Jean-luc Godard, the
French filmmaker, has died aged 91, leaving his legions of fans in dire need of
a world cinema figure who can be called a true guiding light in these times of never-ending
sequels and spinoffs. Godard was a figure who took his politics as seriously as
his films, and no wonder, when protesting outside the Cannes Film Festival in
1968, the Breathless filmmaker was able to proclaim loudly to the who’s-who of the
film world, “We’re talking solidarity with students and workers, and you’re
talking dolly shots and close-ups. You’re idiots!”

Godard started
his career as a film critic for the Cahiers du Cinema magazine founded by Andre
Bazin. Along with his friend and fellow French New Wave director, Francois
Truffaut, Godard lambasted the French films of the 40s and 50s for being too
polished and too devoid of a connection to the lives of the ordinary French
people. They turned their attention to American and British cinema during this
time. The aesthetics of film noir movies in works like Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon were what they were
aiming towards. Even Alfred Hitchcock, who was known as nothing more than a successful
thriller director in the English-speaking world, was first acknowledged as a
true master of the cinematic art form by the Cahiers’ critics.

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Godard began his filmmaking
career in 1960 with a script written by Truffaut, who had by then already stirred
the world with his debut feature, 400 Blows. Godard roped in an unknown actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, as the lead, and chose to shoot his movie outside of
the confines of the film studios. Edit jerks, jump cuts, and poetry between the
lines of an otherwise ‘gangster’ story would be the hallmarks of Breathless and
would go on to define his nearly six-decade-long career.

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The movies of this
maverick genius were more like a statement against established norms. He took an
otherwise average story and then infused it with his own philosophies and references.
Let’s take the example of his second feature, La Petit Soldat. The film revolves
around Bruno Forestier, a man who is hiding in Geneva in order to avoid getting
enlisted in the French Army. He is, however, captured by La Main Rouge, a
terrorist organization operated by the French intelligence service to quash the
pro-independence movement for Algeria. When tasked with murdering an FLN (National
Liberation Front of Algeria) activist, he refuses to go ahead with the task. Forestier
is soon kidnapped by FLN workers who torture him for information about
La Main Rouge. And between those torture scenes, Forestier and the
revolutionaries extensively discuss their Maoist and Leninist ideologies.

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Another famous filmmaking
technique Godard popularized, which has now been adopted in movies like
Deadpool to shows like Fleabag, is the idea of breaking the fourth wall, where the
characters and the audience are both aware that what they are watching is a
manifested reality. Forestier, while giving a voice-over narration in La
Petit Soldat, suddenly says after the torture scene, “Torture is monotonous and
sad. It’s hard to talk about it. I’ll do so as best I can”. In another of his
famous works, Contempt, the lead character is a writer who has been assigned
the task of rewriting a film script of a Fritz Lang production. In the very
first few scenes, we see him talking to the director and producer on a film set.
And guess who is assisting Lang in the movie? Godard himself.

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Giving established genres
a new spin is something the French genius was a master at. He delved into science
fiction with the 1965 production, Alphaville, and instead of going for big sets
and futuristic props, he depicted Paris of the 60s as a technocratic city of
the future. Lightings and the new modernist architecture that was coming up in Paris at
that time, provided the right ambience for the film. Despite being set in the
future, Godard makes it a point to discuss 20th century events in
the film extensively, referring to the period’s icons like Jean Cocteau, Henri
Bergson, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. There are a number of similarities between
Cocteau’s 1950 film, Orpheus, and Godard’s Alphaville.

At the height of his
fame in 1968, fresh off the success of Week-end, Godard and fellow Marxist
intellectual Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard began the Dziga Vertov movement, making
a set of documentaries and features where they did show credits on-screen. Experimenting
and moving the art form ahead from where he found it when he entered the scene
would be the late filmmaker’s watchword for life. He carried on the spirit even
in later, more abstract works like Goodbye to Language and The Image Book.

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Godard’s life is one of
style and substance; he became a poster boy of sorts for the ones who wanted to
bend the rules. He was trashed by Bergman, who remarked about him, “I’ve never
gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux
intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and
infinitely boring”, but was adored by people who came after. Quentin Tarantino said
about the La Chinoise director, “To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did
to music: they both revolutionised their forms.” And that is exactly what Godard
will be remembered as. Someone who strived to break the norms till the very end
and expand the limits of the field that they have decided to dedicate their lives
to.