They radiate, irrigate almost all of his filmography: women are everywhere in the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, who died on September 13, 2022 at the age of 91.
Just read the titles of her films:
A Woman is a Woman
(1961),
A Married Woman
(1964),
Masculine Feminine
(1966),
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(1966)… They are omnipresent in his films made in the 1960s, this New Wave which revolutionized the screens, and our ways of contemplating them.
A decisive period, in which his actresses, who were sometimes his companions, helped to invent, alongside him, a new idea of cinema.
And perhaps also love, which Jean-Luc Godard saw as both a blessing and a torture, a dialogue and a questioning, in front of and behind the camera.
Read also“Godard filmed 20-year-olds so that they would continue to exist long after their twenties”
Anna Karina, the early muse
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Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina in Rome, in 1962. Alamy/ABACA
Originally, it was in
Breathless
that Anna Karina should have made her film debut.
From her real name Hanne Karin Bayer, this Dane arrived in Paris at the age of 17, with 10,000 francs in her pocket and no relation, with the idea of embarking on modeling.
When Godard met her, after seeing her lying in a bubble bath for a Monsavon commercial, he offered her a small role in
A Bout de Souffle
, her first feature film.
The one who is not 20 years old refuses, because of a naked scene, telling her that in the said ad, she was still wearing a swimsuit: "It was you who imagined me naked!".
He solicits her again the following year and offers her the main role of
Little Soldier .
, a film that questions torture in Algeria.
It was on the set that they fell in love: Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard married on March 3, 1961 in Begnins, Switzerland.
Together, they will shoot seven films, including
Une femme est une femme
,
Vivre sa vie
,
Alphaville
and
Pierrot le fou
, in which she utters certain lines that have become legendary: “What can I do?
I don't know what to do?"
that she improvises, distraught, because almost no dialogue is written for the stage;
or the sublime "You speak to me with words, I look at you with feelings", launched at the character interpreted by Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Read alsoAnna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard, a stormy passion
"The Conversations We Didn't Have"
In her own words, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina loved each other “with very highs and very lows”.
Their relationship is like those depicted in their films, both wild with desire and undermined by false starts, straying from the road and misunderstandings.
Ordeals, too: the actress will never really be accepted by Godard's family, who believe that she is from a social background that is too inferior to hers.
But above all, Anna Karina loses a child when she is 7 months pregnant: a tragedy that will make her sterile, and from which she will never recover.
On her relationship with Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, who died in 2019, will confide in AFP in March 2018, on the occasion of the resumption of her first film as a director,
Vivre ensemble
(1973): “We loved each other very much.
But it was complicated to live with him.
(...) He was someone who could say "I'm going to get some cigarettes" and then come back three weeks later.
It was a time when there were no smartphones or answering machines,” she added.
But cameras: “Finally, the dialogues of the films which one made together are like the conversations which one did not have.
Conversations that remain”, she declared to
Liberation
in 2018. The couple divorced on December 21, 1967. And will (almost) never speak to each other again.
On video, Jean-Luc Godard is dead
Anne Wiazemsky and May 68
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Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Luc Godard on the set of
Sympathy for the Devil
.
(Camber Sands, UK, 1968.) Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Jean-Luc Godard met the granddaughter of François Mauriac, born in 1947 in Berlin, on the set of
Au random Balthazar
by Robert Bresson.
He is 17 years older than her, she first refuses his advances, then sends him a love letter, ten months later, in June 1966. Together, they shoot
La Chinoise
and get married 10 days before its release .
, in 1967. She is still a minor, only two witnesses are present.
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Wiazemsky will stay together for three years, while France is transformed in the tumult of May 68: a time that the actress will recount in her autobiographical works
A studious year
(2012) and
One year after
(2015), from which Michel Hazanavicius shot the film
Le Redoutable
, in 2017, with Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin.
Read alsoAnne Wiazemsky, novelist, actress, muse and ex-wife of Jean-Luc Godard
La Chinoise
, in which Anne Wiazemsky plays a Maoist activist, marks Godard's turn towards a more radically political cinema.
“This change in his career would have taken place, it was inevitable, but May 68 precipitated it, she declared to
Madame Figaro
in 2015. And the more he sought to separate himself from the cinema, the more I found that it was my place… May 68 was an incredible accelerator, which caused many couples to explode!”
Anne Wiazemsky will continue her acting career, directed by Philippe Garrel, Marco Ferreri or Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom she shoots
Théorème
et
Porcherie
: it was on the set of this last film, in June 1969, that Godard joined her and, jealous, attempted suicide.
They break up a year later.
To
Madame Figaro
, she told in 2012, on the occasion of the release of
A studious year
, that she had not seen the director “for a good twenty years.
The Jean-Luc that I am describing, the intimate Jean-Luc, is the one from 1967 – I don't know the man he has since become.
On the other hand, I continue to admire his films.
She passed away on October 5, 2017, at the age of 70.
Anne-Marie Miéville, the companion behind the screen
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Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville at the Hotel Matignon.
(Paris, November 25, 1988.) GERARD FOUET / AFP
She is the one who shared most of her life: born in 1945 in Lausanne, Anne-Marie Miéville is a photographer, bookstore manager, and has even recorded two variety discs.
She met Jean-Luc Godard in 1972 and for more than ten years, became his closest collaborator: alongside him and on his films, she was a photographer, screenwriter, editor, co-director and sometimes artistic director.
This is enough to illustrate the adage that we owe to the director: “Cinema is made for two;
see the Lumière brothers?”.
She also led, thereafter, a brilliant career as a director and screenwriter.
It was she, along with the producers of Godard, who announced on September 13, 2022 that he had
“passed away peacefully at his home surrounded by his loved ones”,
in Rolle, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
"He was not sick, he was simply exhausted," a family member told
Liberation
.
So he had made the decision to end it.
It was his decision and it was important for him that it be known.
Jean, Brigitte, Chantal and the others
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Jean Seberg and Jean-Luc Godard at the premiere of A bout de souffle (March 3, 1960.) Zuma / ABACA
If they have not shared his life, many of them have contributed to inscribing his films, and his images, in the collective unconscious: starting with Brigitte Bardot, her blondness, her cat eyeliner in
Le Mépris ( 1963)
and his cult lines, immortalized by his somewhat drawling tone: "And my buttocks, do you like my buttocks?", But also "Get in your Alfa, Romeo".
But also Jean Seberg, his Herald Tribune
t-shirt
on the Champs-Élysées and his eyes flowing over Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Breathless (1960)
.
The American actress would describe the shoot as “a crazy experience — no spots, no makeup, no sound!
But it's so contrary to Hollywood ways that I become natural.
Chantal Goya, in
Masculin, Féminin
, who told
Trois Couleurs
magazine : “We didn't do anything as Godard wanted, we decided everything!
At one point, with Marlène Jobert, he asked us to get naked for a scene in a bathroom.
Our silhouettes had to move behind frosted glass.
Me, I was pregnant, I didn't want to be naked, and I didn't want to kiss anyone.
I hid under the sink and Marlene pretended to be me.
Long before the glory obtained alongside Bécassine and Pandi Panda, his role earned him an interpretation prize awarded by Monica Vitti at the Sorrento festival.
But also Jane Fonda, militant and rebellious journalist in
Tout va bien
(1972), Marina Vlady in
Two or Three Things I Know About Her
(1967)
,
Nathalie Baye in
Sauve qui peut (la vie)
(1979) and
Détective
(1985)... Immortals, like him.