Jean-Luc Godard has died | Hacker News Reader

Jean-Luc Godard has died

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482 pointscoolandsmartrr152 comments

Hard to overstate Godard's importance to the film world, both as a critic and a filmmaker. As a critic with Cahiers du Cinema he and others championed many forgotten Hollywood films and established one of the first recognizable 'canons' of film -- one of the beginning points of film history as a subject. And unlike his predecessor and colleague Bazin, Godard went beyond theory to actually create films that embodied the radical new ideas about film that the Cahiers crowd promoted. I've seen people in the thread mentioning Italian Neorealism, and some of the great Hollywood films of the 50s, all fantastic examples of forward-thinking film art. But Godard and his contemporaries' contributions were about synthesizing earlier developments with a pop-art bent in a way that destroyed established boundaries of the medium and paved the way for explosions of film creativity on the continent and beyond. His genius was finding a middle ground between directors like Hawks and Rosselini, or Ford and Renoir, and using that space to create indelible masterpieces. RIP JLG

Le Mépris (Contempt) is by far my favourite movie, peak cinema. Absolutely stunning Mediterranean cinematography, beautiful coastal and indoor shots, a decent plot with Odysseus in the background, and certainly not hurt by Brigitte Bardot's onscreen presence. Overall unbeatable aesthetics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF0Ju0ONwGU

Watching it is like taking a short vacation. Phenomenal.

Hm, I'll be honest in the spirit of JLG's unabashed expressions of desire for the opposite sex. I reached for it because of Brigitte Bardot, but it is a solid film.

My absolute favorite JLG is "JLG/JLG".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110173/

Apparently no torrents for this, too bad. Here is a taste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk1AK-G6UF4

[p.s. RIP, Jean-Luc.]

> Apparently no torrents for this

I found a few

> Apparently no torrents for this, too bad

I guess someone has not heard about our lord and savior, https://prowlarr.com/ It aggregates search results from various torrent search engine. You choose which search engines you want. The list is impressive and it supports private trackers too.

And that score by Delarue, so beautifully haunting.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3W86RN_TsE4

> Absolutely stunning Mediterranean cinematography, beautiful coastal and indoor shots, a decent plot with....

I had the same feeling when watching Pierrot le Fou (the only Jean-Luc Godard film I watched, possibly new wave...). It was introduced by a french colleague of mine, during a very small international film festival in Dublin early 2000. I wasn't into any art house movies but it made such an impression on me that I always had a nice (and saturated colourful) memory of the film.

It is hard to overstate how much Godard changed cinema, even in America. If you don’t believe me check for yourself. Open the best picture nominees between 55’-65’ and watch their trailers. Films like Marty/On the waterfront/12 angry men/To kill a mockingbird/The Caine Mutiny/Sweet smell of success is what movies were like in the late 50s.

The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes.

Starting in the mid 60s there was a radical shift, topping the nominations we have films like Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Deer Hunter, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver etc. Actors would act and behave like normal everyday people facing everyday problems. The new Archetype is the Anti-Hero, someone with flaws/vices in their character, someone that viewers can relate to. We see the rise of the director as the auteur, the creative master of a film. Every known filmaking rule is being tested to it’s limits and broken by young experimenting directors.

The catalyst for this change was the French New Wave, a group of young filmmakers tired of the old style of cinema wanting to do films about their own life and experiences. The poster boy for the New Wave was Jean-Luc Godard starting this revolution with his 1960 film Breathless.

Italian Neo-realism predates French New Wave.

True, but I believe italian neorealism didn't have international reach until fellini - outside of influencing french new wave which went on to popularize (within the art community at least) those ideas. French New Wave also paired it with new editing and cinematography techniques that made it all work together.

Edit: I had originally prefaced this with "I'm not a scholar" but forgot to readd it - the responses below invalidate most of what I said, but leaving the comment so their responses make sense - though I still stand by the lesser version of what I said - that Godard had a bigger impact on American cinema than pre-Fellini Italian Neorealism, and that parts of italian film influenced Godard.

The French New Wave were all too different to generalise like this. Godard and Rohmer (or Resnais) could't be more different really.

It was actually the previous generation of French directors that they were all reacting against - who were making somewhat pretentious literary adaptation films. You can read about it in Truffaut's 1954 essay 'A certain tendency in the french cinema'.

Neorealism was actually a fairly minor influence - as none of the new wave directors were social realists. But older, maverick French directors like Bresson and Melville were much more influential, as it was their freewheeling sensibility which united all the new wave directors and sent them hurtling off in different directions.

