Godard au travail – Les années 60

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The influence of Jean-Luc Godard on cinema, but also on fashion, music and more globally on the narrative and aesthetics that proceeded from the 60s is more than important! The working method and trajectory of one of the most formidable artists that cinema has produced is revealed in this book – a book to put in the hands of every aesthete!

Author: Alain Bergala

Publishing House: Cahiers du Cinéma

Publication Date: 7 December 2006

Description : The career of Jean-Luc Godard, like that of other great artists of the twentieth century, has gone through several “periods”. It is his “first life in cinema”, that of the sixties, at the time of the triumphant New Wave, that Alain Bergala has chosen to explore. This book describes the blossoming of a power of creation and formal inventiveness out of the ordinary. Between 1959 and 1968, which marked a radical break in his work, Godard directed no less than 15 feature films, and immediately became one of the emblematic figures of this prodigious decade.

Many of them have conquered the cinephiles but also the general public and are among the masterpieces of the history of cinema: Breathless of course, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Le Mépris with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, Pierrot le fou with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Aima Karina, La Chinoise with Anne Wiazemskv and Jean-Pierre Léaud. Despite the great diversity of films from this period, where Godard explores the cinema in all directions, we can identify the permanence of a gesture of dazzling creation and an obvious unity of inspiration for the films whose Anna Karma, companion and muse of the filmmaker, was the “model”, from The Little Soldier to Made in USA.

These Godard films have become mythical, and the legend has often taken precedence over reality. Since his first film, Godard has forged an image of an innovative and unconventional creator, a provocateur and a genius, thus preserving a certain amount of mystery about the reality of his working method. This is why Bergala’s return to the source, which he has done here by delving into the film archives, challenges many preconceived ideas and sheds new light on the entire body of work.