JEAN-LUC GODARD, born in Paris on December 3 1930, died last week in Switzerland, taking his own life. He was the son of Odile and Paul Godard. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent.
 
He was to become the enfant terrible of French cinema and one of the founders of the 1960s Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), that ushered in a whole new, revolutionary approach to film-making.

He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. He and a number of like-minded film-makers revolutionised the motion picture form through experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound and camerawork. During his lifetime he made over 100 films – a formidable output.

He began his career as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema. He criticised mainstream French cinema and established conventions over innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded cinema afficionados like Rivette, Chabrol, Truffaut, Agnes Varda and Chis Marker, began to make their own films challenging the traditional conventions and Hollywood escapism.

Godard’s first film, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), made in 1960, received global acclaim, and helped establish the New Wave movement.

His work was characterised by its quasi-documentary style; he took his camera out of the studio, on to the streets, shooting hand-held sequences, unprecedented at the time. Using portable equipment and requiring little or no set-up time, Godard’s films used original sound, rather than being studio dubbed, and highly sensitive film stock that allowed him to shoot in poor light conditions.

Godard also dispensed with traditional narrative techniques, using discontinuity, fragmented story lines and long takes. The combination of realism, subjectivity, and authorial commentary created a challenging but often irritating narrative ambiguity.

His cameraman of choice was Raoul Coutard. He wanted Breathless to be shot like a documentary, with a lightweight handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting; Coutard was experienced as a documentary cameraman and had worked for the French army’s information service in Indochina. Tracking shots were filmed by Coutard from a wheelchair pushed by Godard. Though Godard prepared a traditional screenplay, he dispensed with it and wrote the dialogue day by day as they filmed.
 
In his films he paid frequent homage and made references to classical works in the film canon. He was very much a political film-maker, not hiding his far-left views. His philosophy could be said to be a combination of existentialism and Marxism, and he later morphed into an avid Maoist.

In 1969, he formed the Dziga Vertov Group (in homage to the great Soviet documentarist of that name) with other radical filmmakers to promote films with a political message.
 
The Cinematheeque Française in the Quartier Latin, founded by Henri Langlois and George Franjou, became one of his regular haunts. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He said: “In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread — but it isn’t the case anymore.”
 
He left Paris in 1952 for Switzerland to join his mother. He became friendly with his mother’s lover, who was a labourer on the Grande Dixence dam. Godard himself worked for a time as a construction worker on the dam and saw the possibility of making a documentary film about it.

Thanks to Swiss friends who lent him a 35mm camera, he was able to shoot his film. He gave it the title Operation Beton (Operation Concrete). The company that built the dam bought the film for publicity purposes.

Godard’s most celebrated period as a director spans roughly from his first feature, Breathless (1960), through to Week End (1967). Although his work during this time is considered groundbreaking in its own right, the period stands in contrast to that which immediately followed, during which Godard denounced much of cinema’s history as bourgeois and therefore without merit.
 
Godard’s next film Le Petit Soldat (The Little Soldier, 1963), dealt with the Algerian war of independence, and because of its political nature, it was banned by the French government for the next two years.

La Chinoise (1967), saw Godard at his most politically forthright. The film focused on a group of students and engaged with ideas coming out of the student movement in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events, the film foreshadowed the student rebellions.

A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard’s early work. His Marxism is not explicitly apparent, however. A constant refrain throughout Godard’s cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie’s consumerism, the commodification of daily life and human alienation — all central features of Marx’s critique of capitalism.
 
The period which spans from May 1968 into the 1970s has been characterised as his most “militant” phase. It saw Godard employ a consistent revolutionary rhetoric in his films and in his public statements.

Inspired by the May ’68 student rebellion, Godard led protests that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Godard stated there was not a single film showing at the festival that represented their causes.
 
Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s, Godard became passionate about “making political films politically.” Though many of his films from 1968 to 1972 are feature-length, they are low-budget and challenge the notion of what a film is.

He made several films that directly address the Vietnam War and also participated in Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), an anti-war project, consisting of seven sketches directed by Godard, Claude Lelouch, Joris Ivens and others.

In 1978 Godard was commissioned by the Mozambican government to make a short film. During this time his experience with Kodak film led him to criticise the film stock as “inherently racist” since it did not reflect the variety, nuance or complexity in dark brown or dark skin.

Godard’s noted engagement with Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht’s theory of epic theatre and his idea of alienation, through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (theatre in Brecht'’ case, but in Godard’s, film). Brecht’s influence is keenly felt through much of his work.
 
Godard was married twice, to actresses Anna Karenina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in his films.

JOHN GREEN