Jean-Luc Godard was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic.
77 Facts About Jean-Luc Godard
2.
Jean-Luc Godard rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Demy.
3.
Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.
4.
Jean-Luc Godard's most acclaimed films include Breathless, Vivre sa vie, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Feminin, Weekend, and Goodbye to Language.
5.
Jean-Luc Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless, helping to establish the New Wave movement.
6.
Jean-Luc Godard's work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works.
7.
Jean-Luc Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Mieville.
8.
Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician.
9.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Jean-Luc Godard was in France, and returned to Switzerland with difficulty.
10.
Jean-Luc Godard spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva.
11.
Jean-Luc Godard studied in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up.
12.
Jean-Luc Godard spent time in Geneva with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco.
13.
Jean-Luc Godard registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris, but did not attend class.
14.
Jean-Luc Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance.
15.
At this point Jean-Luc Godard's activities did not include making films.
16.
Jean-Luc Godard became friendly with his mother's lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, who was a labourer on the Grande Dixence Dam.
17.
Jean-Luc Godard saw the possibility of making a documentary film about the dam; when his initial contract ended, in order to prolong his time at the dam, he moved to the post of telephone switchboard operator.
18.
Whilst on duty, in April 1954, he put through a call to Laubscher which relayed the fact that Odile Monod, Jean-Luc Godard's mother, had died in a scooter accident.
19.
Jean-Luc Godard rewrote the commentary that Laubscher had written, and gave his film a rhyming title Operation beton.
20.
Jean-Luc Godard that administered the dam bought the film and used it for publicity purposes.
21.
Jean-Luc Godard worked with Rohmer on a planned series of short films centering on the lives of two young women, Charlotte and Veronique; and in the autumn of 1957, Pierre Braunberger produced the first film in the series, All the Boys Are Called Patrick, directed by Godard from Rohmer's script.
22.
Jean-Luc Godard travelled to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and asked Truffaut to let him use the story on which they had collaborated in 1956, about car thief Michel Portail.
23.
Jean-Luc Godard sought money from producer Georges de Beauregard, whom he had met previously whilst working briefly in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox's Paris office, and who was at the Festival.
24.
Jean-Luc Godard's most celebrated period as a director spans roughly from his first feature, Breathless, through to Week End.
25.
Jean-Luc Godard wanted to hire the American actress Jean Seberg, who was living in Paris with her husband Francois Moreuil, a lawyer, to play the American woman.
26.
Jean-Luc Godard wanted Breathless to be shot like a documentary, with a lightweight handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting; Coutard had experience as a documentary cameraman while working for the French army's information service in Indochina during the French-Indochina War.
27.
The film's importance was recognised immediately, and in January 1960 Jean-Luc Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded "to encourage an auteur of the future".
28.
Jean-Luc Godard used her awkwardness as an element of her performance.
29.
Jean-Luc Godard appeared again, along with Belmondo, in Godard's first color film, A Woman Is a Woman, their first project to be released.
30.
Jean-Luc Godard is in love with Veronica Dreyer, a young woman who has worked with the Algerian fighters.
31.
Jean-Luc Godard's following film was Les Carabiniers, based on a story by Roberto Rossellini, one of Godard's influences.
32.
In 1965, Jean-Luc Godard directed Alphaville, a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir, and satire.
33.
Jean-Luc Godard's mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun, a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and is believed to be suppressed by the computer.
34.
Jean-Luc Godard solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo, by then a famous actor, in order to guarantee the necessary amount of funding for the expensive film.
35.
Jean-Luc Godard followed with Made in USA, the source material for which was Richard Stark's The Jugger.
36.
That same year, Jean-Luc Godard made a more colourful and political film, Week End.
37.
The film contains an eight-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, cited as a technique Jean-Luc Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends.
38.
Jean-Luc Godard was known for his "highly political voice", and regularly featured political content in his films.
39.
Cieply makes reference to Richard Brody's book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, and alluded to a previous, longer article published by the Jewish Journal as lying near the origin of the debate.
40.
Immediately after Cieply's article was published, Brody made a clear point of criticising the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book, and noted that Jean-Luc Godard's work approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness".
