From the anarchic spark of Breathless to the prescience of Week End, no one captured the epoch like Jean-Luc Godard.

Now that the 40th anniversary celebrations and memoirs of May 1968 are becoming ubiquitous, I’d like to get into the act by stating that I remember the 60s and I was there. I was also lucky to be living in Paris in May 68. I loved the smell of tear-gas in the morning as I walked past burnt cars and tornup paving stones. I listened to heated philosophical and political discussions on every street corner in the Latin Quarter and the occupied Sorbonne. I heard the students chanting “De Gaulle Assassin!”, and saw the surreal phrases chalked up on the walls - “sous les pavé la plage” (under the paving stones, the beach) and “l’imagination au pouvoir” (put imagination in power), “liberez expression” (liberate expression), “la societé est une fleur carnivore” (society is a carnivorous plant), “prenez vos desires pour la realité” (take your desires for reality)... It all seemed to be directed and choreographed by the artist who, more than any other, embodied the spirit of May 68 - Jean-Luc Godard. I’ve lived with Godard longer than his long-time companion Anne Marie Mièville. I have watched his films chronologically since being shell-shocked by Breathless in 1960. 

Those who didn’t see Godard’s debut feature when it was first shown cannot imagine the impact of the film just as one can’t imagine what it was like for the first audiences who saw The Arrival of the Train at Ciotat Station in 1895. There was already in Breathless the nascent anarchic spirit of May 68 in the character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Godard’s prescient vision blossomed in Pierrot Le Fou, Made in USA, La Chinoise and Le Gai Savoir, culminating in Week End, released a few months before May 68. After 68, while the experimental elements of the New Wave were transformed into the cliches of film-making, Godard became even more radical both politically and stylistically in his film making.

Godard is not only a part of cinema history, he is also cinema’s most important historian and critic through the language of film, just as Picasso was art’s most important historian and critic through painting. Two or three things we know about Godard are that he has always striven to go beyond film, beyond the image into the other arts and into politics, and that he has always been concerned with the complexities of communication, thus formulating a genuine revolutionary language freed from the dominant bourgeois culture. His didactic aim is not only political but philosophical and social, a challenge to audiences to think and see differently.

Godard’s presence, like all real auteurs, is felt in every sequence in every film in his entire oeuvre. The films are poetic, ironic, contemplative essays on serious contemporary issues (genocide, war and imperialism) and the eternal verities such as birth, love and death. Each person’s individual history is part of our collective history. His histoire has become our story, his music is also Notre musique. Ronald Bergan; (PhD English. Lit), film historian, critic and lecturer, is a regular contributor to The Guardian. He is a former Vice-President of Fipresci for which he has been president of the jury at numerous film festivals and has chaired and participated in many conferences on cinema all over the world. He lives in France and has lectured on literature, theatre and film at the Sorbonne, the British Institute in Paris and the University of Lille. He has held a Chair at the Florida International University in Miami where he taught Film History and Theory. Among the many books he has written are: Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict; Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise; The Coen Brothers; Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life; Francis Coppola: The Making of His Movies; The Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide; The United Artists Story, The Eyewitness Guide To Film (published in 8 languages ), Francois Truffaut Interviews, which he edited and Isms: Understanding Film (2010).

Ronald Bergan
www.guardian.co.uk