The Jean-Luc Godard movie that took over 60 years to be released
The French New Wave movement of cinema remains one of the most alluring eras of film history. Dominated by the likes of François Truffaut, Agnes Varda and Eric Rohmer, the French New Wave marked a new signal of excellence for European film and one cannot forget, of course, the mastery of one of it’s greatest directors, Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard had started out as a film critic for the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinema, in which he frequently lambasted the filmmakers of the time for the lack of experimentation in the medium. Eventually, the Paris-born artist took matters into his own hands and set about creating his own movies.
His 1960 film Breathless helped to reinvent the French cinematic medium and challenged its hitherto accepted conventions and styles. Godard followed up with a series of movies that would go down in history as some of the greatest French works, including Contempt, Bande a parte, Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou, all of which were released in a flurry of activity in the 1960s.
Suddenly, the French New Wave had its new hero and Godard was quickly joined by the likes of Truffaut and Varda in establishing the movement, though his latter works were less radical in their approach to narrative, style and production. Still, not all of Godard’s works managed to be released with ease, particularly some of his early pre-New Wave efforts.
For instance, in 1955, long before he had made anything of feature-length, Godard had set about making a series of short fiction films, beginning with Une femme coquette, translated to English as A Flirtatious Woman. Based on the story Le Signe by Guy de Maupassant, the short nine-minute film tells of a woman (played by Maria Lysandre) who begins to copy a gesture she has seen made by a prostitute to passing men.
Suddenly, a man, played by Roland Tolmatchoff, responds to the woman, to her surprise. There’s a difference in Godard’s adaptation of the story, though, because the film sees the pair meet near a bench on the Ile Rousseau in Geneva, whereas Maupassant’s story has the woman signal to the young man from her apartment window.
Godard’s first narrative short, made under his film critic name, Hans Lucas, and shot on 16mm in the streets of Geneva, had been unavailable for many years and was presumed to have been lost to the annals of time. However, over 60 years after it was originally made, it was uploaded to YouTube, finally completing the wider puzzle of Godard’s wider oeuvre.
While many consider digital technology to be the enemy of cinema, in this instance, it proved to be vital in showing the cinematic world the early brilliance of Godard. Une femme coquette features many of what would become the legendary French director’s trademark stylisms, showing his early talent as a director.
Just five years later, Godard made his debut feature film, Breathless, after three further efforts in the short film medium and a previous short documentary called Operation beton. His early effort, Une femme coquette, is a vital piece of film history and saw the director flirt with narrative cinema for the first time, a moment in which he was discovering the brilliance of the medium, just a few short years before he would establish himself as the master of the French New Wave.
