Godard was the inspired maverick of the French New Wave, the Lennon to Truffaut’s McCartney, and kept his radical imagination to the very end
The last great 20th-century modernist is dead. At the last, Jean-Luc Godard had become like a charismatic but remote cult leader; it was as if Che Guevara had evaded assassination and grown old hiding out in the Bolivian jungle: less visible, less important, but still capable of masterminding from afar those bank-heists and spectacular acts of armed resistance which reminded people of his revolutionary vocation. Godard was at first hero-worshipped and adored and then shrugged at and yawned at: as unthinkingly mocked and jeered at as he was once unthinkingly swooned over. He was influential in the sense that the French New Wave shook up Hollywood and all film-makers; his own rarefied experimental procedures have nowadays migrated to video art.
Godard exploded on to world cinema with À Bout de Souffle, or Breathless, in 1960, from a treatment by François Truffaut, the story of a young American girl in Paris, played by Hollywood star Jean Seberg, and her doomed affair with a sexy tough guy on the run, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Godard tore up the rule book without troubling to read it: his wild digressions, offbeat dialogue scenes, vérité location work, non-narrative excursions and “jump-cuts” – the inspired, semi-deliberate wrong editing created by an intuitive, untutored auteur.
