The practice of honoring our artistic giants is one that thrives on analysis, though speaking as someone who’s less of a scholar than a lay admirer of Godard’s work, I don’t feel particularly big on explanations myself right now.
The tributes will be as voluminous and scholarly as his output, and they will mark not the end of a collective remembrance but a beginning. Does it feel, even, like the “end of cinema,” to quote the kicker of his 1967 apocalyptic freakout, “Week-end”? I hope not, but it’s hard to think for even a moment about what Godard means to cinema, an art form he revolutionized like no other, and not feel that something has permanently shifted. The motion-picture medium that he studied, worshiped, mastered, mocked, deconstructed and sparred with for decades feels immediately and infinitely poorer for it. Godard, filmmaker, critic, essayist, polemicist, crank, disruptor, legend and one of the most significant artists working in any medium over the last century, is gone today at age 91, having died by assisted suicide at his home in Rolle, Switzerland.
It seems fitting to consider those words this week, and the void as well.
Of all the endlessly quotable maxims and aphorisms that have poured from the mouth and the movies of Jean-Luc Godard - “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” “The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second,” “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order” - one that especially springs to mind today is this: “He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”
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