![]() ![]() He even named his first production company, A Band Apart, after Godard’s seventh film: another dreamy Parisian underworld tale with its iconic, giddy-making sequences of Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur dancing the Madison in a smoky café and scampering through the Louvre. Half a century later, with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino would return this transatlantic favour, folding fin-de-siècle American irony and excess into the by-then-canonised Godardian recipe. À bout de souffle, his 1960 debut feature, told of an affair between Jean-Paul Belmondo’s young, Humphrey Bogart-obsessed Parisian crook and Jean Seberg’s American student and aspiring journalist: the plot was straight from Hollywood’s B-movie playbook, but Godard infused it with pure European avant-garde cool. The jump cuts, the long takes, the achingly hip rambling dialogue, the thrilling tension between the chaos and bustle of the real world and the icy poise of movie glamour: Godard and his New Wave contemporaries’ contribution to cinema in the 1960s changed the medium forever after its first half-century’s existence, here was a surge of new blood and new possibilities. The director who, more than half a century earlier, had pioneered the 'jump cut’ – unprovoked, hiccupy edits which deliberately throw viewers off-balance – was now passing control of this signature technique to his audience, with a literal wink. Typically in 3D cinema, the left and right images only differ in perspective by a few inches, to simulate the slightly different angles each of our eyes has on real physical space.īut at one point, Godard detaches them from each other completely, and has each eye go wandering off solo: viewers initially confronted with an incomprehensible haze discovered at their own speed that by closing one eye then the other they could flick between the two channels at will. The result, 2014’s Goodbye to Language, was one of the 21st century’s most formally innovative films: its radical experiments with depth and binocular vision could only have come from the mind of an artist who was prepared to smash apart the very idea of cinema and rebuild it from scratch. Instead, he and his cinematographer Fabrice Aragno mounted two Canon 5Ds side by side on a plank of wood and joined in with the craze. When 3D last blew back into vogue, Godard didn’t join the ranks of purists bewailing the return of this lowbrow fairground wheeze. But Godard, who has died aged 91, was eternally, untiringly fascinated by the changing nature of the moving image, and the way in which humans understand it, and don’t. It’s hard to imagine many great directors colluding in their own visual diminishment, at the world’s biggest film festival or elsewhere. The titan of the French New Wave – the director of such medium-stretching masterpieces as À bout de souffle, Le Mépris, Bande à part and Pierrot le Fou – had shrunk himself to pocket-size. Rather than being physically present, the great director was FaceTiming from his home in Switzerland, responding to journalists’ earnest questions with gnomic utterances while drawing deeply and with great satisfaction on a courgette-sized cigar. The world’s media dutifully filed off to the press conference chamber, where they found no Godard, but an iPhone 7+ sitting on the table. Or did I? At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, it was announced that this titan of the French New Wave would be holding court to discuss his latest – and, in the end, final – film, a cryptic slab of cinéma concret called The Image Book.
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