I wanted to point the way towards a couple of really good tributes written by (as it happens) good friends of mine.
Dan Callahan over at Ebert: Image is Happiness: Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022).
Godard was alive in but entrapped by a sea of quotations and points of comparison, and it could be said that he was the James Joyce of modernist cinema; in his middle period he tried to be the Bertolt Brecht of the cinema, too, but that didn’t really take, and after that he was a very gnarly purveyor of erudite futility. His mind was full of intellectual bric-a-brac, a sensitive young loner’s defense system, and so he was protected by all his references but also walled in.
Glenn Kenny over on Decider: Jean-Luc Godard Is Dead: The Cinema’s Highest Modernist Was 91
I don’t think any filmmaker has been called “pretentious” more than Godard. In any event, his talky, elliptical, sometimes deliberately boring films of post-’68, made in collaboration with Jean Pierre Gorin and later his life partner Anne Marie Mieville, motivated critics to break out the “p” word almost reflexively. Pop art Godard was replaced by (provisional) Maoist Godard. A Godard who also worked a great deal in television, even doing commercials (he contained multitudes). Richard Brody’s monumental 2008 biography of the man, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, persuasively argues that this period was as artistically significant as any other in Godard’s career. Godard not being any “fun” did not, after all, equal Godard not being great.
And finally, Jordan Hoffman for Vanity Fair.
People who write well – and thoughtfully – people who know shit help me and others to process things.
