At the 2001 Cannes Film Festival Jean-Luc Godard was present with his film “Elegy of Love”. A highly experienced and popular press conference moderator, Henri Béart, when it came time to introduce the director, said: “Ladies and gentlemen, Jean-Luc Godard.”

Everyone was satisfied with the pun. We journalists because we secured the title the next day, as did Jean Lik himself. He may have heard every name in his career, but “God” was not publicly called.

Swiss “dad” of French cinema, stamped director 7th Art in a way “cinema before and after Godard”, “living legend”, “revolutionary, provocative, controversial”, protagonist and co-founder of the “new vagina”, since yesterday he does not live among us. He died at the age of 91 as a result of “voluntary euthanasia”. His body will be cremated today and his ashes will be scattered over Lake Leman by his partner, director Anna Marie Mieville.

Born of an era and a world that is now retired, like Godard himself, who lived for many years in the small village of Rolle, near Geneva, despite the fact that he never stopped making films, but also drawing the next ones. He interfered with statements (very often about political events) and with his work, but from afar. He did not appear in public, he preferred to express his anxiety with images, to experiment to the end, not to stop there. The Oscar gave him an honorary award in 2010, but he did not attend the ceremony. The same happened to his award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where he shared the Jury Prize for Goodbye Tongue.

Expanding the boundaries

His body will be cremated today and his ashes will be scattered over Lake Leman by his partner, director Anna Marie Mieville.

Provocative to the end, he seemed to have the goal of his life to continuously expand the boundaries of cinematographic art, film language, language as such. Passionate, obsessed traveler in the universe of cinema and literature. Its constant and unchanging value is the conviction that “it is not what we see on the screen, what the camera shows us, but what we do not see that matters.”

Aiming, thus, at the “inexpressible”, he constantly attacked the settled and settled from all sides. As a pioneer of French nouvelle uncertainty, as a theorist and critic in the iconic Cahiers du Cinema. A subversive of orthodox storytelling rules (“Breathless” created history), he tried to mount constant confrontations and breaks as a politicized creator of May 1968 (he led student protests and that year’s episodic Cannes Film Festival, canceling him, Tryphos and Lelous leaving the era) , as an ordinary director of the “Jiga Vertov Team”), as a sensitive receiver of the currents of each era (he faced the challenge of television, video, IT), as a lecturer in the “film essay”.

He inherited his mania for reading from his mother, the daughter of a banker. Father – a doctor, Jean Lik grows up in Switzerland in an urban environment. “As a child, I had a rich spiritual life in my grandparents’ house. I found it again at Cahiers du Cinema and at the nouvelle vag,” he said. Excerpts from a press conference in Cannes, 2004, at the 57th Festival, where his film “Our Music” was screened.

That was the last time I saw Godard, calmly smoking a cigar, with a slightly trembling voice, Olympian calm and detachment (copying my report “K”). “When you hear Cahiers du Cinema today, what comes to mind,” he was asked. “This is a whole era … and now it’s like the Russian revolution. Sounds the same. I still buy the magazine, but I don’t find the hope I had when it first started.” “A nouvelle vag, what does that mean to you” is another question. “It was a kind of religion. We are like Christians who believed without seeing either Jesus Christ or the Apostle Paul. For us, a good movie was something we hadn’t seen.”

Jean-Luc Godard was associated with Greece. It was not only his attitude to ancient Greek literature and admiration for Greek culture. His sister Véronique was married to the prominent international cameraman Alexis Grivas (he was also Godard’s assistant), their son, also a cameraman, Paul Grivas worked closely with him.

Godard [με περισσότερες από 100 ταινίες μεγάλου μήκους, ντοκιμαντέρ, μεσαίου μήκους, μικρού και μια δοκιμιακή σειρά 8 επεισοδίων με τίτλο «Histoire(s) du Cinema») κατόρθωσε να συντηρήσει το μοντέρνο σε ένα έργο που έγινε κλασικό. Ισως γιατί ο αντικομφορμισμός του πήγαζε από μια ανησυχία ειλικρινή όσο και βασανιστική.