Jean-Luc Godard

The episode nobody’s biography leads with is the one that happened in Montreal. In the spring of 1978, Jean-Luc Godard — already the most famous living French filmmaker, already past his New Wave peak and his Maoist period — arrived at Concordia University’s Conservatory of Cinematographic Art at the invitation of its director, Serge Losique, and began a long-term “research” on the history of cinema, acting by turns, in the words of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival notes, as “gardener, archaeologist, geologist, producer, rarely professor” (Il Cinema Ritrovato). Fourteen lessons, each about an hour and a half, ran from April 14 to October 21, 1978 — and they were the fertile ground for what would become his eight-part video magnum opus, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1987-1998) (Il Cinema Ritrovato).

They were preceded, in March 1977, by five post-projection discussion sessions held as part of a partial retrospective of Godard’s films that Losique had organized — sessions full of dazzling digressions on editing, economics, actors, war, political commitment, and the media (Il Cinema Ritrovato). The recordings — some thirty half-inch black-and-white open reels — slept for decades in the vaults of Concordia’s Visual Collections Repository department before Il Cinema Ritrovato presented them publicly, a privilege granted, as the festival put it, by the artist who “more than any other… has constantly given back to the cinema, even beyond his death, the invention of childhood” (Il Cinema Ritrovato).

The collaboration had a ghost at its origin. Godard’s lectures effectively replaced a planned series by Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque française, who had lectured at Concordia in the 1960s and 1970s and was to return in 1977 — but died that January (Senses of Cinema). Losique persuaded the marginalized, little-distributed Godard to take up the mantle, and Godard used the platform to develop an already-existing project for a video series about the history of cinema — the project that, twenty years later, became Histoire(s) du cinéma (Senses of Cinema).

The making of an enfant terrible

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, and raised in Switzerland by wealthy, prominent parents — a childhood he later compressed into a quip: “I escaped from a bourgeois family into show business. And then I discovered that show business was a bigger bourgeois family than my own” (Academy obituary). His family moved to Switzerland during the war; he returned to Paris in the late 1940s, ostensibly to study ethnology at the Sorbonne, but in truth to haunt the film societies and the Cinémathèque alongside Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut (Academy obituary, moviestarhistory). There he met André Bazin, who hired him as a contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma, where Godard attacked the “Tradition of Quality” of the French old guard and helped lay the groundwork for what became auteur theory (Academy obituary, moviestarhistory).

His first feature, 1960’s Breathless (À bout de souffle), was a thunderclap. Shot on the streets of Paris with a handheld camera, minimal budget, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wandering criminal, it arrived with a stylistic invention born of accident: when the first cut was too long for distribution, Godard trimmed multiple scenes rather than removing any, creating the jump cuts that became one of cinema’s signature devices (Academy obituary). The film won him the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin and, with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, launched the French New Wave (Academy obituary).

The 1960s brought a barrage: Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Vivre sa Vie, Pierrot le Fou — films of bold primary colors, philosophical dialogue, broken fourth walls, and asynchronous sound (Academy obituary, moviestarhistory). After Weekend (1967), Godard moved into the militant phase of the Dziga Vertov Group collective and overtly political filmmaking, then a more introspective television and video period with Anne-Marie Miéville (Academy obituary, moviestarhistory).

Montreal’s lessons and the book that got them wrong

The Montreal format itself was a provocation about method. Each session was preceded by screenings — Godard’s own films paired with other filmmakers’ reels — but he had no means to pause and speak about the images as they played. “You can see a film and then talk about it, which is what we’re doing here, but it’s a pretty poor work method,” he admitted in the first lecture (Senses of Cinema). The intended video project never materialized — Losique could not offer the technical means Godard considered necessary — and plans for a book replaced it (Senses of Cinema). The 1980 volume, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, edited by Godard himself, eliminated Losique’s and the audience’s remarks and was riddled with transcription errors; Timothy Barnard’s 2014 Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television is not a translation of that text but a fresh re-transcription of the talks in their entirety (Senses of Cinema).

The end, chosen

In 2011, the former enfant terrible received an Honorary Oscar, inscribed: “For passion. For confrontation. For a new kind of cinema” (Academy obituary). On September 13, 2022, Godard died at home in Rolle, Switzerland, at 91, by assisted suicide — legal in Switzerland — after what the family statement described as “multiple invalidating pathologies” (Academy obituary). His longtime legal adviser Patrick Jeanneret said: “He could not live like you and me, so he decided with a great lucidity, as he had all his life, to say, ‘Now, it’s enough’” (Academy obituary).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not assert the outcome of the Dziga Vertov Group films beyond what the cited sources describe, and it does not name a co-founder of the group, since the cited sources disagree on the rendering.
• The death circumstances are drawn from the family statement and legal adviser via the Academy obituary; the specific pathologies were never disclosed.
• It does not enumerate Godard’s complete filmography — over 100 features, shorts, and documentaries — only the works the cited sources discuss.
• The Montreal lectures’ intellectual content is characterized only as the cited sources characterize it; the recordings themselves were not consulted for this profile.