Breathless:
director Jean-Luc Godard, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was one of the greatest cinematic revolutionaries of all time.
He broke all the rules and rewrote them.
He injected new life into the medium and changed the semantic syntax.
Godard invented a new cinematic aesthetic and coined immortal sentences such as: "All you need to make a film is a woman and a gun", "A story should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order", or "Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames per second".
Extraordinary statements that continue to resonate to this day (although we don't always remember who to attribute them to).
Director Jean-Luc Godard, in 1990, photo: Farabola/Leemage
The French New Wave
In the sixties, Godard changed the face of cinema together with his friends of the French New Wave (Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer).
The films he made in those years - "Until the Bride of the Breath" (1960), "Living Her Life" (1962), "The Contempt" (1963), "A Separate Group" (1964), "Crazy Pierrot" (1965) and more - are the films thanks to will be remembered, and rightfully so.
They are relevant, effective and powerful and live even today.
The style that oozes from them and their charismatic and sexy stars - Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Jean Seberg, Michel Piccoli, Brigitte Bardot - will never go out of fashion.
Their spontaneity and freshness have no expiration date.
Their romance and naivety will never stop influencing the younger generations (those who know what's good for them, at least).
Towards the end of the sixties, after the wild, subversive and particularly political "Weekend" (1967), Godard took a sharp turn to the Marxist-socialist fringes and began making even more political and even more experimental films.
His influence and centrality waned, as did his popularity.
At the same time Godard left and the officer even testifies that he became an unpleasant person.
He quarreled a lot and was known as a misanthrope and a scumbag of a man.
But even his haters admitted that he was a genius.
Flowers placed at the entrance to the house of director Jean-Luc Godard after his death, photo: AFP
Tarantino has no idea about his life
It is hard to underestimate the influence that Godard had on the Hollywood cinema of the seventies, as well as on more contemporary creators, such as Lars von Trier, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and more.
Quentin Tarantino named his production company "A Band Apart", a twisted homage to one of Godard's early films.
When asked about this, Godard contemptuously said that Tarantino's films were nothing to him and that the fact that the American director chose one of his worst films to make his tribute was proof that he had no idea about his own life.
Tarantino's movies are nothing in his eyes.
Godard, photo: Reuters
Guerre in 1980 with the French actress Natalie Bay, photo: IPF
Although their impact was negligible compared to his first films, even in his later films - such as "Our Music" (2004) and "Hello to the Language" (2014), which was in 3D - Godard never stopped looking for ways to innovate and challenge conventional cinematic conventions.
He was the last remnant of the amazing cinematic revolution that took place in France in the sixties.
It is hard to imagine the cinema as it is today without the films of the great French director.
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