The filmmaker, who died on Tuesday, at the age of 91, never had hard enough words towards the little skylight. However, he has shot several times for television and built a real media troublemaker.
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“In the cinema room, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower it.” Remaining famous, this aphorism pronounced by Jean-Luc Godard on March 7, 1987 alongside Jean-Pierre Elkabbach, when From the ceremony of French cinema Caesars, where he saw himself awarding a statuette as an honorary basis, has permanently fixed the image of the filmmaker at war against the little skylight, “tap with images” towards whom he never had enough words hard.
Nothing surprising in fact that the artist who made cinema the heart of a vast reflection on the 20th e century and the fate of images, considers television as his bad object or his sworn enemy. But to look at it, Godard’s relationships with it, certainly contradictory, are much more complex and dialectical than you think. Not only did the filmmaker have shot several times for television, but he also frequented his sets a lot, where he built a real character of media troublemakers.
The story of Godard on television begins with the GAI Knowledge, an order from ORTF to adapt the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, shot in the studios of Joinville at the beginning of 1968, on the breach of the turn filmmaker activist. On the black and naked background of a plateau, Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud rely on revolutionary bases. But the film will be refused to broadcast for a few replicas Lest or Iconoclasts (notably towards the “television of France”, described as “advertising and fascist”).
two ambitious series
In the backlash of May 68, Godard broke with his political years and moved in 1973 to Grenoble with his partner and partner Anne-Marie Miéville, where he invests in the practice of new video tools. In 1976, the INA made the slightly crazy bet to entrust him twelve one hour programs to deliver in two months for immediate broadcast on FR3 (ex-France 3). The filmmaker fell in titan work, oscillating between video editing and simple filming device, often in unique plans. The result, a magnificent documentary series entitled six times two. On and under communication, presents itself as a practical reflection on media society. Embarrassed, the chain will premunicate its broadcast of a warning message: “This program does not offer the usual technical characteristics to our programs …”
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