»The Contempt«, 1963
The woman!
The man!
The island!
The car!
And all in Technicolor!
In 1963, like a film mogul of the old school, the still young wild man Jean-Luc Godard presented the capital of his then most expensive film in all its show value glory.
And the capital was enormous, because he had at his disposal: Brigitte Bardot!
Michel Piccoli!
The island of Capri!
An Alfa Romeo convertible!
The island shone in the middle of the blue sea, the convertible curved bright red along the streets.
Most of the other colors looked washed out, with blue and red dominating the canvas – just as Bardot and Piccoli drew the eye.
She played an actress, he a writer, both lost in love while around them old-school film moguls set the show values for a film shoot.
Hollywood villain Jack Palance gave a fucked-up producer, cinema visionary Fritz Lang a melancholic version of himself. The result was a film that celebrates cinema in all its ambiguity: its magic as well as its obscenity.
The shooting was actually already over, it is said, when Godard added a few nude shots of Bardot.
A favor for the financiers who distrusted Godard's storytelling and at least wanted to lure audiences to the cinema with Bardot's bare bottom.
Christian Buss
»Weekend«, 1967
Of course, Godard foresaw everything, including the destructive quarrel and the malice with which members of polite society attack one another as soon as the slightest occasion presents itself.
Maybe he didn't need any prophetic powers at all, and the mood was bad long before Corona, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis.
With »Weekend« he shot a farce that couldn't be more evil.
Two spouses are cheating on each other and covet an inheritance they will not get.
They are stuck in endless traffic, meet Emily Brontë, a group of hippies in the forest and one of them ends up in a cooking pot.
The Western model of society is one terrible accident.
Oliver Kaever
»The Outsider Gang«, 1964
Two men and a woman who, as if by magic, take off from everyday life and flutter through the hustle and bustle of Paris, as well as a cheerful, insane crime plot: »The Gang of Outsiders« is the film in which Godard came closest to the ideal of weightless cinema.
Anna Karina plays a rich man's maid, Claude Brasseur a wily villain with a penchant for plaid sweaters and Sami Frey a cool charmer.
The two men are only concerned with the money from the bigwigs' house, but in the end the film is also about a magical love affair for three.
In the most famous scene of this parody of gritty American pulp films, the three heroic characters run through the Louvre and none of the wardens can catch them.
This wonderful hunt through the museum is still a role model for me today,
when I am forced to visit art museums by people I like.
I almost always try to sprint from the entrance to the exit – and only look at the images at the edge of the track out of the corner of my eye as I run past.
Wolfgang Hoebel
»Save yourself, who when (life)«, 1980
When the film was released in German cinemas at the end of 1981, it had had quite a long run-up.
It had been filmed two years earlier and screened at the Cannes Festival in May 1980.
It was celebrated there as the director's comeback, filmed with stars such as Isabelle Huppert and Jacques Dutronc.
When I was finally able to see him, after having read quite a bit about him, the fragmentary story about an ailing director, whose name was also Paul Godard, and a prostitute played by Huppert left me rather cold.
But what a magnificent, often enigmatic symphony of images, dialogue, sounds and music it was!
I had the feeling that I saw the cinema with different eyes and heard it with different ears.
And got an idea of how sensual and at the same time abstract it can be.
Lars Olav Beier
»Pierrot le fou«, 1965
Godard called »Pierrot le fou« the first film noir in color - and was booed for it at the premiere at the Venice Festival.
Today, the pop art work with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, painted in bright Mondrian colors, is considered a milestone in Godard's work: a farewell to structure and narrative conventions, a departure to more impressionistic forms in the deceptive form of an adventure film, at the same time helpless Self-portrait and deeply skeptical image of the politically turbulent zeitgeist of the 1960s.
»Pierrot« was planned as an adaptation of a pulp novel by US author Lionel White, but the romantic-escapist crime plot about a dropout couple slipped away from the director the more his marriage to leading actress Karina deteriorated and they divorced in the same year.
Andrew Borcholte
»Masculin Feminin«, 1966
While Godard was ahead of his time with his first films, he let himself fall a little behind with »Masculin Féminin« in 1966 in order to film at the height of pop, politics, consumer society and protest.
Jean-Pierre Léaud, the irresistible face of the new age in all his beauty and youth, took his place and explored what young women and men are currently wearing, what they dance to, who they kiss and what they think of war.
The subtitle "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola" became a description of an entire generation of young Western Europeans, so closely Godard and the zeitgeist were briefly interwoven.
