With Jean-Luc Godard a filmmaker does not die, a philosopher, a revolutionary and a country die.
The homeland of a stateless person, of "a foreigner in Switzerland, an exile in his own home", who forged with images but also with countless phrases and thoughts an imaginary country in which cinema, or rather, the mystery of cinema, it was everything.
Godard's life has been a long reflection on the power of images and the tireless search for the enigma of an art that in his opinion was only entirely possible thanks to the viewer's imagination.
He recognized that power in us and that is why his death leaves a feeling of orphanhood that can only be mitigated through his own words.
More information
The life and films of Jean-Luc Godard, in pictures
The myth that surrounded his first film,
At the end of the escapade
(1959), turned the young Godard into a flag, but also into the most uncomfortable representative of the
nouvelle vague
.
For him, cinema responded to a research process as heir to jazz as Chaplin and Rossellini.
A place between the Méliès show and the Lumière brothers' documentary.
"What interested Méliès was the ordinary in the extraordinary, and the Lumières the extraordinary in the ordinary", he left said in the writings and interviews that, in a priceless way, he edited in several volumes in España Intermedio.
For Godard, the Maoist grandson of a banker friend of Paul Valéry, films were traces of life, a laboratory in which everything fit: “Cinema does not exist in itself.
It is a movement.
A film is nothing if it is not projected, and the fact of being projected is a movement;
the film is not in the projection apparatus, nor on the screen, it is a movement in which one enters.
I see no difference between my life and the cinema;
before I had ideas about cinema, now I live them”.
His political commitment to image was always radical and he never avoided the great contradictions of his profession or of his time.
His reflection on cinema after Auschwitz is famous: “The only real film that should be made about the concentration camps, which has never been shot and will never be shot because it would be intolerable, would consist of filming a camp from the point of view of the executioners, with their daily problems… The unbearable thing would not be the horror that these scenes would give off, but, on the contrary, their perfectly normal and human aspect”.
When he reached half a century, Godard already began to consider his memories through cinema and his obsession with montage.
His life had a lot of combat within a job condemned to impossibility: “We, the filmmakers, have both words and images, and we must suffer twice, that is, define and imagine at the same time.
We are condemned to the analysis of the world, of reality, of ourselves, while neither the painter nor the musician is condemned to do so”.
Although he liked to compare himself to a castaway like Orson Welles, he devoted large pages to giants like Hitchcock.
“For twenty years, he got it all.
When
Cahiers du cinéma
said that Hitchcock was the cinema and the others were crap, suddenly the
Cahiers
and the waiter on the corner agreed.
That defines an era.”
Godard said that, above all, he was interested in everything that begins and everything that ends.
"I was a bourgeois filmmaker, and then a progressive filmmaker, and then I was no longer a filmmaker, but simply a film worker."
A tireless “worker” who, paraphrasing Picasso (“I will paint until painting rejects me and doesn't love me anymore”), kept going with his back to everything, and that included the public, but, above all, the industry.
Inevitably he was critical of the present.
“Cinema is like football: no one hesitates to give their opinion, to say that it is formidable or disgusting.
Cinema is a mutating art, which comes at the end of something, which is a sign of something.
Now everyone can say: 'I make movies'.
And the press adds: 'With small digital cameras, everyone can become a filmmaker.'
Well then, friends, become so."
But despite his inevitable pessimism, he also affirmed.
“The true cinema, the one that for me continues to be the great cinema, is the one that cannot be seen”.
And that is why today, more blindly than ever after his death, we will continue trying to see where no one sees anymore.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber