Death of the Author – Newspaper Kommersant No. 169 (7370) dated 14.09.

At the age of 92, Jean-Luc Godard died – the only director in the history of cinema who divided it into “before” and “after”.

Dogodarovsky cinema immediately became archaic, as soon as the films “Breathless”, “Living Your Life”, “Contempt”, “Mad Pierrot” appeared. As well as “Little Soldier”, “Carabinieri”, “Alfaville”. Cinema arose twice, and both times in France: the first time – in 1895, the second – in 1960. In the first part of the cinema, it either reflects reality (Lumière’s line) or fantastically transforms it (Méliès’ experience), but still repels reality. Another stage begins with Godard, when cinema itself, its mythology, becomes the point of repulsion. And even politics, with which Godard enters into a long relationship, turns out to be primarily a part of screenwriting and the director’s method.

In the young Godard, individualism and collectivism were combined in an amazing way. If Truffaut, Romer, Rivette, Chabrol were the pioneers of the new wave, then Godard was the pioneer leader in this detachment. Soon the detachment broke up, and each went his own way. Godard anathematized his former comrades. And he himself got it from all sides – with his hobbies for Trotskyism and Maoism, and on the other hand, with a mania of a complex form, incomprehensible to the general public. Godard liked to repeat: “It is useless to simplify. You just have to make it harder.”

Film critic Serge Daney wrote: “The name of Godard is about the same as the name of Picasso once … There are still people who say that it costs nothing to make a Godard film. When I was a child, I always heard in the same way that any baby or crazy person can paint a picture of Picasso … Something similar happens with Godard, he will never be popular, but his name alone means: artist. Oh, this eternal temptation to see in modernism amateur performance, the absence of a school, and in deconstruction – the inability to construct!

Time has put the dots: Godard’s early work could not be killed by any sentences, and it remained a model of fiery inspiration, and only then – a revolution in film form.

Many of his opponents have devoted their lives to “finish all talk of Godard forever.” As he moved away from the reformation of art and cinematic language to the cultivation of political ideas or purely intellectual expression, his cinema became more and more conserved, only occasionally revived by outbursts of the former spontaneity. But while none of his films over the past half century has been a global success, his image as a great Author has only grown in scope.

Everyone has their own Godard. Every living soul, every country, every generation. Bertolucci told me in an interview how they discussed this topic with Tarantino: “Quentin adores Godard, but he will never understand what Godard’s films were for his contemporaries. Cinema was a part of life and changed this life. After shooting my first picture, I held a press conference in Rome in French. I was asked: “Why?” To which I replied: “Because French is the true language of cinema.”

“Cinema is more important than life. Reality is a lie, the truth is what the movie camera catches” – this was the principle of the entire new wave, but only Godard followed it honestly and to the end. And therefore he had the right to reproach Truffaut for “betrayal” when he played the director Ferrand, who does not sleep with Jacqueline Bisset, in American Night. Godard’s ethics (including the relationship between directors and actresses) are as revolutionary and watershed as his aesthetics. It differs from the one that defined “daddy’s cinema”, and will be relevant for another half century, until art is crushed by political correctness and “new ethics”. If Anna Karina and other Godard actresses heard today’s songs about “objectification” and male gaze, they would laugh a lot. Because without a loving look they could not imagine cinema, seeing it as a living embodiment of truth in cinema, because love cannot be imitated.

Godard is the last modernist on the path traversed by Eisenstein, Murnau, Dreyer, Buñuel, Visconti, Bergman… And the first postmodernist, followed by Demi, Polanski, Fassbinder, Almodovar, Coppola, Scorsese, the Coens and the same Tarantino. Claude Lelouch wittily remarked: “What I like most about Spielberg is Godard.”

For Russia, Godard was an even more sacred monster than for the rest, because he was a forbidden deity. None of his films got into Soviet distribution.

Godard frightened our children from birth. Perestroika opened the floodgates, but it turned out that the train – or better use the ship as an image – left, and with it potential spectators. Too smart Godard films are out of fashion. Godard, as a rental director, remained in the category of a parallel unlived life – “like a Western film that we have not seen,” to quote Alexander Kushner’s poems.

The sixties could still watch “On the last breath” and “Live your life” in VGIK; the seventies were already forbidden to even think about the “Trotskyist” and “Maoist” Godard. When we began to travel abroad, we copied Godard’s films from European friends on video cassettes – these were the most valuable acquisitions of those voyages.

Imagine my feelings when, in the early 1990s, at the Toronto Festival, I saw a living Godard a few meters away from me. Just like in Michel Hazanavicius’ film “Young Godard” dedicated to him, he managed to drop and break his glasses when he went outside with a glass of wine during the reception and was very rudely seized by the police (drinking alcohol in those parts is strictly regulated by special places). It was my only unforgettable communion.

It seems that Godard’s first film released in Russia was “Socialism” (2010): its action takes place on a ship, where a model of European society is assembled. The same film that Godard refused to personally present at Cannes. At about the same time, the managers of the Oscar Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could not find him, realizing that it was time for the old man, who had never even been nominated, to “give a contribution”, otherwise it would be too late. It has long since become a brand, an image of itself, absolutely mythologized and alienated from its physical body. So he ended up on a ship, but not to replenish the flotilla – a long list of ships of art. “Socialism” is the negation of both the Titanic and the Battleship Potemkin. It is a denial of cinema as such, a media in which there is nothing more to say. The film is no more, only a piece of developed film remains. Films today, however, are also absent or almost non-existent – there are pixels left.

Andrey Plakhov