Yeah, it's hard to talk about French New Wave as a cohesive set, since it was so reactionary - I still see influences from earlier italian neorealism in Godard, in the street view slice of life shots and focus on regular people throughout Breathless

Not sure I agree De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine) won a Honorary Academy Award in 1947, which then became the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film. In other words it was so influential that it ended up defining its own category at the Oscars.

I am wrong about that then, but I was talking more about influence on American films - I haven't seen any Sciuscia so I don't know if that went on to influence american films in the same way that godard did later.

It does, but it has little to do with the kind of cinema of New Wave, or the later 60s-70s cinema in America.

It goes in waves back and forth from Europe to Usa and back again:

40s: Italian Neo-realism

50s: Hollywood Golden Era

60s: French new wave

70s: New Hollywood

Somehow every wave greatly inspired the next one.

There’s also the Japanese New Wave somewhere in there (the ‘50s and ‘60s) which also had a very great influence.

Me, personally, I’d also put the 1960s-1970s wuxia films from Hong Kong in a list of “stuff that has changed movie history for good”.

Of course, the list wasn't exhaustive. Asian cinema also had a great influence again in the 90s/00s.

For sure, to this day I’m mesmerized by a few Tsui Hark movies from that era, even though I saw them 15+ years ago. Pure art of fluid movement, for lack of a better expression.

IMO the success of "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay) marks the moment when the New Wave truly hit Hollywood.

Although set in New York, it owes a lot more to Godard and other Europeans than American movies of the past.

> "Midnight Cowboy" (1970 Oscars for Best Picture + Director + Screenplay)

That was the first time people in Hollywood truly saw themselves represented on screen.

The Deer Hunter. A great movie I will never watch a second time. Too much reality.

The Deer Hunter is also a great example of how movies have changed. I enjoyed the movie but it's just sooooooooo.... daamn.... slooooooooow. Nothing happens for the first hour. That doesn't make it bad, but it goes to show - audiences in 1978 must have had very long attention spans. I can't imagine such a glacially slow movie being a hit if it came out today, when the average person can't pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok video (and even that needs to be played on double speed.)

People's brains have changed.

Glacially slow, a lot of existential brooding and inner conflict. Curious if Godard was never considered to direct 'Dune', seems like his sort of thing, he might have done a good job.

What, you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation? Your leisure free time's too important? You gotta quick-flick-swipe through endless new distractions on the web? C'mon. Just watch an old film. Once can't hurt. Don't apply the modern bullshit standards to the past.

Alphaville. Worth a watch. Not everything has to be what you expect. Be confused. Be challenged. At least then you know someone's not making it trying to push your buttons and manipulate you. Maybe you just need to get in the moment.

There's more entropy and information in something unexpected. And how is there not something unexpected to find, something new, in even the slowest oldest film? Just watch it with focused awareness. The quality of your attention determines the quality of your experience. :P ;) xx ;p

There's a difference between someone's personal experience/capabilities and making observations about the broader cultural appeal of a thing.

I can still put in the personal effort to read Charlotte Bronte or watch North By Northwest and take on the appropriate context required to understand that these are landmark works for their era, while simultaneously understanding that they have limited appeal to a general modern audience.

I object to your tone, and I don't understand why you're taking it with me, or wrongly assuming that I didn't see 'The Deer Hunter'; I did see it. I had heard rave reviews about 'The Deer Hunter' but as things happen, I only got around to seeing it ~15yrs after it was released. It was decent, De Niro and Cazale are standouts, but not as great as the accolades it had been showered with. I like most De Niro (Scorsese, Cimino, or other director), but for a slow-boiler character study of a man's descent into insanity, 'Taxi Driver' (or the little-known but superb Danish film trilogy 'Pusher' (1996-2004-2005)) are IMO far superior. Or maybe even Takeshi Kitano. As far as TDH goes, I think the last chapter suffers a break in coherence, and it doesn't advance the narrative to see De Niro unravel in slow-motion at the end. As far as anti-Vietnam war films go, Bogdanovich's 'Saint Jack' made the point more deftly; we don't necessarily need to see people literally blowing their brains out to get the point that they've been systematically dehumanized. Perhaps it's the Oscar hype machine rather than Cimino's directing that's responsible for the perpetual hype around 'The Deer Hunter', and the lack of hype around Nicolas Winding Refn. In any fair universe, foreign directors like Refn would have won an Oscar for his early work, regardless that it was in Danish; which is a Hollywood attitude that persisted until 'Parasite' (2019).

Be assured I've "watched old films" aplenty. (I referenced 'Alphaville' above, earlier; and the David Lynch 'Dune'. I was even gong to reference Tarkovsky). My comment wondering if Godard was ever considered to direct 'Dune' is obviously praise for his work.

