Ingmar Bergman once called Jean-Luc Godard movies “completely dead” and “infinitely boring”
Film culture was shaken this year when legendary director Jean-Luc Godard, notorious as a founder of France’s New Wave cinema, died on Tuesday, September 13th, aged 91. His most beloved work includes the classics Breathless and Contempt, both are still studied in film academia due to how they experimented with and changed conventions. This resulted in a new way of filmmaking, one that flourished artistically through handheld camera work, jump cuts and existential dialogue.
This contribution to cinema has placed Godard as one of the medium’s most cherished figures, He is praised as an artist who pushed cinematic boundaries. His outlook on film is evident in his infamous statement: “A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”
Godard began his film career as a journalist writing for the popular magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which translates to Notebooks on Cinema. Through his writing, the director panned mainstream French cinema for its “tradition of quality”, as he felt it lacked innovation and experimentation, in turn diminishing film’s artistic ability. In somewhat of a rebellion style, Godard was joined by other French filmmakers, such as Agnes Varda, Francois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who began making their own films as a means to challenge traditional Hollywood and its conventions alongside French cinema in the late 1950s.
From then on, film history was made, and Godard became arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era, as he progressed film’s DNA through his re-organising of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. In terms of story matter, Godard expressed love for both film history and politics, such as Marxism and Existentialism. Once the New Wave had steadied towards a conclusion, Godard made the transition to telling stories about human conflict and artistic representation rather than radical theoretic scopes. These works include Passion, a film about the creation of an art film that was rather fluid and free in its filming, and an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Godard was shown admiration and praise from fellow filmmakers throughout his career and life. These were rejuvenated to heartfelt tributes in the wake of his death. Film director Edgar Wright, known for Last Night in Soho and Baby Driver, responded to the tragic news with “RIP Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most influential, iconoclastic filmmakers of them all. It was ironic that he himself revered the Hollywood studio filmmaking system, as perhaps no other director inspired as many people to just pick up a camera and start shooting”.
Other movie figures who paid respects include Bridgette Bardot, who appeared in several of Godard’s films: “Godard created Contempt and then, Breathless, he has joined the firmament of the last great star-makers”.
However, there were those who questioned Godard’s stance as a revolutionary artist and the quality of his works. Most notably, Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish director and re-creator of European cinema similar to Godard and French cinema. The late director, most known for The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, took an oppositional stance to Godard’s work in terms of its stylistic techniques and tones.
“I’ve never gotten anything out of (Godard’s) movies,” Bergman once stated in an interview on his foundation’s website “they have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead”. In terms of Godard’s visual credentials, Bergman could only summarise them as “cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring” upon watching.
These lead to any re-assessments of Godard’s work as being style over substance, as it is their experimentation with film’s technicality that earns attention, rather than the plot events.
