Whatever conventions up until now that Jean Luc Godard had abided by were now completely abandoned; in addition, from this point on, Godard's work would become more politicised. Throughout the remainder of the sixties, Godard's work expressed a fundamentally Marxist social critique and challenged, engaged and even lectured to his audience. This period of his work culminated in the masterly Week-end (1967) a powerful indictment of living the bourgeois dream in modern France. However, he followed Week-end with a series of films that were overly didactic, perhaps with a view to stirring a revolutionary consciousness in the cinema going masses. Godard returned to more conventional cinema in 1979 with his Sauve qui peut la vie which perhaps revealed the beginning of Godard's maturity, dealing as it did more with sensuality and poetry.

He would continue in this vein throughout the eighties producing fantastic works that included Passion (1981), Prénom Carmen (First Name Carmen, 1983), Je vous salue Marie (I Salute Thee Marie / Hail Mary, 1985), Détective (Detective, 1985), King Lear (1987), Soigne ta droite: une place sur la terre comme au ciel (Keep Your Right Up: A Place on the Earth as in Heaven, 1987), and Nouvelle vague (New Wave, 1990). During the 1990s, he worked on the mammoth eight part series Histoire(s) du cinema which combined all the innovations of his video work and engagement in twentieth century issue and the history of film itself. Godard continues to work, his latest feature being Notre Musique (2004) in which he focuses on war specifically the war in Sarajevo.



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Jean Luc Godard does things the way he wants them, he's is own man, nobody, not even his loyal audience sways him, he makes movies his way, no other way. Cinema meant so much to Godard, he viewed the course with which it would take with horror and derision, this is the guy who debunked Spielberg as, well, not very good. An early apostle to the cine clubs that proliferated Paris in the fifties, he made contact with fellow devotees Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer. It was they that espoused the auteur theory - the film was the director's, it was their vision, films were not collaborations - the cast and crew did what the director directed and it was the director's job to do just that - direct.

Godard's first feature came in 1959, A Bout de Souffle/Breathless, formed part of the New Wave movement, which was characterised by shooting quickly and on low budgets dealing with contemporary life and youth culture and perceived in an unsentimental manner. Godard broke with all conventions of filming, delighting in smashing axiomatic rules and conventions. Godard's output following A Bout de Souffle was prolific, producing two or three films every year. His next feature Un Petit Soldat (1960) cast Anna Karina, the Danish model who would become Godard's muse and regular leading lady throughout the first half of the 1960s.With Pierrot le fou (1965) Jean-Luc Godard embarked on a new film form that blurred the demarcation between cinematic narrative and cinematic essay.



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Shadows(1959) won the Critic's Award at the Cannes Film Festival, the award brought him to the attention of Hollywood who financed his next movies Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting (1963). Throughout the sixties he remained pretty much in the mainstream, including acting in several ABC dramas, Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). His second independent film Faces (1968), starred his wife, Gena Rowlands and was nominated for three Academy Awards - Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Faces was typical Cassavetes - an exhausting, sincere and troubling piece, shot in an improvisational, cinema verite style. He followed Faces with Husbands (1970), a film focussing on three friends dealing with mortality and the search for freedom in the wake of a mutual friends death.

Both these movies proved pivotal in the integration of cinema verite techniques into mainstream Hollywood productions. Indeed Cassavetes mixed the two in his A Woman Under the Influence (1974) which proved to be a commercial and critical success, it was nominated for two Academy Awards - Best Actress for Rowlands and Best Director for Cassavetes.

His next two features, The Killing of A Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1978) both failed to find audience. Cassavetes didn't give a damn, he continued doing things on his terms, he released his Gloria (1980) without a final cut. To the end Cassavetes refused to compromise, in his final work, Love Streams (1984), he captured the emptiness of his characters, who simply drift, defining themelves through incomprehensible acts of cruelty and self-destructiveness.



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Cassavetes is Cassavetes and no-one else, his directing style was different to whatever went before and set precedents for much of what was to follow. Cassavetes focused on characters, indeed the character was everything to him often to the detriment of narrative, plot and storyline. He shot mostly hand-held using normal lighting to accommodate the spontaneity of his actors. He constantly defied standard practice becoming a symbol of the American counter-culture independent film movement. He strove to depict human nature as it truly was, in it's rawest form and in aggressive opposition to the normal Hollywood depiction that had become a societal norm. His characters were complex, illegible and thought-provoking; Cassavetes ensured that to understand was not going to be easy, just like reality.

He stayed away from employing actors who were high profile and who would be more interested in their image than in the character they were portraying. He employed mostly friends and acquaintances as cast and crew offering little or no money guarantee but a share in the profits of the film, if there were any.

His directorial debut Shadows (1959) was shot in this manner over a four year period, mostly taking place on week-ends and when funds were available. Shadows was an account of a biracial romance between an African-American woman, Leila Goldoni and a white man, Anthony Ray, who eventually ditches her when he meets the rest of her family. Unflattering, bursting with energy and real, real, real it took the Critic's Award at the Cannes Film Festival.


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