“Playful”, “anarchistic”, “revolutionary”. These are just some of the words used to describe the works of film director Jean-Luc Godard. – It is the end of an era. He gave us a higher artistic understanding of the possibilities of the film medium. What he did was really, really radical, says Joachim Trier, moved. Joachim Trier at the Lumiere film festival in Lyon in 2020 Photo: JEFF PACHOUD / AFP – I get really sad, he admits. Today came the news that Godard (1930-2022), one of Trier’s great inspirations, died at his home by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It happened, like much else in his life, on his own terms, with active euthanasia. – He wasn’t sick, he was just exhausted, says a family friend to the newspaper Libération. Jean-Luc Godard holds a press conference in 1971, cigarette in hand. Photo: STRINGER / AFP Until his last breath Godard’s eyes for film were opened immediately after the war, when he wandered in the heart of the French cultural elite in the Latin Quarter in Paris. He was bad at school and absent from university. But at the start of the 1950s he found his calling, as a film critic for the influential film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma. It was in 1960, with the film Till last breath (À bout de souffle), that Jean-Luc Godard made his debut as a feature film director. With stars Jean Seberg and Jean Paul Belmondo in the lead roles, he took the breath away of critics and cinemagoers. The film poster for To the Last Breath (1960). Photo: Breve Storia del Cinema / Flickr Moving camera follows the explosive couple through the streets of Paris in a whirlwind of escape, seduction and betrayal. The viewer is thrown from one scene to another without warning in brutal cuts. In the film lay an innovative force that would define a generation, The New Wave. – Modern film begins here, said the American film critic Roger Ebert about the work. It was spontaneous. It was free. It was raw. It turned a solidified and book-smart film tradition upside down. It was protest, in the form of film. Or “truth, 24 frames per second”, as Godard himself defined the art form. Jean-Luc Godard exhales cigarette smoke at a press conference for the film “Detective” in Cannes in 1985. Photo: RALPH GATTI][DOMINIQUE FAGET / AFP Frihet Joachim Trier remembers well his first meeting with Godard: – I had a huge phase at the end of my teens and early twenties where I watched all the French new wave films I could get my hands on. Then I was lucky enough to be able to see Till the Last Breath as my first Godard experience at the cinematheque. Even then, more than 30 years after the film came out, it felt new. – It felt as fresh to me at the time, in the 1990s, as if it had just come out. With his peculiar understanding, he reinvented the film language a little for himself. He took themes from American B-movies such as gangsters, filmed this rough and imperfect with jump cuts and jazz music. You got a feeling of freedom, Trier remembers. Joachim Trier surrounded by his own young stars, Anders Danielsen Lie (left), Renate Reinsve, and Herbert Nordrum (right) Photo: CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP The freedom came from Godard freeing himself from the narrative itself, says the director known for, among other things The world’s worst person and Oslo 31 August. – For Godard, film language was more like music than storytelling. It was the pictorial and clipped, not the psychological drama, that interested him. He showed us the film’s possibilities to play, to be free, says Trier. Jean-Luc Godard together with actress Nathalie Baye in 1980 at a press conference for the film “Sauve qui peut (la vie)”. Photo: RALPH GATTI / AFP Permanent rebellion Until his last breath, doors opened for the young Godard, but the man with the disheveled hair chose instead to smash the walls. Each film had to be new and different, and the creativity seemingly never ended. Godard was in permanent rebellion both in art, in love and in politics. Godard together with another revolutionary voice, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in 1971. Photo: – / AFP In 1961 came A woman is a woman, in 1962 To live her own life, and in 1964 Bande à part. Not to mention Masculin féminin in 1966. A series of now classic films that conveyed both strong emotions and contemporary commentary. The films expressed opinions that came to the surface during the student uprisings in 1968: Godard was critical of the war in Vietnam and the consumer society, and was close to Marxism for a long time. Flowers hang on the door of Jean-Luc Godard’s home in Rolle, Switzerland. Photo: FABRICE COFFRINI / AFP Farewell to language He kept the rebellion going, ever deeper into the unknown and experimental. All the way to Adieu au Langage (“Farewell to language”) in 2014, a narrative essay in 3D. In some scenes, for example, Godard experimented by making the left eye see a completely different image from the right, before they intertwine. The film, mostly filmed near Godard’s home in Rolle, Switzerland, also depicts some of the solitude and peace he sought in his private life. Jean Luc Godard and Jean Seberg in 1960. Photo: – / AFP Godard was described by many – including ex-wife Anna Karina – as a “hermit”. Another contrast in an eventful life devoted to one thing only: filmmaking. Joachim Trier hopes more people will take the time to discover Godard. – When great artists die, and they, like Godard, have lived such a rich life, the best way to pay tribute to them is to watch their films over and over again. I will do that, he says.
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