41.
Jean-Luc Godard's views become more complex regarding the State of Israel.
42.
In 1970, Jean-Luc Godard travelled to the Middle East to make a pro-Palestinian film he didn't complete and whose footage eventually became part of the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs.
43.
Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard explicitly identified himself as an anti-Zionist but denied the accusations of anti-Semitism.
44.
Jean-Luc Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam War.
45.
Jean-Luc Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which the spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis".
46.
Jean-Luc Godard was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being.
47.
Jean-Luc Godard's efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analysing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity.
48.
Jean-Luc Godard stated there was not a single film showing at the festival that represented their causes.
49.
Jean-Luc Godard worked anonymously in collaboration with other filmmakers, most notably Jean-Pierre Gorin, with whom he formed the Dziga-Vertov cinema collective.
50.
In 1978 Jean-Luc Godard was commissioned by the Mozambican government to make a short film.
51.
Under Sonimage, Jean-Luc Godard produced Comment ca va, Numero Deux and Sauve qui peut.
52.
The small group of Maoists that Jean-Luc Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group.
53.
Towards the end of this period of his life, Jean-Luc Godard began to feel disappointed with his Maoist ideals and was abandoned by his wife at the time, Anne Wiazemsky.
54.
Jean-Luc Godard returned to somewhat more traditional fiction with Sauve qui peut, the first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: it was followed by Passion, Lettre a Freddy Buache, Prenom Carmen, and Grandeur et decadence d'un petit commerce de cinema.
55.
In 1990, Jean-Luc Godard was presented with a special award from the National Society of Film Critics.
56.
Jean-Luc Godard was rumoured to be considering directing a film adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an award-winning book about the Holocaust.
57.
In 2013, Jean-Luc Godard released the short Les trois desastres as part of the omnibus film 3X3D with filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Edgar Pera.
58.
In 2015 J Hoberman reported that Godard was working on a new film.
59.
On 4 December 2019, an art installation piece created by Jean-Luc Godard opened at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.
60.
Jean-Luc Godard added that the second film was for the Arte channel in France.
61.
Jean-Luc Godard has been recognised as one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century and one of the leaders of the French New Wave.
62.
Jean-Luc Godard is a director of the very first rank; no other director in the 1960s has had more influence on the development of the feature-length film.
63.
Political activist, critic, and filmmaker Tariq Ali listed Jean-Luc Godard's film Tout Va Bien as one of his ten favourite films of all time in the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll.
64.
Four of Jean-Luc Godard's films are included on the 2022 edition of the British Film Institute Sight and Sound magazine list of 100 Greatest Films: Breathless, Le Mepris, Pierrot le Fou, and Histoire du cinema.
65.
The 60th New York Film Festival which was held in 2022 paid tribute to Jean-Luc Godard who died earlier that year.
66.
Jean-Luc Godard was married to two of his leading women: Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky.
67.
Jean-Luc Godard lived with Mieville in Rolle, Switzerland, from 1978 onwards, and was described by his former wife Karina as a "recluse".
68.
Jean-Luc Godard married Mieville in the 2010s, according to Patrick Jeanneret, an adviser to Jean-Luc Godard.
69.
In 2017, Michel Hazanavicius directed a film about Jean-Luc Godard, Redoubtable, based on the memoir One Year After by Wiazemsky.
70.
Jean-Luc Godard said that the film was a "stupid, stupid idea".
71.
Jean-Luc Godard agreed to the meeting but he "stands them up".
72.
Jean-Luc Godard participated in the 2022 documentary See You Friday, Robinson.
73.
At the age of 91, Jean-Luc Godard died on 13 September 2022, at his home in Rolle.
74.
Jean-Luc Godard's death was reported as an assisted suicide procedure, which is legal in Switzerland.
75.
Jean-Luc Godard's body was cremated and there was no funeral service.
76.
Jean-Luc Godard had a lasting friendship with Manfred Eicher, founder and head of the German music label ECM Records.
77.
Jean-Luc Godard released on the label a collection of shorts he made with Anne-Marie Mieville called Four Short Films.