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Godard at a press conference for his film »Notre musique« in Cannes in 2004
Photo: BORIS HORVAT / AFP
There are almost as many formative sentences by Jean-Luc Godard as there are iconic images.
He himself explained why this was the case with the slogan “Filming and writing the course of thoughts”: For him, filming and writing were two processes that always coincided.
Coincidentally, because he actually wanted to finish another project, and yet speaking, his last film released during his lifetime has now become »Le livre d'image« from 2018: »Bildbuch«.
It is a cinematic collage in which Godard demonstrated in his self-recorded comments how he was able to read in the images of our time, from news broadcasts as well as from Hollywood films.
At the beginning of his six-decade career, Godard first excelled in writing.
At the age of 19, he felt compelled to put his thoughts on cinema into words.
In May 1950, together with Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, he founded the »Gazette du cinéma« and in one of his first texts immediately began a major study of political cinema based on Gaumont newsreels and Soviet films, taking into account Rossellini's »Germany in the year zero " on.
"You French film buffs who lack scripts, unfortunate ones, why haven't you filmed the tax legislation, the death of Philippe Henriot, the wonderful life of Danielle Casanova long ago?"
Young fighters for a different kind of cinema
This type of film journalism needed self-confident comrades-in-arms, and Godard found them in the »Cahiers du cinéma«, which was founded shortly after the »Gazette«.
»Jeunes turcs« was the name of the troupe around André Bazin, which also included Rohmer, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette: young fighters for cinematic modernization, properly self-assured and enormously influential.
In West Germany, it was mainly Frieda Grafe and Enno Patalas who made sure that the French discussions were followed up.
In 1971, Grafe collected and translated a selection of Godard's texts, thus recording how Godard first became a new form of writing about the cinema, before he followed his words with images.
His texts were impetuous, full of the urge to describe what he had just seen in the cinema and at the same time not to fix it, not to trivialize it down to a single meaning, but to reveal the possibility of many views in a subjective view.
The great collective rethinking task that the »Cahiers du cinéma« called for in their early days was the reconsideration of commercial US cinema as a valid art form.
At the same time, Godard was enthusiastic about the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman.
He covered them with superlatives (for him, Bergman's »Monika« was »the most original film by the most original of all directors«), which, in their casual casualness, anticipated the pop poses and slogans of his later films.
Writing texts, creating images, Godard soon combined these in constantly changing constellations.
His zeitgeist document »Masculin Féminin« from 1966 is probably the only film of which an intertitle in particular became world famous: »Les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola, comprenne qui voudra«.
In West Germany, the film was released in cinemas with the slightly shortened aphorism as the title: »The children of Marx and Coca-Cola«.
Death of the wannabe author
A year earlier in »Pierrot le fou«, Godard had shown that writing is something personal that touches the core of his self-image as a heterosexual man – with more humor than was often conceded to him in the feminist criticism of his works.
Carried away by his criminal younger lover Marianne (Anna Karina), the middle-class Pierrot (Jean-Paul Belmondo) finally wants to get into writing in his new underground life.
But he doesn't succeed, and out of sheer self-pity for his inhibitions, Pierrot misses Marianne writing her own story and giving it an amazing twist.
Abandoned and alone, Pierrot dies in a stupid accident.
Death of the wannabe author.
In the Cahiers, Godard wrote a wonderful text about Pierrot, never at a loss for a self-declaration in the form of a film-theoretical manifesto (»I am not petty about my thoughts«).
“Two shots that follow each other do not follow each other.
And the same for two shots that are not consecutive.
In that sense you can say that Pierrot is not really a film.
Rather, it is an attempt at cinema.
And cinema, which has to give back to reality what it has taken from it, reminds us that we must try to live.«
What Godard unleashed on the screen via learning by doing bounced back to the pages of newspapers and magazines for a short time.
In 1967 he wrote a »Letter to my friends/To teach/Together/Cinema/To make« for »L'avant-scène du cinéma«, in which he declared cinema to be »Child's play« that only those who could play it doesn't believe in any rules.
But the poetry soon came to an end, both on paper and on the screen.
In the course of his political radicalization, Godard also largely turned his back on writing lyrics.
One of his last key texts, written for "afterimage" in 1970, was just a list.
"1.
What do political films have to do.
2. We must be
political
make movies.
3. 1 and 2 are antagonistic to each other and belong to two opposite conceptions of the world.' It ends with point 39. 'To do 2 is to be militant.'
"A disaster"
Never at a loss for quarrels with former comrades-in-arms, Godard slapped Jean-Paul Sartre in an interview in 1972 because he only acted as a revolutionary as soon as his intellectual work was done.
“The prolo would also like to know why Sartre writes about Flaubert the way he does.
Why write ten hours a day and protest three hours while the worker is on the line all the time.'
As a result, Godard was neither on the line for 13 hours nor was he on the road non-stop.
Nevertheless, he managed to combine art and political commitment in a new way - by allowing his work with language to be fully incorporated into his films.
»Ici et ailleurs« (»Here and Elsewhere«) is the 1973 hinge film that holds Godard's fragile filmography together, as film critic Bert Rebhandl put it in his brilliant work and life analysis »Jean-Luc Godard.
The Permanent Revolutionary« describes.
The interweaving of words and images are questioned in the essay film, an own method of visual poiesis, the creation of meaning with images and through images, is attempted.
Godard later picked it up again in his opus magnum »Histoire(s) du cinéma«, created between 1988 and 1998, and continued it again with »Bildbuch« in 2018 - this time with the greatest response that his essayistic films had had for a long time happened.
»Picture Book« premiered in the Cannes competition and was awarded a spontaneous prize by the jury led by Cate Blanchett: a special Palme d'Or.
At this point, Godard had already angrily turned down the honorary Oscar.
For this last prize, however, he found words that once again demonstrated all his aphoristic talent.
The prize was a catastrophe, Godard wrote in a letter to the Cannes festival director, "because, according to Rilke, a catastrophe is the first stanza of a love poem".
In this sense, too, the death of Godard is a catastrophe.