On the Death of Jean-Luc Godard – His Best Films – Culture

Out of breath (À bout de souffle), 1960

Jean-Paul Belmondo wears a tweed jacket, white shirt and tie. Also a curb bracelet and a hat from which he can peek out with a wry smile. He likes to rub his thumb across his lips – a Humphrey Bogart gesture. He’s a car thief and a murderer. He meets Jean Seberg, who sells newspapers on the Champs-Elysées. She will be his greatest happiness – and his downfall. The birth of the Nouvelle Vague, the new (not only French) cinema. Everything was improvisation, everyone could move freely, the cameraman was prepared for anything. “Live dangerously to the end” demands a film poster that once happened to hang behind this first great Godard hero – even the master himself stuck to it in the end. And generations of filmmakers wanted to emulate him. Tobias Kniebe

Open detailed view

A Woman is a Woman (Une femme est une femme), 1961

Angéla (Anna Karina) wants a child, out of the blue, and Émile no longer understands the world, or she, or both. A musical relationship comedy, but each film is above all a document of its time. And “A woman is a woman” is still innocent in its objectification of the protagonist, downright naïve, so cheerfully frivolous that it is very difficult to blame Godard for the image of women it contains. There’s kind of a pun in this whole story that the movie ends on: infamousterrible, or un femmea woman? Susan Vahabzadeh

Open detailed view

The Contempt (Le Mépris), 1963

It’s one of the saddest love stories in cinema, and one of the saddest stories about the love of cinema. Michel Piccoli plays a screenwriter tasked with rescuing a botched film about the Odyssey, while Brigitte Bardot plays his partner, who realizes her contempt for her husband while working on the film. Godard closely interwoven this end of a marriage with his disdain for the commercial side of cinema: the producer wanted more nudity, more glamour, and Godard gave him both – but at the same time caricatured these simple longings in his pictures. Finally, death separates the lovers forever, an Alfa Romeo under a tanker. Alone, the machinery of commodity production cannot stop a death in capitalism. Filming continues, the island of Capri and the glittering sea look as beautiful in Technicolor as ever before and since. The schedule features the scene where Odysseus, the wandering wanderer, first sees his homeland of Ithaca, and Godard, in a cameo appearance as assistant director, scurries about the set while another assistant shouts over the megaphone at his direction : “Silenzio!” David Steinitz

Open detailed view

The Outsider Gang (Bande à part), 1964

Life is a movie, at least that’s how the young would-be gangsters Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) are planning their big coup, stealing money from a villa that Odile (Anna Karina) told them about, for whose favor they are court. A playful enterprise, all in exuberance and a sense of freedom – and because she captures that mood so beautifully, the scene in which Odile, Franz and Arthur race through the Louvre to break the existing record for museum visits is among Godard’s most famous . The world in which the three move is all play and dream, and Arthur’s uncle interrupts all the fun because he’s serious about the robbery. But that doesn’t really matter, because the film just keeps dreaming, beyond death. Susan Vahabzadeh

Open detailed view

Eleven o’clock at night (Pierrot le fou), 1965

Actually, Ferdinand just wants to elope with his beautiful and, because we’re in the middle of the Nouvelle Vague, of course also frivolously mysterious ex-girlfriend Marianne (Anna Karina). The journey of the two of them out of Parisian bourgeoisie into the glaringly sunlit south of France begins in Marianne’s bare apartment: Kalashnikovs are leaning against the walls there, so one could suspect that this will end badly. But she sings such a serene catchy love song – “Oh mon amour” – so disarmingly that Jean-Paul Belmondo nearly drops the fag out of his mouth. But the machine guns are right, Marianne is the deadly “femme fatale” variety. And so this crazy, modern, colorful, shocking adventure film ends for Ferdinand on a cliff where he ties sticks of dynamite around his head and actually burns the fuse. An explosion of cinema history. Kathleen Hildebrand

Open detailed view

Weekend (1967)

If one day the social contract is canceled and everyone goes nuts, Godard knew of course that it would happen in traffic. Corinne and Roland are a couple bound by deep contempt. Together they make their way to Corinne’s father, whose inheritance they want to get their hands on. The journey from the city to the country is a journey into anarchy, all state and moral structures seem to crumble, property and bodies are gradually exposed to the law of the strongest. The highlight is what is probably the most famous traffic jam in film history, a long plan sequence past involuntarily slowed-down people and their cars. Violence breaks out, it is, as always with Godard, tragic and comic. Of course, the director applied the dissolution of all rules and conventions to his work. A film found at the dump can be read at the beginning of “Week-end” (1967) and at the end: fin de cinema – the end of cinema. David Steinitz

Open detailed view

One plus One/Sympathy for the Devil, 1968

Equations never really add up, Godard knew that. And you have to know that when you watch his film “One plus One”, with which he started working in teams – which was later continued with international Maoist groups. There is already a lot of militant slogans here, black power with gun-wielding and shootings of white girls. Anything to show how “serious” they are. the Rolling Stones rehearse “Sympathy for the Devil” from the LP “Beggars Banquet” at Olympic Sound Studios, and Godard’s camera moves around them as if in a vacuum. “That was the theme,” Godard later said: “On the one hand, One, the Rolling Stones, and I face them. That made one plus one, one and one, that’s an attempt to make two.” Fritz Goettler

Open detailed view

Deutschland Neu(n) Null (Allemagne 90 neuf zéro), 1991

Godard, the romantic, that’s what he was from his first texts and films on … The title varies a legendary film in cinema history, from which the boys of the Nouvelle Vague all learned, “Germany in the year zero”, by Roberto Rossellini. Godard also went to Berlin in 1991 to document the country in its new hour after reunification. A phantom film, a film of the night, which the abundance of literary, musical and cinematic quotations gives an eerie transparency. Also returning is Eddie Constantine, the Lemmy Caution from “Alphaville”, his face immobile and lined. Godard developed his love of romance in his youth through German literature. Fritz Goettler

Open detailed view

Movie Socialism, 2010

In the same way, says Godard, the title could have been called “Film Communisme” or “Film Capitalisme”. In any case, it’s about the big designs, the journey takes you back in history, rich in quotations and learned, naturally back to antiquity, i.e. towards the Mediterranean. Go on: Then why don’t we go on a cruise right away? Said and done. A cruise ship full of real passengers, heading for ports from Casablanca to Odessa to Naples, filmed on video. Patti Smith follows along for a while, but then only shows up for a good five seconds. Unknown actors declaim the endless stream of consciousness of the master, whose chains of associations one can no longer follow – but one can let oneself drift along them excitedly. When Godard asked “Quo vadis, Europa?” asks, then only, just not to answer them under any circumstances. The great art of saying “no” into old age – and yet remaining completely relaxed. Tobias Kniebe