The death of Jean-Luc Godard is a fiction, a figment of the imagination: how could such an important author, who knew how to be the contemporary of all eras since the end of the 1950s, really disappear?
His films, his works, his reflections, his books have so marked the minds, even implicitly, that it is impossible to detach oneself from them, to ignore their effect on the world, and on us, above all.
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His death is in any case in all respects connected with what his creations have instilled in us: a desire to be permanently in the era, attentive to its changes and, at the same time, actor and spectator of the world.
From his first feature film,
À bout de souffle
, Godard captured the end of the 1950s and the coming decade: discovering this film, even today, is synonymous with formal freedom, both in cinema and in life.
Life until the end: the death of the main character still haunts all those who continue to wander where this scene was filmed, rue Campagne Première, in Paris, not far from Montparnasse.
To pass there, to look at the perspective of this street, is to be forever in the film.
After Godard, Paris was never looked at the same way again.
Full screen
Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in
Breathless (1960).
Charlotte Films
"The harshness of feelings, the friction of real life"
But what resonates even more in an era like ours, which constantly questions love and the questions inherent in romantic relationships, is most certainly
Le Mépris
.
This film, perhaps Godard's best known, is also the one that resonates the most with our questions.
The one who transmitted essential clues as to our ways of falling in love – and of falling, too, out of love.
Because,
Le Mépris
, from its title to its last shots, evokes only that: what it means to be in love, what it means, in abyss, to suddenly despise this same feeling and to reject the person of whom one could to be madly in love - before being just as madly estranged from it.
Contempt
, adaptation of the eponymous novel by Alberto Moravia, it is a love story, filmed in the most honest way possible, that is to say by taking it from its rawest, cruelest reality.
This is perhaps what touches first, and remains long after, in Godard's work: his way of capturing the harshness of feelings and the friction of real life.
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Brigitte Bardot opposite Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance in
Contempt (1963)
Carlotta Films
Watching Godard's films is therefore as much a path in the history of cinema as a personal journey through our own feelings, our own intimate breath and our ways of orchestrating our lives.
The titles of the films already map existence, sum up the obsessions of entire lives:
Two or Three Things I Know
About Her ,
Living Her Life
,
Masculine Feminine
,
Band Apart
.
So many feature films, especially those from the 1960s, which are real toolboxes for learning and arming yourself, educating yourself, growing up, capturing what it means to live with others.
They are a precise, a manual, to which it is necessary to return often, finding the echoes of the ones in the others and compared to the true life especially.
Once you have watched
Masculin Féminin
, the cafés of Paris change in appearance, they become places of sharing, places where endless conversations begin, where you fall in love and where loves also move.
Once we delved into
two or three things I know about her
, and its static shots on a cup of coffee, we know that the entire universe can be contained in this: a cup of coffee.
Once you have immersed yourself in the science fiction of
Alphaville
, your eyes widen to the world that is ours, regardless of time and place.
Make no mistake: Godard filmed 20-year-olds so that 20-year-olds would continue to exist long after their twenties had passed away.
Keeping your youth, never forgetting your dreams, never damaging or corrupting them.
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"The Possibility of Being Smugglers"
Over the years, Godard has never ceased to be a beacon.
His films, of course, and everything else too: books, exhibitions, interventions, the
Histoire(s) du cinema project
... His ways of taking over television in the 1980s or 1990s also marked the kids of the time who saw in him the possibility of being smugglers, of seizing the most prominent territories and to do something else.
And to persevere too;
until the end of his life, he will have been an example of the possibilities of permanent invention.
His last press conference during the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, broadcast experimentally from his home in Rolle, Switzerland via Facetime;
his intervention during the first months of confinement, in April 2020, on Instagram Live with students from a Swiss art school, Ecal, in conversation with the head of the cinema department;
and then, too, this incredible, almost final gesture:
Godard sold in 2019 to the Prada Foundation what constituted the living room of his house in Rolle.
The piece, which became an installation in Milan under the title
Le Studio d'Orphée
, sealed something fundamental in the century to come, as if Jean-Luc Godard had convinced himself that it was with Miuccia Prada that a large part of his work would continue to live, just as much as in cinemas and on screens.
A few hours after learning of his death, and while Instagram was filling up with his portraits, a private message reached me, from a reader, telling me this: "My mother lives in Rolle too - she has just told me that she ate in front of him yesterday, at Moret's where he often ate, and that he looked in great shape.
I have no doubt, Jean-Luc Godard is alive.