Have you seen Pusher Trilogy? or Bogdanovich's 'Saint Jack'? How do you think they compare?

(Also, 'The Deer Hunter' running time is 3h3m, so the "you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation" misassumption is offbase for multiple reasons. Ask questions, rather than make wrong assumptions.)

I'm sorry I wasn't directing it at you. It was more just a response to the gestalt of the thread.

I'm sorry I put it under your comment... I wish it was just sort of like taking turns in a conversation with a group of people... But with text and threads, I don't really know where to throw this in...i don't think there was any one comment that I could sort of respond to, it wasn't just one thread, it was vibe from multiple thread.

I guess if we'd been having a conversation and we're next to other people who were talking and I'd said that I probably would have expected you to take it in the sense that I was responding to something that someone else said but it was something that you could appreciate.

I like film, but I'm not a film nut. Thank you for the recommendations

Ask questions, rather than make wrong assumptions

I totally agree with that, and see this all the time. Again I wasn't responding to you, I think there are some people in the thread who what I said could totally apply to though. I guess I just expected you were someone who could appreciate that :) ;p xx :p

Apology accepted! Please take care in threaded discussions who remarks appear to be directed to, also I tend to not make assumptions, rather to ask questions. You could have preambled "This remark isn't directed at you, but the thread audience in general seems to be unfamiliar with..." Use @name to reference people's comments by name.

It's definitely slow, but I don't know what else could draw you into the social intimacy that's dissolved with devastating emotions engagement later in the film. There's a tolerance and intimacy established in the first scenes that I believe fuels the culmination of disassociation in self destruction, despair and rage in the numerous infamous scenes I'm uncertain could have had as much impact otherwise. Another theme may arguably be counterpoint between tolerance or understanding of mediocrity and individual desires for inestimable even incomprehensible realization both in terms of ff everything (the simplest contemporary expression become inseparable from New generation post Viet Nam national identity, and seeking private assessment when all meaningful references are lost. These are only some is a frequent contemporary messages conveyed by making seventies filmmakers reflecting a crumbling human infrastructure. It's possible to imagine the contemporary viewer, as I once could, appreciating the establishing scenes as something other than vicarious observation and more akin to a negotiation of sympathy and even solace. Today, I find the same extraordinary and beautified scenes, Cimino foreshadowing Heavens's Gate hubris had the winter location grass and trees decorated with green paint and faux foliage only for color balance, frustrating. We're ostensibly living in economic good times in unremitting contrast, and yet so little seems to have changed. I'm eagerly looking forward to viewing the moment I can discard my present perspective.

I think The Deer Hunter hits a lot harder for folks that lived through the Vietnam war. My dad (a boomer who was in his 20s during the war) connected deeply with the film because it portrayed what was really happening to people in that time. The movie wouldn't have been nearly as powerful or impacting if it just cut straight to the Vietnam and capture scenes, you need the first act to establish the deep and real friendship of the folks going to war. You see their life before the war and how amazing and perfect it is--how it could be your life. And then you see the horror of the war and how it completely fractures and destroys this group of friends. A lot of people that lived through the war experienced the same kind of shock and the film is quite cathartic for them.

If you just want a Vietnam war movie that cuts right to the gory chase about the horror of conflict, watch Platoon. If you want to experience what life was like for a young adult in their 20s and 30s being drafted or going to fight in the war and its impact on their life, watch The Deer Hunter.

And people's brains continue to change.

When I was in my mid-20's, I rented Jaws and couldn't believe how boring it was. Twenty years later I gave it another go when I saw it on some streaming service and I absolutely loved it.

On one hand, people love short videos but at the same time many of them will settle in for a multi-hour podcast or binge-watch six hours of some streaming series on a slack weekend.

It isn't that movies like The Deer Hunter are slow, necessarily. It's that the scenes are doing things other than advancing "the plot". Things like revealing a hidden character trait or depicting the quality of the protagonist's world. I remember someone telling me that The Zero Effect (1997) was "too slow", when I thought it was moving along at a fast clip; I finally realized it was the difference in what we were getting out of (or looking to get out of) the movie that accounted for our differing perceptions.

Not that that can't be done poorly, either. But The Deer Hunter never struck me as slow, and I'm a kid who grew up with Star Wars as my template. But I got really into what we might call (erroneously) "character-driven" movies in the '80s.

(Dammit, I liked Chariots of Fire, but there was no way it should have taken Best Picture over Reds. Same with Ordinary People and Raging Bull.)

> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear. The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending. Movie shots followed strict guidelines and the creative head of the movie was the producer while the director was akin to a contractor, someone hired to film the scenes.

12 Angry Men and especially Sweet Smell of Success are not good examples of this.

And for me, I miss some of that straightforward cinema today. Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters.

Everything is a blockbuster and a franchise.

> Sometimes you don’t want ambiguities and meandering characters.

Or antiheroes, or love triangles, or…

You know, ketchup[1] in the right amount can do wonders but slather it everywhere and it’s the delight of a four year old, but it’s really not the way it should be experienced.

[1] pick your condiment of choice.

When a movie has a love story that doesn't involve a love-triangle or infidelity I breath a palpable sigh of relief. Realistic or not, does all romance have to involve competition or deception?

Cinema instead of being a reflection on society is more a mirror of itself. (look at Weinstein/Polanski and people like them in cinema and how they were treated until they could no more --look at their compasses).

I just watched a romance movie where the plot was one was dying of a terminal disease. I watched it because the protagonist was Feynman, otherwise I'd have turned it off because watching people die is not entertaining to me.

Matt Damon said that in the past studios could expect to make half of the money back in DVD sales. Now that DVDs are gone studios are a lot more concerned about funding movies that are _not_ blockbusters/franchises. Sucks!

Can you imagine a studio funding a movie like Fracture (2007) today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG1Lxnn8Qa8 - probably not, a movie about a genius man who murders his cheating wife and an egotistical district attorney. But the film is tremendous, can't be made today.

It becomes a 6 episode miniseries.

Exactly. Storytelling format follows the dollars which follows consumer habits. Right now all the dollar is in content made-for-Netflix and franchise movies because most people just want to watch online stuff at home nowadays.

You should hang out around small cinemas and niche festivals, you'd see everything can be and is made. There's a universe beyond studios. I just saw Cronenberg's Futur Crimes (the direct successor to Videodrome and eXistenZ) a few days ago, and Maps to the Stars yesterday. The man is as nuts as ever and he can still get his films made, it just takes producers who do it for fun and inventive financing. Films are the easiest they've ever been to make.

Indeed. And all noir films. American cinema is a lot more than just its best picture nominees. Why is OP ignoring films like Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, The Defiant Ones, Anatomy of a Murder, The Hustler, Paths of Glory?

I love French New Wave and Breathless is one of my favorite films, but OP overstates their case.

OP was simply referring to nominees as best picture in the Oscars between 55-65 to make his point.

With cherry picking you can make any point you want. It not only ignores most of the films in that era, it even ignores most of the best picture Oscar nominees, to say nothing of the fact that OP so wildly mischaracterizes 12 Angry Men and Sweet Smell of Success that I wonder if they've seen the films in the first place.

I have to agree with OP, 12 angry men is a fantastic movie on many levels, but it really feels more like good Shakespeare than 12 real dudes discussing execution and their consience

The noir films was a significant inspiration for the nouvelle vague. They were highly regarded by french critics, which even gave the genre its name.

12 Angry Men is pretty stiff and theatrical. Not a criticism since it is a great movie, but it it wolds apart from say Five Easy Pieces.

Stiff and theatrical are better descriptors. Or mannered and a bit stilted.

I've only seen Breathless and A Band Apart. My sense is that Godard played a big part in transforming cinema from mannered to free-form. But I'd caution against framing that transition in terms of quality. Lots of stiff, theatrical movies are excellent, many of them have really good camerawork, and Godard certainly didn't invent moral ambiguity.

I don't think OP is framing it in terms of quality. Just a different style of filmmaking. A change. Whether the change is for the better - different story!

That's also due to the fact that it's a classical chamber play. I'd say a "theatrical" feel was definitely intended.

Film Noir (which inspired Godard a lot; his 1965 film Alphaville is basically an homage/parody of it) had many of these traits (realistic dialogue, protagonists who weren't 100% good or even antiheroes, endings where the the good guys don't win) -- look at 1940s/1950s movies with Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.

Specifically, the subgenre Future Noir. See 'How Alphaville (1965) Gave Us Blade Runner (1982) And The Matrix (1999)' [1]

[1] https://nerdist.com/article/alphaville-gave-us-blade-runner-...

Future noir it's just cyberpunk since its conception.

Blade Runner it's film noir in the future, and Neuromancer it's a hardboiled mistery book with computers.

It has sense, a lot of pulp writers wrote both mystery and sci-fi booklets under diferent aliases, and a lot of plots were recycled by changing the setting.

Yep, I immediately thought of "SUNSET BLVD." as a counter example. Even "The 400 Blows" predates Godard in French New-Wave.

