R.I.P. 2022: Jean-Luc Godard and other filmmakers 2022

I probably saw my first Godard film at a Cinema Club screening as a student at Knox College, and doubtless I didn’t know what the hell was going on.  It took awhile for me to absorb especially the narrative language of foreign films.  But Jean Luc Godard was a rising star in the late 60s and early 1970s, so I made sure to see as many of his films as I could during a Godard festival in 1970 at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, MA.  As I recently described elsewhere, I recall sitting mesmerized in the back of a nearly empty theatre late at night, drinking coffee and smoking Gauloises as I watched.

 Eventually I saw all of his films released in America by 1970 at the Welles, and a few that came to America later.  At their best, scenes in his films were strikingly audacious and expressed a culture that was partly familiar, and partly foreign but magnetically attractive. For example, I loved the simple café scenes in Masculin/Feminin.  They were deliberately imperfect in ways that, for example, the films of his French New Wave contemporary Francois Truffaut were not. Both made offbeat films about the future, but Godard’s Alphaville was more mythic and strange.

 My favorite was always Pierrot LeFou, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karinia.  The road sequences (largely improvised) and the tragic-comic ending are memorable, but I was devoted to the early scenes of Belmondo as the married man Ferdinand, before he runs off with the babysitter.  He reads a book on art in his bathtub (literature, art and bathtubs all recur frequently in Godard), reading aloud a passage about the painter Velasquez as the artist of the spaces between people and objects, “the painter of the evening, of the plains, of the silence…”

 The world he lives in disgusts Ferdinand, shown as a surreal party in which upper middle class young professional couples converse literally in the language of advertisements.  He meets the American director Samuel Fuller who tells him that the cinema is all about emotion.  All of this describes Godard’s aesthetic at the time, resonating with our attitudes about the conventional adult world we were expected to join.

 Godard was an early exponent of the French New Wave, which he helped to define.  With a film vocabulary steeped in his encyclopedic knowledge of movies—especially American movies—he took his camera into the streets, and working from outlines and ideas, quotations and some dialogue, he enacted cinema of the moment.  “But that’s cinema,” he says in an interview published with the Pierrot script.  “Life arranges itself.”

 For awhile, Godard exemplified and symbolized a new creative role for cinema, available to anyone.  He inspired countless young filmmakers, and film schools, as well as moviegoers. He more than any other of these directors changed the culture.

  After this New Wave period he alienated many with political messages, but continued to make gorgeous images.  Personally I didn’t share his fascination with American gangster films and violence, but even his most lurid images are indelible.  He also alienated friends with his mercurial behavior and confused others with his churning intellectual obsessions, but he remained committed to film as art, and will be remembered for this.      

 2022 also saw the death of actor Jean-Louis Trintigant, prominent in several French New Wave films, and two French filmmakers not especially associated with the New Wave but who made two of my all-time favorite movies, each exemplifying cinematic and narrative style found only in European films: Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva) and Alain Tanner (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.) 

   

Peter Bogdanovich was an American director, and a writer and raconteur on Hollywood movies.  After early success as a director with The Last Picture Show and his following two films, he married his fortunes to the Picture Show’s star, Cybill Shepherd.   He cast her as the lead in Daisy Miller, based on the Henry James novel.  He wasn’t wrong about her embodying qualities of the James heroine, but the movie did badly with critics and at the box office.  They made a couple of subsequent failures before he stopped directing for several years, and the relationship ended.  I met them after a screening of Daisy Miller at the Orson Welles in 1974.  They were both nearsighted, and seemed very vulnerable within the circle of frenzied attention that followed them. That was not the last of his ill-fated romances.  But along the way he helped to revive the reputation of Orson Welles himself, also in the 1970s.  

  

Other filmmakers and movie professionals who died in 2022 (excluding actors) include: American directors Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) and Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), British director Mike Hodges (Get Carter), Japanese film director Akira Inoue, Czech director and screenwriter Dusan Klein, film editor David Brenner, film designer Tony Walton, British cinematographer Sir Sydney Samuelson, production designer Albert Brenner.  May they all rest in peace.  Their work lives on.