Then they separated, and the great pain of separation from the glorious Godard of the early 1960s began.
Hannah Pilarczyk
»One Plus One«, 1968
This movie has the brutality of a car crash - which is fitting considering it was filmed in 1968.
Even if the focus is on the great sequences from the Rolling Stones' recording sessions for their song "Sympathy For The Devil", Godard tried to make a film about this revolutionary year with "One Plus One" - without a gap, out of the year .
He edits images of black militants against Jagger and Richards reciting Black Panther lyrics, throwing guns at each other in a junkyard, and shooting white women.
And films a porn shop where Maoists are held captive and Nazi literature is sold.
This is insane and confused and disturbingly in love with the violence that is shown.
It's a film about how beautiful radicalism used to be and how stupid it made smart people.
Tobias Rapp
»Out of breath«, 1960
It must have been in 2005 or 2006 when I saw the only film by Godard that I can still remember: I was in my early twenties and was about to start studying film studies.
Men with flushed cheeks from the admiration of Marlene Dietrich gave lectures on »Classical Hollywood«, chain-smoking artist types with scarves raved about the Nouvelle Vague.
It was good manners among students to read up on as much film history as possible on the weekends in order to be able to have a say, including, of course, »Out of Breath«, the Godard film that is still best known today.
I forced myself to persevere to the end.
The film follows a French gangster (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his, well, relationship with an American student (Jean Seberg),
it is interspersed with breaches of aesthetic rules and a treatment of American film history rich in quotations.
The fact that Godard redefined cinematic storytelling came to me primarily as an exhibition of a knowledge of dominance that was already annoying me.
Partly because of this impression, at some point I demoted film studies to a minor, attended fewer and more modern seminars on the aesthetics of music videos and on the new Spanish cinema - the last time I thought about »out of breath« was when a friend asked me for tips for a good short hairstyle asked.
Jean Seberg's hair in the film is timelessly good.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
The fact that Godard redefined cinematic storytelling came to me primarily as an exhibition of a knowledge of dominance that was already annoying me.
Partly because of this impression, at some point I demoted film studies to a minor, attended fewer and more modern seminars on the aesthetics of music videos and on the new Spanish cinema - the last time I thought about »out of breath« was when a friend asked me for tips for a good short hairstyle asked.
Jean Seberg's hair in the film is timelessly good.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
The fact that Godard redefined cinematic storytelling came to me primarily as an exhibition of a knowledge of dominance that was already annoying me.
Partly because of this impression, at some point I demoted film studies to a minor, attended fewer and more modern seminars on the aesthetics of music videos and on the new Spanish cinema - the last time I thought about »out of breath« was when a friend asked me for tips for a good short hairstyle asked.
Jean Seberg's hair in the film is timelessly good.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
Partly because of this impression, at some point I demoted film studies to a minor, attended fewer and more modern seminars on the aesthetics of music videos and on the new Spanish cinema - the last time I thought about »out of breath« was when a friend asked me for tips for a good short hairstyle asked.
Jean Seberg's hair in the film is timelessly good.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
Partly because of this impression, at some point I demoted film studies to a minor, attended fewer and more modern seminars on the aesthetics of music videos and on the new Spanish cinema - the last time I thought about »out of breath« was when a friend asked me for tips for a good short hairstyle asked.
Jean Seberg's hair in the film is timelessly good.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
Doesn't that also apply to »out of breath«?
My studies have now been completed for ten years.
Maybe it's time for a second chance.
Eva Thone
»Adieu au Langage«, 2014
When Godard's penultimate film was shown in Berlin's Babylon cinema in Mitte in 2014, the crowds crowded excitedly in front of the cinema: apart from this special screening, »Adieu au langage« was not shown.
"It's like the sixties," a visitor exclaimed, amazed.
»Waiting in line for the new Godard!« With the first image, however, any nostalgic feeling was over, because Godard performed what I believe to be the most exciting experiment with 3D on a screen that has ever been tried out.
Instead of rounding off the images with plasticity, Godard cut them up across all dimensions and put them back together with bizarre fractures.
I felt like he had access to my individual eyeballs and could turn them individually in any direction.
I remember a dog and a trench coat and a naked woman from back then,
and sometimes my brain still rearranges these memories because it still hasn't found a suitable place for them.
"Godard forever!" someone shouted before the film premiered in Cannes.
Definitely in my head.
Hannah Pilarczyk