In nearly sixty years of career and as many films, Jean-Luc Godard, who died on Tuesday, at the age of 91, was often expressed in the pages of the “world” on literature, the Politics, television, sport, but especially on cinema. Extracts.
Le Monde
In 1960, only 29 years old, he gave his first interview to the “world” for the release of the feature film “A Bout de Boute de souffle”:
“For a long time the boy has been obsessed with death, he has prosecution. For this reason I have shot this scene from the accident where he sees a guy dying in the street. I quoted this sentence from Lenin : “We are all deaths in permission”, and I chose the concerto to clarinet that Mozart wrote shortly before dying (…). I was inspired by a friend who travels and that I suspect to do traffic. He too thinks of death. Socially I am different from the character of Belmondo. Morally, he looks more like me. He is a bit anarchist … “(Le Monde, March 18, 1960)
In the early 1970s, the filmmaker affirms a more political vision of cinema, marked by his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin:
“To break definitively with a certain way of doing cinema you had to start by breaking with the classic rupture concept. It was – and it is always – the beginning of a long work of new style (…). For example, that is not to say, I filmmaker, I will make political films, but, on the contrary, I will make politically political films (…). As far as I am concerned, the real break, it is not Say: I made a clean sweep, I left the system, I do something else (…). That is to say, not “Godard returns”, but “someone arrives”. Since he has a name, it’s Gorin. This is what is really new: no longer call me Godard but Godard-Gorin. It was necessary, of course, to broadcast this novelty, to take a flag, like everyone else, and Shake it (…). But it is not enough to take a flag, it was still necessary to plant it and mark the territory where we were and from which we decided to take the offensive. “(Le Monde, 27 April 1972)
The 1980s saw Godard take a closer look at the world of television. On the occasion of the filming of the series “France Tour detour two children”, he pays tribute to his cinema masters:
“silent cinema, which was popular because it showed things without saying them, was very powerful (…). With speaking cinema, you had to stop seeing, thinking, imagining. With the dumb People opened their eyes, together. Everyone is tied before the images (…). All the great of speaking are silent. We will therefore take examples of the mute and what it has become at the time of speaking. Hitchcock made you die of anxiety by showing a row of bottles and not a row of corpses. He needed not an incredible power, but an image before, and after. There we see the truth. It makes justice. It is. Clear, no need to say, it shows. Seeing the story rather than telling it. Cinema is the only place where it can be done. “(Le Monde, April 30, 1980)
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