In some of its greatest moments, the seventh art was—and still is—overtly self-referential. The film knows how to talk about the world by looking at itself.

Some filmmakers realized this early on, and since then, every time they picked up a camera, they sent a love letter to the cinema itself. OUR Jean-Luc Godard who died at the age of 91, according to Libération, after a rich and long career, was not only one of the prominent figures in world cinema and a mandatory name for wild authors in director’s schools. He was a creator who loved and he really served cinema precisely because he found out about it, challenged it and turned its rules around.

He was one of those who wrote “Caye du Cinema” the legendary French film magazine, which, no less, laid all the foundations that subsequently built new uncertainty, or French New Wave, if you like. Not surprisingly, some prominent directors of this film school, such as François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, acted as reviewers.

However, among his fellow New Wave directors, Godard managed to look much more modern, unexpected, lively. As unconventional as the image of the childish Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel “praying” to Honore de Balzac in Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959) may seem in itself, it seems almost “ordinary” when placed next to another. every sarcastic rant by Jeanne Szyberg, every breaking of the fourth wall in storytelling, and the feeling that an entire generation can worry, think, and be bored at the same time, as we saw in Breathless (1960). happened a few months after Truffaut’s film debut.

Godard’s cinema is at best overflowing with one unbridled romance, completely “French” and dreamy, but also the feeling of each frame is deeply political, it hits you like a punch in the stomach. For every early hipster character he put on the big screen, the colors of the French flag were weathered into every corner of the frame, in an almost ironic use of them, and the Left had an answer for everything.

Godard marched triumphantly in this direction throughout the 60s: either through his black-and-white dystopia “Alphaville” (1965), or from the hands with raised red Maoist booklets in “Chinese” (1967), or even from youth “Male female” (1966).

Was all this peculiar cinematic language of the French author always interesting? It would be a lie to say that from one moment his characters did not become garrulous and that Godard’s narrative motif did not sink into itself – sometimes even surpassed it. (Clues are already there from the 60s and his endless “2 or 3 things I know about her” monologues.)

In the later period of his career, the French director became less politically embittered – yet always commenting on the world through Marxism – and more existential. “Revolution” could wait – or be expressed in experimental formalism, which, with films like “Goodbye Tongue” 2014 Godard also said… goodbye to meaning.

“gontar” it has become a term with which a part of the suspicious world can “get along” and “get along”. And not just for every film on loan from directors of the next generations. Close-up of his muse (on screen and life partner) Anna Karina from Alphaville, kissing from Crazy Pierrot, sharing a Breathless cigarette, and Jean Scheuberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo languidly rocking in bed have become images embodied by the Tumblr aesthetic and the continuation of the “artistic” Instagram, while, for most cinephiles have always had the image of Godard himself holding a piece of film against the light, accompanied by the statement “About a photograph that is correct once, and about a film that is correct 24 times per second.”

One thing is for sure: those who have seen Belmodo briefly step away from the wheel to talk to the camera, Brigitte Bardot sunbathing naked, Belmodo in a rented car and Anna Karina looking into the camera with her huge wet eyes, will never forget them. So it will be with the art of cinema.