“I bet you’ll fall in love with her after five minutes.”
Are the words echoed by the character of Paul to his friend, titular character Bruno Forestier around four minutes into the 1963 film ‘Le Petit Soldat.’ The two enter a $50 bet with Paul assured it will only take Bruno five minutes to fall in love with Veronica Dryer played by the infamous Anna Karina in her debut role. Bruno shows little interest in the bet but agrees.
After a car ride with the three discussing light topics such as the political assassination of an art professor by the name of Lachenal, Bruno has one request, one he almost stops himself from uttering. Yet he does, asking Veronica to sway her head from side to side, she does, her flowing black hair dances in the camera’s frame as she hides a cheeky smile.
Bruno hands $50 to Paul, right away.
In the six decades since, millions have lost similar bets except it wasn’t only the way Anna Karina swayed her hair, but the pictures the man behind the camera created that captured the hearts and eyes of the public. Jean-Luc Godard, the reclusive man, changed cinema forever.
The legendary Swiss-French film director died on Sept. 13, 2022 the way he began his career, on his own terms. Taking the route of assisted suicide at the age of 91.
Yet his legacy lives on with his countless ground-breaking creations, his precious films.
Richard Brody was a seasoned film critic by the time he met Godard in 2000, a moment that had been a lifetime in the making — 25 years to be exact.
“When I told people and friends I was interviewing him for a profile for the New Yorker, they were surprised. They thought he had died, “ Brody says. “That’s how far off the map of cinema he was for many people.”
Brody wasn’t always an admirer of Godard’s films.
“I was in college, I had more or less no interest in movies — a friend of mine, a much more sophisticated guy of the same age, said there’s a movie playing tonight. This is of course being held in a college film society because this was 1975, so there was no home video.”
The film in question was Godard’s infamous first picture Breathless. When he walked out of the screening, Brody’s life would never be the same.
“I came out with my molecular structure rearranged. It made me feel like I had seen something that was the combination of the two things that I love most in the world. Jazz and philosophy. It was on the one hand, very freewheeling, spontaneous, serious fun, and on the other hand, it was seriously intellectually full of ideas.”
In his debut film, Godard would usher what was dubbed Nouvelle Vague — the New Wave. Alongside other greats like François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette they challenged the old guard of cinema, breaking all the rules and pushing the boundaries of film.
Godard while filming his seventh movie, Band of Outsiders, had spoken of his habit of breaking the rules of traditional cinema, the prolific director had made a habit of revolutionary techniques such as his use of jump cuts, and completing his scripts well into filming in his first feature film Breathless.
“As an artist, he did what he felt he needed to do. The famous story when he was making Breathless, he brought in a first cut that was over two hours long. He was contractually obligated to deliver a cut that was an hour and a half long,” Brody says. “He did what felt right and he took his own counsel. That’s how we ended up with jump cuts.”
Throughout his career, Godard became increasingly politically charged as Godard’s Maoism became more prevalent in his life, something that could be seen and perceived in films such as Pierrot le Fou, Vivre sa Vie, and Le Petit Soldat. Films that discuss countless leftist movements of the time such as the Algerian independence movement, and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
“I think of Godard’s Maoism as not in any way insincere, but as connected with a crisis of cinema. He had grown away from his classical models of filmmaking. He abandoned the Hollywood model in the mid-60s,” Brody says. “And the turn against the Vietnam War led to a kind of anti-Americanism as a facile term as that is — a hostility toward what American culture contributed to the Vietnam War, including Hollywood.”
Speaking on the element of Godard’s films that made them so identifiable, Brody offers the timeless and expanding sense of commitment Godard had for breaking away from the pack, creating his own cinema, expectations, and norms as a fundamental reason for his immense legacy.
Godard’s career is often divided into two sections or eras with admirers often pigeon-holing the director into his exciting accessible digestible early films and his overtly politically pretentious ones that came later in his career. Yet Brody, like countless others, identifies this as a rather unfair outlook, one that misses the point of the late director’s vision.
“He kept changing, kept growing as an artist, kept doing surprising, original, exciting, provocative things with movies,” Brody says. “His artistic imagination developed with a shocking rapidity but when he, let’s say, returned to the movie business in 1980, with ‘Every Man for Himself’ I was 22. And he was advancing a lot faster than I was, he was greatly expanding and deepening his approach to movies.”
Godard’s commitment and love of cinema pushed him to dedicate his life to it, his final film ‘The Image Book’ came in 2018, a prolific work ethic for a man well into old age. His 2014 film ‘Goodbye to Language’ was an experiential 3D film that signalled his constant fascination with what film could be and do.
Godard has passed on this year, yet his art never will, once Godard picked up a camera for the first time, fate was sealed. He would become immortal.
purgatory chanran 