Five directors who hated Jean-Luc Godard
The French New Wave transformed modern cinema, injecting the medium with a newfound sense of innovation and playfulness. These filmmakers, such as François Truffaut, Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, emerged in the late 1950s with a groundbreaking approach to filmmaking, making movies with limited resources. They utilised handheld cameras, natural filming locations, and unusual editing techniques, influencing practically every director that followed.
Godard’s first feature was Breathless, released at the start of the French New Wave, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Complete with naturalistic photography, freeze frames and jump cuts, Breathless tells a relatively simple story, yet its formal techniques allow Godard’s thematic explorations (existentialism, betrayal, love) to hold more weight.
From there, Godard made many successful movies, often in collaboration with his wife, Anna Karina, such as Une Femme est une femme, Vivre sa vie, Pierrot Le Fou and Alphaville. Once he had found widespread success, he entered into his ‘militant’ period, often creating films with Jean-Pierre Gorin, which were overtly political.
While many of his New Wave counterparts stopped making movies as the decades rolled on, Godard kept experimenting, making his most avant-garde and radical movies later on in his career. He amassed a large body of work, adored by some and hated by others. Below are five filmmakers who were critical of Godard.
Five directors who hated Jean-Luc Godard:
Ingmar Bergman
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman was an undisputed cinematic genius known for creating incredible movies such as Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Autumn Sonata. Within his immense oeuvre, he explored themes of time, nostalgia, mortality and family.
For Bergman, Godard was a “faux intellectual.” He once revealed that he has “never gotten anything out of his movies,” finding them “constructed” and “completely dead”. But the criticism didn’t end there. Bergman added, rather scathingly: “Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”
Werner Herzog
A key figure of New German Cinema, Werner Herzog has always explored characters who would typically be sidelined by the mainstream, working between both documentary and fiction to convey the most unusual sides of humanity. From Aguirre, the Wrath of God, to Stroszek and Grizzly Man, Herzog has made some incredibly impressive pieces of cinema.
Herzog once delivered his verdict on the French New Wave master, calling him an “intellectual counterfeit,” a criticism that has been wagered towards Godard on more than one occasion. He declared, via Werner Herzog: a Guide for the Perplexed: “Compared to a good kung fu film, someone like Jean-Luc Godard is intellectual counterfeit money.”
Orson Welles
Citizen Kane is a film so highly praised that it has become synonymous with the highest achievements of filmmaking. Orson Welles directed the movie when he was just 26 years old, also starring in the leading role. Both Welles and Godard exerted tremendous influence over cinema, yet Welles was not fond of Godard’s approach to the medium.
He explained: “His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino is essentially a walking film encyclopedia, so it is no surprise that he is well-versed in Godard’s work. As a young man working in a video store, he had easy access to thousands of titles, and he was particularly drawn to many of Godard’s films, which he studied intently. He once said: “To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionised their forms.”
However, he later explained that he had outgrown the filmmaker’s work, stating that he is “not really a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard anymore,” Tarantino continued. “I think Godard is kind of like Frank Frazetta. You get into him for a while, and he’s like your hero for a little bit. You start drawing shit like him, and then you outgrow. I think that’s what Godard is, at least for me anyway, as a filmmaker.”
François Truffaut
Alongside Godard, François Truffaut was one of the French New Wave’s biggest names and most successful directors. Both filmmakers worked together during the early years of their careers, with Truffaut helping Godard formulate the story that became Breathless. However, they eventually fell out at the end of the 1960s after the pair clashed politically. The feud between them was bitter, continuing up until Truffaut’s death in 1984.
One instance involved Godard sending Truffaut a furious letter after watching Day for Night. He criticised the director for his filmmaking skills, calling him “a liar.” In return, Truffaut sent Godard a letter which included the lines, “I have read it and find it disgusting. It is because of this that I feel that the time has come to tell you, at length, that in my view, you are behaving like a shit.”
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