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We think of icons as grand, fixed, unreachable things.
Something that has becomeiconicis enormous and inescapable but also unchanging, flat, impersonal.
In other words, everybody has their own icon.
Is there another filmmaker over whom so many would claim ownership, each in their own distinct manner?
The immensity and variety of his work, with its ceaseless contradictions, ensure that.
And he really was like God.
And, like God, Godards mind was deemed largely unknowable by the high priests of cinema.
His work was labeled difficult and came with additional reading.
His own gnomic utterances, his constant wordplay, both onscreen and in interviews, helped maintain the illusion.
This was probably true to some extent, but it also unfairly made the films seem like a chore.
(All that came later.)
There were girls and boys and guns and color and music and snatches of poetry and philosophy.
Rather, he embraced and expanded this new language hed created.
Call it genius, call it ignorance, call it incompetence, or call it luck.
This was not profundity but the promise of profundity.
A shot of a city street while on the soundtrack someone reads from a philosophical text.
A close-up of Anna Karina accompanied by a burst of music.
A camera lingering over handwritten words.
A man or a woman reading about art history in a bathtub.
A simple, and simply shot, dance sequence.
Could it all be so easy?
It would be somewhat inaccurate to say that he became increasingly political.
But rather, the films grew more self-aware.
And Godard was intent on letting it intrude more and more into his frame.
And yet, Godard clearly identifies with them.
Maybe therein lies the key to his identification.)
That he would go on to partly denounce his earlier work is not just understandable but relatable.
But the Year Zero for cinema never really came.
In fact, he seemed less interested in story than ever before.
The pictures were fragmented, doubling back and repeating themselves.
But he was still growing, still searching.
His immense yearslong film-essayHistorie(s) du Cinemawas perhaps the most obvious manifestation of that impulse.
(I wrote about my experiences with that filmhere.)
I found it initially confounding but also hypnotic.
Godards inner rhythm, his ability to juxtapose images and create new textures out of them, remained unparalleled.
Again, its the surfaces that get you.
Godard never lost his ability to seduce his viewer.
Most of us watched the conference on the many TVs interspersed around the festival headquarters.
Wed all grown up with him.
And in that moment, each of us communed with him in our own way.
