivre sa vie recalls Debord's similar use of material on the soundtrack of his 1953 feature length anti-classic Screams in Favour of de Sade." --Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (2005) by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris |
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Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022) was a French-Swiss film director who rose to prominence as a pioneer of the Nouvelle Vague in European cinema best known for his jump cuts in À bout de souffle (1960); and for films that defied audience expectations such as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964), and Pierrot le Fou (1965).
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Education
Born to Franco-Swiss parents in Paris, he was educated in Nyon, Switzerland, later studying at the Lycée Rohmer, and the Sorbonne back to Paris. During his time at the Sorbonne, he became involved with the young group of filmmakers and film theorists that gave birth to the New Wave.
New Wave
Known for stylistic implementations that challenged, at their focus, the conventions of Hollywood cinema, he became universally recognized as the most audacious and radical of the New Wave filmmakers. He adopted a position in filmmaking that was unambiguously political. His work reflected a fervent knowledge of film history, a comprehensive understanding of existential and Marxist philosophy, and a scholarly disposition that placed him as the lone filmmaker among the public intellectuals of the Rive Gauche.
Filmography
Feature films
The list excludes multi-director anthology films to which Godard has contributed shorts.
- 1960 Breathless
- 1961 A Woman Is a Woman
- 1962 My Life to Live
- 1963 The Little Soldier
- 1963 The Carabineers
- 1963 Contempt
- 1964 Band of Outsiders
- 1964 A Married Woman
- 1965 Alphaville
- 1965 Pierrot le Fou
- 1966 Masculin Féminin
- 1966 Made in U.S.A.
- 1967 Two or Three Things I Know About Her
- 1967 La Chinoise
- 1967 Week-end
- 1968 A Film Like Any Other
- 1968 One Plus One
- 1969 Joy of Learning
- 1969 British Sounds
- 1970 Wind from the East
- 1971 Struggle in Italy
- 1971 Vladimir et Rosa
- 1972 Tout va bien
- 1975 Number Two
- 1976 Here and Elsewhere
- 1976/1978 How's It Going?
- 1980 Every Man for Himself
- 1982 Passion
- 1983 First Name: Carmen
- 1985 Hail Mary
- 1985 Detective
- 1987 King Lear
- 1987 Keep Your Right Up
- 1990 New Wave
- 1991 Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
- 1993 The Kids Play Russian
- 1993 Oh Woe Is Me
- 1994 JLG/JLG – Self-Portrait in December
- 1996 For Ever Mozart
- 2001 In Praise of Love
- 2004 Notre musique
- 2010 Film Socialisme
- 2014 Goodbye to Language
- 2018 The Image Book
See also