Jean-Luc Godard died at 91 and his cinema still questions feminists

” Photography is the truth and cinema is twenty-four times the truth per second », Jean-Luc Godard liked to summarize. The French director, spearhead of the New Wave, has just died on 13 September 2022 at the age of 91, for reasons still unknown.

Who really was Jean-Luc Godard, who died on September 13 at the age of 91?

Born in Paris on December 3, 1930, Jean-Luc Godard grew up among Protestant, pacifist and Anglophile parents and grandparents who supported Pétain and read the collaborationist press. After failing his baccalaureate in 1947 (he ended up getting it on his third attempt in 1949), he became passionate about cinema and its criticism, in particular the texts by Maurice Scherer alias Éric Rohmer.

From there he wrote his first reviews and first screenplays instead of taking his anthropology courses at the Sorbonne. He regularly attends the film library and the cineforum of the Latin Quarter, where he makes friends with François Truffaut, Jean Gruault, Jacques Rivette and Maurice Scherer, and they publish together The Gazzetta del Cinemabefore he joined The Quaderni del Cinema from 1950 to 1959.

Inspired by his partner François Truffaut and his four hundred shotssuccessfully presented at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard made his first feature film, Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. The film was released in 1960 and was a great success with audiences and critics alike. Starting his career as a director, he continues The Soldier, A woman is a woman, Lives her life, The Carabinieri, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, or Male Female.

Indeed, on average he made almost one film a year from 1960 to 2018, and generally affirms himself as the demiurge author (director, screenwriter and dialogist). He has received dozens of film awards, numerous awards from the Berlinale, the Cannes Film Festival, the Césars, the Venice Film Festival and even an honorary Oscar for his entire career in 2010. Let’s say his career has been prolific, right up to the his official death on 13 September 2022. In 1981 he refused the national order of merit, declaring: ” I don’t like being tidy around and I have no merit (comment reported by producer Marin Karmitz, in his memoirs comediespublished in 2016).

Jean-Luc Godard and the women who found his cinema

But Jean-Luc Godard would be nothing without certain women who have marked his life and his cinema. Starting with actress Anna Karina, whom he married in 1961 and who became his muse for seven films in the 1960s.

In fact, women occupy a special place in her cinematographic work, as pointed out by the intellectual Laura Mulvey, the one who conceptualized the notion of ” male gauze »At the cinema (v Visual pleasure and narrative cinema in 1975). This male gaze objectifies female roles in the form of fetishized icons, objects of desire and pleasure, rarely subjects. This masculine gauze at the same time forces cinema audiences to adopt the perspective of a straight, cisgender man. But Jean-Luc Godard strangely escapes the rule, or rather distorts it according to his political concernsexplains Laura Mulvey Fetishism and curiosity (published in French in 2019).

The cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, “gold mine for feminist theories”?

After questioning the female mystery in his early films, Jean-Luc Godard puts his female roles at the service of an eminently patriarchal Marxist critique of consumer society, deciphering feminist critique with French culture :

“I am fascinated by the films of Jean-Luc Godard. When I worked on Marx (Capital) and Freud (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), I returned to Godard’s films with a different point of view.

Then he appeared to me as a thoughtful director, who was perfectly aware of the relationship betweena function of women in the consumer society and the construction of women as commodities.

Godard established a series of links that form a chain, in between the figure of the woman as a consumer, of the woman who builds herself into a commodity, and of the woman consumed as a prostitute.

In A Married Woman, he constantly juxtaposes commercial imagery and a woman’s aspiration to reach a perfection of femininity, which is not really her, which is only the desire of the consumer society.

In my eyes, Godard is brilliant, but he never seems to be completely free. At the end of the chapter I dedicate to him in my book, I conclude it her films are a gold mine for feminist theories. “

From there to saying that Jean-Luc Godard was a feminist, there is a big gap that she will never overcome. But her films survive her and can therefore help illustrate many of the problems of feminism. With each of the new waves of her.

Front page photo credit: YouTube screenshot.