Marty had pompous acting/writing? Seriously?

How is Brando in "On the waterfront" all that different from Brando in "The Godfather"?

Cahieurs du Cinema crew were famously obsessed with film noir and american directors who have been pushing doom and gloom ever since the depression.

For what it’s worth they also loved Lubitsch, so it was not all doom and gloom for them.

> The acting/writing was pompous, actors talked like reciting Shakespear.

To be fair, they were literally lifting from theater talent that was trained to do this

1955-1965 could be described as Hollywood's McCarthyist era, characterized by Cold War hysteria, the blacklisting of anyone and anything even vaguely associated with Communism, the end of film noir, etc.

French cinema didn't go that way, another important director of the period was Jean-Pierre Melville.

https://www.indiewire.com/2015/08/the-essentials-the-10-grea...

But wasn't this inevitable given the declining cost of movie cameras?

After all, I grew up when taking a photograph cost a dollar (including printing). This meant one was very parsimonious that the picture would be worth it. I still have trouble shaking that off when taking pictures with my phone, though I use the phone for all kinds of things I never would have considered before. Such as taking a photo of the back of my head to check on a mole that I can't see in a mirror. Or when I mail a package to someone, I'll text a quick photo of the receipt with the tracking number on it. Or photograph something so I can enlarge it, i.e. use it as a magnifying glass.

(Yes, I've watched Breathless. I thought it was rather dull.)

> . The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending.

I confess, I rather prefer that approach. Really don't like anti-heros and villains as protagonists.

It's hard to be more pompeous and recitative than a godard film.

Reminds me of a joke from french comedian Desproges describing the parisian artistic crowd "who would rather die than to be more than 12 having understood the last Godard movie".

"recitative" - great word, I would have never thought to use it.

This is just wildly exaggerated. Italian neo-realism, British kitchen sink dramas and the emergence (in France) of vérité cinema did just as much, if not more, to contribute to the refocusing of cinema on normal, working people.

>The movies were about heros of impeccable character doing heroic things and there always was a happy ending.

I thought a big part of this was the Hays Code, which forced (voluntarily adopted by studios) certain standards of morality for filmmakers: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheHaysCo...

"I just talked about myself, and you, yourself. You should’ve talked about me, and me, about you."

— Michel Poiccard, Breathless (1960)

"The 1960 French crime drama film, Breathless, by Jean-Luc Godard has a very interesting idea about love. The protagonist, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a car thief and crook, is unlikeable. He steals from helpless women as well as vulnerable men, and kills a police officer without remorse. He claims to be in love with an American, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), but at one point he threatens to strangle her, and he disregards her wishes whether big or small. But he wants to be with her, and we believe him. Is this enough to be defined as love?"

From: What Is Love? The True Definition According To The Movies https://moviewise.substack.com/p/what-is-love

I wish I could understand him more. My wife and I tried to watch Breathless and it was insufferable watching this complete jerk mope his way around. We didn't even manage to finish it. On top of that, Godard himself came off as rude in 2017's Visages Villages (Agnes Varda).

Is there something of his I might appreciate more?

I've only seen Bande à Part, but found it charming.

Try Pierrot le fou, Contempt, Alphaville... However Breathless is (one of?) the easiest of Godard's movies.

Notice that you're supposed to suffer to watch many of his movies. It's part of the experience, to prove that you're part of the intellectual elite that "gets it".

His films take apart the mannerisms of film and French society. anti-intellectual shots at him are only a lost opportunity to know a moving, meaningful artist

In fact it's the opposite: I'm a staunch intellectual, snob Frenchman. I can't stand brain-damaged Hollywood entertainment (I'd rather stand 2 hours under the rain than watching any Avengers movie). The cultural gap may require time and effort to cross to be able to appreciate Godard (or Bergman, or Rohmer, ...) when you're into mass culture.

LOL, this reminded me of Gene Hackman's character in Night Moves on Rohmer:

https://vimeo.com/8688973

attempt to scramble to the top of some crumbled European high-cultural ground to throw stones at low culture is just as dumb as being dismissive of Godard

but, that said, i was responding to the parent comment and accidentally got nested under you

If you are suffering watching Breathless and Pierrot le fou, I feel a bit sad for you.

I'm not, but for some of his movies it's obviously part of the project.

I would suggest looking into Pierrot le Fou, and Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders in NA).

It's the only one I've watched and that stopped me from watching more of his movies, it just bored me so much, I wonder if all his movies are at the same pace or if I should give another try to `A bout de souffle`.

