Godard was a trailblazer who means more to the art form than maybe anyone else alive right now. Everyone who came after dreamt of meeting how innovative and radical he could be. RIP.
Jean-Luc Godard is film. He was its Bob Dylan, he was its Andy Kaufman. He stood upon the formal techniques of Hitchcock and others and showed us how to break every rule. He was a celebrated master in the Sixties only to turn against his own fame to make polemics. The colors of Pierrot le Fou felt like they were going to overwhelm the screen; the bleakness of Week End felt like the end of the world; the playfulness of A Woman is a Woman captured the irreverence of being in love. Even in his old age, Goodbye to Language closed the conversation of what 3D visuals in movies can actually accomplish. Anyone who cares about the artform in any serious way owes it to themselves to watch at least one of his early films to understand the difference between what a movie can be versus the narrow box that they are almost always put into. Like his own explosion into fame, start with the breezy and quick 90 minutes of Breathless and think about the cuts and how what you have always though as seamless editing is in fact part of a language of cinema, one you have been taught but one in which you have not necessarily been able to compare to anything else. Think about his decision to stop the action of the film for what seems like a pointless interview with a new character, and how so many people would call something like that filler. Think about how the film both celebrates pop culture while showing the detriment of believing in it.
I think a lot of people were introduced to alternative cinema through people like Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, and they are both obvious descendants of his work. Wes Anderson cited Godard's influence on The French Dispatch, and Quentin Tarantino named his own production company after a Godard film. Scorsese used the famous theme from Contempt to close Casino. It is selfish to wish we could have gotten one more film, but it hurts so much for him to be gone.
One of the reasons this feels like such a loss is that he was one of the very last titans left from that era. Ozu, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Tarkovsky - all names that have been gone for a long time. The New Hollywood guys, despite some having started in the Sixties, still feel modern.
I havent had 2 buck chuck in a long time, but at a younger age, that was the go to wine - just for the price.
The way Kai Winn was passive aggressive and condescending to everyone was perfect. I still compare her to other villains in shows. The way she would say “my child” at the end of sentences…damn.