Tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, auteur filmmaker

Jean-Luc Godard : the filmmaker in action

Jean-Luc Godard, the leader of the filmmakers of the French 'New Wave', was born in Paris to Swiss parents on 3rd December 1930. He started watching films during his Sorbonne University days. His passionate devotion to cinema brought him in close contact with Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in 1950. He started contributing regularly to the film journals 'La Gazette du Cinema' and 'Cahiers du Cinema'. The journal 'Cahiers du Cinema', founded by the French film critic and editor Andre Bazin, was the practice ground for these young, aspiring creative film critics who would eventually turn into filmmakers. These young critics attacked the traditional studio-based filmmaking of the 1950s. And they propagated for a new kind of auteur cinema which would reflect the reality as it is. So they started shooting their films on location in real settings with 16 m.m. portable cameras.

All these film critics started making their first features at the same time - in 1958-59, though they had already made several short films and documentary films by then. In their first efforts, they often collaborated with one another. Their recognition came almost immediately at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) made by novelist Albert Camus' brother Marcel Camus and Les Quatres cents coups (The Four Hundred Blows) made by Francois Truffaut won the top prizes at the Festival.

Godard made his first feature film A bout de souffle (Breathless) in 1959. The film was well received by the critics as well as the viewers. The film paved the way for the 'Nouvelle Vague' which in French means 'New Wave'. It was the harbinger of a new age - an age of freedom and non-conformity, of youthful aspirations and frustrations, of existentialist crisis and absurdist realisations, of unemlpoyment and survival, of generation gap and miscommunication, of mobility and technical innovations.Francois Truffaut provided the storyline and Claude Chabrol provided the technical advises to Breathless. Who else but Godard could make such a perfect film! A film cannot be more perfect than this one. Jean-Paul Belmondo is a cop-killer hiding out in Paris with his girlfriend Jean Seberg. Seberg, an American student, sells 'New York Herald Tribune' on the roads in Paris and thus tries to manage her expenses. They live together and the inevitable takes place. This film noir parody rewrote cinematic grammar with innovative editing.

In The Little Soldier a man is turning to reflection from action: Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) is a secret agent working against Algerian terrorists in France, but he doesn't believe in his fight, and his mind is full of aesthetic and philosophical questions. A Woman Is a Woman is Godard's first colour and widescreen film. It is a delightful, loving send-up of MGM musicals, with Anna Karina as a stripper who wants a baby. When lover Jean-Paul Belmondo won't oblige, she goes to his best friend Jean-Claude Brially. Les Carabiniers (The Soldiers) is an extreme attack on the absurdity of war seen through the eyes of two morons who enlist as mercenaries. Contempt takes a tongue-in-cheek, raised-eye-brow look at European filmmaking. Jack Palance is a vulgar producer; filmmaker Fritz Lang, playing himself, is his director; Godard plays Lang's assistant, and in directing this adaptation of The Odyssey by Homer turned into an inside joke - in real (not reel) life, he held the film's producer Joseph E. Levine in contempt. Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli act as the leads in the film-within-film. Pierrot le fou (Foolish Pierrot) is a complex drama about a man (Belmondo) who leaves his rich wife and runs off with a beautiful young woman (Anna Karina) who is fleeing some gangsters. Shot on location in south France, this existential character drama fascinates the viewers.

Jean-Luc Godard writes and edits his own films. In his later films, he often collaborated with other filmmakers like Edgar Gorin and Anne-Marie Mieville. Godard is still relentlessly making films. This prolific and versatile filmmaker has proved himself to be not only the greatest French filmmaker ever but also one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the world cinema. He is the filmmaker of the filmmakers. We pay our tribute to this cinematic genius who changed the course of the history of the cinema.

A film society activist, Sabbir Chowdhury teaches in the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka.

e-mail: sabbirchowdhury@rock.com