Tributes to Jean-Luc Godard since his death, Tuesday, September 13, are as numerous in France as abroad, in the cinema and outside, and the emotion is with a large spectrum, ranging from the Actress Brigitte Bardot at the deputy (La France Insoumise) of Seine-Saint-Denis Clémentine Autain. We also note that the flow of praise is often based on a few films barely, among the first, in the 1960s. The 150 others rarely exist, undoubtedly deemed too hermetic and made by a guru whose aphorisms aroused so much mockery that admiration. As for the aesthetic descendants of the filmmaker, it is not found.
So why does that capsize so much? Because Godard shows the artists, and even to the public, which we can create and live differently. Yes, live differently. He gives this hope. He opens a more existential question, confirms Leos Carax who, at 17, discovers Pierrot le fou and says that “life will therefore be possible” (Liberation of September 13).
Jean-Paul Belmondo goes in the same direction in his autobiography, a thousand lives are better than one (Fayard, 2016). While the comedy experts repeated to the actor that he was zero, Godard hires him for a breath of breath (1960) so that he is as in life. Asking the filmmaker what he should do when he enters a bar, the answer fuses: “What you want.” Pissing in a sink, for example. And to comment: “Godard gives me a great impunity to be myself.” Belmondo did three feature films with the Franco-Swiss, he did not have much in common with him, but he dreamed of make it ten or twenty. “For nothing in the world I would not have missed an adventure with him.” Because it’s an adventure, not a shoot.
This adventure, having its corollary its share of unforeseen, stems from the particular and idealized status of Godard, which any creator wants to appropriate and quotes to reassure himself: that of an artist between the idol and the hermit , who intends to keep total control over his work, on his life too since he chose his death. No one has so much scrapped on the border of art and industry, playing it tight with “professionals in the profession”, to resume one of her formulas, before scuttled for aesthetic and political reasons – a Little like the American author and director Orson Welles.
Miraculous period
It is no coincidence that almost all the films mentioned in tribute to Godard for four days appear in his first fifteen. They constitute a miraculous period. The filmmaker turns them in eight years, therefore at a phenomenal pace. Weekend (1967) closes this “classic” period, if you can say. Because these fifteen works are already on the border of the traditional feature film and the experimental object (story, form). Of the cinema and the museum.
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