Why do you want to? If you prefer movies about likable characters overcoming challenges and setbacks but eventually prevailing due to their core of goodness, then there are plenty of great movies to watch. This is just not Godard.

Eh, “moping insufferable jerk” and “good, likable overcomer” can be thought of as ends on a potentially broad spectrum of character types. Perhaps the commenter doesn’t care for either.

Well, people whose opinions I respect say they're great movies and there's a lot to appreciate about them, so I suppose I'm wondering if there's a way I could learn to enjoy them more. The responses here have been helpful!

I really enjoy Koyaanisqatsi but I can understand how someone else might not like it at first, but perhaps enjoy it more after the theme and intended meaning become more clear.

I did not watch Breathless, but the feeling you describe reminds me of what I experienced watching La Piel Que Habito by Pedro Amlodóvar (a loose adaptation of a novel: Mygale by Thierry Jonquet).

It was an incredibly difficult movie for me to watch, the amount of psychological violence was so unbearable I barely made it to the end, couldn't help but think what could possibly go through the mind of the writer to give birth to such a twisted story.

(Note that Breathless has Godard for direction and screenplay but the story is Truffaut and Chabrol)

oh yes that Almodóvar movie was really weird. I remember feeling a bit nauseous in the end.

As always, an Ebert review will help you at least set the table for the discussion about it. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-breathless-19...

Excellent critic, thanks!

"Contempt" is much more accessible and enjoyable.

Probably still the best piece introducing him is by Craig Keller (@evillights) for the Senses of Cinema's Great Directors series: https://archive.ph/ncWrG

My advice: watch it like a movie that just came out, not as a “really important and heady film”. If not, you might miss the whole concept is funny - it’s about a French guy who looks like bogart who watches American films and wishes he was American, who falls in love with an American who wishes she was French.

I love Breathless but I think my interpretation is different than most - to me it’s about the meaningless of art, how the main characters drift aimlessly because they model their lives after superficial understandings of the other gleaned from media. Also there’s an artist character who iirc explicitly says that art is meaningless. But yeah its a difficult watch, it’s almost an easier watch if you watch it superficially since it’s so well shot.

No promises, but I would recommend trying Weekend (1967). I felt the same way about Breathless for a long time, until I watched it the third time and it just "clicked." It's easy to take that film way too seriously and miss the point.

That said, I don't really know why I've watched so many Godard films, since I almost never actually enjoy them (the reason is probably Anna Karina et al. hnngh). Still, he was undoubtedly a genius and I have the uttermost respect for his craft. RIP.

I didn't really care for the characters in Breathless either, but I did really enjoy seeing how avante garde (for the time) the filmmaking was with fast cuts, hand held camera, etc. It looks like a modern TV or streaming show but you have to remember this was 1960 and _no one_ was making stuff that looked like that (the big hollywood films were John Wayne westerns, huge epics like Ben Hur, etc.). It's pretty amazing that Godard pioneered a style that we all see and take for granted today.

It's been a while since I've seen it but I remember liking Masculine Feminine more than Breathless, at least liking the characters in it more. Give it a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRiVKoW18Fw

I'm striking out with Jean-Luc Godard. I've seen seven of his films now from the "1001 Films to See Before You Die" and have found them all tedious.

It's too bad because there are parts of each that can stay with you like the "car scene" in "Week-End". But often they are peopled with unlikeable characters, have a meandering plot that feels made-up on the spot, are punctuated with obtuse poetry....

I appreciate what he did for cinema in showing all the things that it could be, but perhaps I like some of the films from other directors influenced by him that instead struck something of a balance.

Try Éric Rohmer for a different taste of French New Wave. He’s most well known for My Night at Maud's which is part of his “Six Moral Tales”, but my favorite of them is La Collectionneuse.

I subscribed to Criterion a while back just to watch all six.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Rohmer_filmography

Highly recommend "l'Amie de mon Ami", my favorite Rohmer. "Maud" is probably second.

Any movie that’s someone’s favorite movie is one I’ll watch. So, watching it tonight. Thanks for the rec.

The only one of “Comedies and Proverbs” that I’ve seen so far is The Green Ray which is a very sweet film.

I hope you like it!

Thanks. I enjoyed it. That was a long setup for the final scene. I have to wonder if the outfits was Rohmer’s doing or if the actors decided to play a trick on him and he kept it in.

I still prefer the Six Moral Tales and La Collectionneuse remains my favorite Rohmer.

I think I particularly like this film because it is a highly structured story around feelings that can be illogical. The Green Ray is an improvised film, so the polar opposite in a way!

