Film director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the founders of the French New Wave and one of the most respected European and world authors, died on September 13th in Rolle, Switzerland, at the age of 92.
Jean-Luc Godard (born in 1930) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic, the author of the cult films Breathless (1960), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965)… He is one of the founders and most significant representatives of the French new wave and one of the most influential figures in today’s world cinema, an author who changed the face of world cinema with his directing during the 1960s. His radical approach to film conventions, politics and philosophy made him an influential filmmaker. Godard’s films have inspired different directors such as Bertolucci, Scorsese, Altman, Soderbergh, Tarantino…
The book “Jean-Luc Godard: Permanent Revolutionary” by Austrian journalist Bert Rebhandl was recently published by Film Center Serbia. It is a biography of the famous cinematographer given through an exhaustive review of his life and filmography. Relating to the films, Rebhandl records the most important segments of Godard’s career, enriching our knowledge with hitherto unknown or lesser known contexts in which they were created.
“About people, real or fictional, we know only a fraction of what they really are. This is, of course, even more true for an artist like Jean-Luc Godard, who in his long life identified more and more with his work – personal experiences become more and more unimportant, while he, with over a hundred titles in his filmography, appears as a kind of universal spirit of cinema”, notes Bert Rebhandl in the introduction, adding that Godard is a figure on the border between biography and work, between history and writing history, between subjectivity and politics, between modern art and the digital age.
Without the man who shot more than a hundred films, including Virvre se vie, world cinema would be extremely different. And that is exactly why this book about the French-Swiss filmmaker, militant intellectual and opponent of Hollywood, is not just an overview of the artist’s complex creative personality. It is a biography that is on the border between art and the digital age, on the border of subjectivity and history, on the border of work and politics. It is filled with bitg fictional and real characters, cinemas, films and towering over it all, Godard, as an inimitable figure in the world of cinema.
The book “Jean-Luc Godard: Permanent Revolutionary” by Bert Rebhandl was published by Film Center Serbia and the publishing house Ultimatum.rs. On 311 pages and in hardcover, an overview of the key points of Godard’s biography and filmography is given. The book was translated from German by Nikola B. Cvetković, and its editors are Miroljub Stojanović (Film Center of Serbia) and Jasna Miladinović (Ultimatum.rs). The book is divided into seven segments that follow the stages of Godard’s work and development (from 1950 to 2020), and as an appendix it contains a filmography and a chronology of Godard’s life.