If you like improvised films, you might enjoy Mike Leigh. His films are very heavy though. I don't know if I have a favorite, but Happy-Go-Lucky is as good to start with as any. His films are more structured in that he workshops them with the actors first, so maybe they are more a collaboration than improvised.

I don’t guess you’ll see this but on the off chance you do, you got me started watching the Rohmer films again and I just watched A Summer’s Tale. What a delight of a film.

Yes that's another great one. Often shown on French TV as one of the more "modern" Rohmers, and because viewers tend to appreciate the aesthetics of that film (Brittany, M. Poupaud)

Why would you watch seven movies from a director you dont enjoy? I can understand giving a director a second chance, but seven?

Well, I suppose it's possible I need to ease into his style and one film might not do it. But in fact I'm a completist and all 7 are included among the "1001 Films to See Before you Die". So I suffer 6 more because I want to see all the films in the list.

Now, despite not enjoying his films (and others in the "1001" list, c'mon Warhol!) I was in fact able to appreciate that he has died and the impact he had made on cinema (whether I enjoyed his work or not). So I suppose I look at "1001 Films" as my "film school" class. (That has been going on for several years now, ha ha — and I'm only just closing out the 1960's.) I'm less film-stupid than I was a few years ago — maybe still not erudite (?) enough to appreciate New Wave though.

Thats a really weird way to work, if it doesnt click with you just move on, life is too short to follow some other's ideas and values. Being completionist may not be the best direction if it drags you like that.

Especially since you are getting consistent feedback from your own sub-consiousness. Or just go with the masses and watch top imdb rated ones if lists must be

>and it was insufferable watching this complete jerk mope his way around.

Well, the key is not to let some rigid moralistic sentiments color the experience.

Cinema is for experiencing the point of view and lives of other people. Not for watching behaviors we already approve of.

I didn’t approve of what Raskolnikov did, yet I could empathize with him thanks to the writer’s prowess. I don’t see why cinema would be different than literature. The guy in Breathless was a jerk and the director failed to make the audience empathize with him.

The director didn't want you to take pity on the guy or feel morally superior to him. He wanted to you to see his viewpoint and his experience.

With Rascolnicoff, Dostoyevsky wanted from the start to condemn the ideas he had (and his actions).

> He wanted to you to see his viewpoint and his experience.

I don't think the protagonist has a viewpoint. My impression was that he was a random jerk. Why did I watch a movie about a random jerk who is not worth paying attention to. It was definitely a waste of time. If wasting my time was the intention of the director, then I would say that he succeeded.

Well, art cinema is not for everybody

Yep, that's what I said to those who found my movie stupid.

Well, if it wasn't stupid, you'd be right to tell them that.

More often than not, it's the audience that's stupid, especially the average viewer.

Which is also why e.g. the Monkeys sold more than Miles Davis, and Bieber more than any number of much higher quality pop.

Pierrot le Fou was the one that clicked with me. I’d already appreciated Breathless, Contempt, and Bande a Part but I didn’t feel a lot of emotional connection to them. Pierrot le Fou delighted me.

Can’t say why, but in part perhaps his use of color and in part I’d been reading a lot on the Algerian War at the time, so there was some resonance there. I think it’s also just lighter in spirit, despite some serious themes.

I’ve watched a significant amount of his 60’s output and yeah…he’s pretty insufferable and sexist. Brilliant and innovative, sure, but the man could not write a film without deeply unlikable characters and an incoherent plot. The closest he got was Vivre Sa Vie which has some really poignant moments with Anna Karina.

IMO Eric Rohmer and Agnes Varda are more my style. Rohmer can be rather talk-y but that’s not necessarily bad. Definitely influenced the Woody Allen/Noah Baumbach school of directing.

Edit: And don’t feel guilty if you don’t care for Godard. Great filmmakers like Werner Hertzog and Ingmar Bergman shared your views. Hertzog famously said he’d prefer a good Kung fu movie. Which in fairness, I’m not sure Godard would have objected; he did love his B movies.

Weird that it doesn't seem to mentioned he died by assisted suicide, right when France is starting to talk about legalising assisted suicides

Tarantino mentioned Godard as an influence at the beginning of the Reservoir Dogs script (Here he is talking about it: https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU). He says that the seminal moment when he recognized his key aesthetic as a director, was when he read Pauline Kael's review of a Godard film (A band apart), where Kael says in her review: "It was as if a bunch of movie mad young frenchmen had taken up a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the lines". Tarantino says that when he read that he knew that this was his aesthetic -- this is what he wanted to do as a director.

Tarantino called his production company "A Band Apart" (in my opinion) for that reason.

(Tarantino's comment: https://youtu.be/vb7oUEVjFjo)

It's funny, because after I watched _Breathless_ for the first time I was struck by how modern it seemed - and how little directors like Tarantino have added in the intervening years; normally when going back to the early works of pioneers, one can see why they were important and meaningful, but they age in light of all that's been built on them.

An interesting take from The New Yorkers' movie critic Richard Brody from twenty years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/profiles/2000/11/20/exile...

Godard changed my life. I still can't express how exactly though, but watching Pierrot le Fou literally left a serious deep impact to me when I was adolescent. I am deeply thankful that he existed in this world.

I'm not against art films, but when there's an obsession over theme, technique, or personality, I'm probably out. Good art is scandalous and daring without needing any provenance or context. The Banksyism is: "comfort to the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." What matters to the general audience is what is on their plate, not the difficulty in or constraints on making the sausage. If someone wants to go the direction of say Spike Lee, then that's a deliberate choice to put art above chasing dollars, risking becoming the archetype of the starving artist and possibly their wide-appeal legacy. They're neither good nor bad, but different roads needing different driving styles.

"Life may be sad, but it's always beautiful."

-- From "Pierrot le Fou", 1965

Maybe HN can help: Years ago I watched a French movie, I think black and white, involving a young guy living in Paris. I don't remember much: Scenes where he jumped the iconic Parisian metro entrances without a ticket, and also a bourgie party with an American astronaut (?) staring at the moon? Maybe New-Wave, maybe not. I always wanted to find it again.

Maybe it was Masculin Féminin by Godard?

Try https://old.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ if HN doesn't come through for you.

I think you're talking about "Boy meets girl" by Leos Carax. I do remember the scene when the hero jumps the metro still by somersaulting over it... (the somersault is in the trailer https://youtu.be/uA-jdQIWGKA?t=88)

That’s it, many thanks!

'weekend' is still one of my favourites movies all time.

So many epic scenes in that movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BySdtZWDCwI

And that clip you posted is still perhaps 5 minutes shorter than the full clip from the film.

Whenever I hear the words “American carnage”, I can only think of this scene.

I recommend you to also watch Opération Béton - a documentary about the construction of the Grande Dixence concrete dam by JLG preceding his film work and a testimony.

When I first saw the headline, my mind immediately read it as “Jean-Luc Picard” has died” and I was about to say something nice about the actor who plays him.

I have access to 6 streaming services. None of them have a Godard, one of the greatest movie makers of all times.

Streaming is really f*ck#d.

Check out mubi.com for a more cineastic approach to streaming

I've seen plenty of ads for a "classics" streaming service, not what I'm interested in, but they seem to be out there.

Am I the only one that read this as "Jean-Luc Picard has died" and then went into a minor panic for just a split second?

Yeah. Me either.

...the ogre Henri Langlois...

"Ogre"? In the context of European film, this designation could indicate a fairly terrible person. I can't find anything negative about Langlois other than that he had a disagreement with his bosses, which seems forgivable. What am I missing?

Alan Tanner also died just yesterday, and I rate him much higher than Godard. I'll only see Revolutionary Maoist Godard obituaries I assume, not any Tanner's. Not even a movie yesterday.

They lived very close, Geneva and Grenoble.

The poster-boy for commodity fetishism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

I remember sitting in a hotel room in SF with my girlfriend at the time and her waxing about Godard, whom I knew little about. She was right about how influential and brilliant he was.

The obituary did miss the most important part. Why the hell did he commit career suicide, by becoming a revolutionary Maoist, had to leave to Paris, and only made horrible bad movies after that.

The answer is simply a pretty blonde aristocrat, Anne Wiazemsky, who drove him into radicalism. Cannes recently had a bad movie "Redoubtable" about that. https://freebeacon.com/culture/godard-mon-amour-review/

He was extremely talented, until Le Chinoise and The Weekend.

They do talk about him becoming a maoist and the influence on its movies. Maybe I misunderstood what you’re trying to say.

The Wiazemsky influence on his career suicide. He only talked about Gorin.

Je vais prendre deux fois des moules

It's sad, but I assumed he was already dead.

It's strange how his more recent work isn't known so much, it remained daring and innovative. Goodbye to Language (2014) is well worth a watch.

Really? Care to explain more? To me he is basically a critic of commodity fetishism while acknowledging the reality of it.

A more complete, and written in English, obituary : https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2022/09/13/jean...

Changed from https://www.liberation.fr/culture/jean-luc-godard-est-mort-2.... Thanks!

It is actually "Godard", not Goddard.

Fixed.

I'll never forget his leading role on the USS Entergrose

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