生涯を貫いた反逆精神　ゴダール監督

【パリＡＦＰ＝時事】１３日に死去が発表された映画監督ジャン＝リュック・ゴダール氏は、フランスで誕生した映画運動「ヌーベルバーグ」をけん引した反逆精神にあふれた旗手で、１９６０年代に次々と話題作を発表し、映画界のルールを書き換えた。（写真はジャン＝リュック・ゴダール監督。資料写真）
　『勝手にしやがれ』（１９６０年）から、フランス各地で学生たちが大規模な反体制デモを行った６８年の五月革命の間、技術的な革新をもたらして映画界を揺さぶった。
　同時に２作品を手掛けることもあり、テーマは犯罪から政治、売春に及び、創造性に満ちたエネルギーは２世代にわたる映画監督に刺激を与えた。
　「物語には始まりと中盤、終わりがあるべきだが、必ずしもその順序に従う必要はない」といった、ゴダール氏の機知に富んだ名言は、ロバート・アルトマン氏やマーティン・スコセッシ氏、クエンティン・タランティーノ氏、ポール・トーマス・アンダーソン氏らの有名監督の指針となった。
　商業映画からは一時離れていたが、１９７９年に復帰した。しかし、新味は失われ、批評家からは、言葉が省略され過ぎて曖昧過ぎる、作品に女性差別主義が反映されているとの批判を受けたこともあった。
　イタリア船籍のクルーズ客船上で撮影された２００９年の『ゴダール・ソシアリスム』では、資本主義の行き詰まりを予測。客船が３年後に座礁した際には、門弟以外からも洞察力を評価する声が上がった。
　ゴダール氏はパリで１９３０年１２月３日、フランスとスイス出身の両親の裕福な家庭に生まれた。第２次世界大戦中は、幸運にも中立国のスイスで過ごし、ソルボンヌ大学で民族学を学ぶために１９４９年にパリに戻った。
　実際の教育はパリの小さな映画館で受けたようなもので、フランソワ・トリュフォー氏やジャック・リヴェット氏ら将来の映画界の巨匠と知り合った。
　米国のアクション映画のファンになり、仮名で雑誌に映画批評を執筆した。米国で最初の映画制作の試みが頓挫した後、スイスのダム建設に従事し、資金を確保して１９５４年の『コンクリート作業』の制作につなげた。
　映画界でのキャリアは、当初から論争の的になった。アルジェリア戦争を題材にした１９６０年の『小さな兵隊』は、フランス当局に３年間にわたって上映が禁じられたほか、６４年の『恋人のいる時間』は、浮気性のヒロインが典型的なフランス人妻と見なされることが懸念され、検閲によってタイトルが変更された。
　２０１１年には、英紙ガーディアンのインタビューに応じ、「映画は終わりだ」との見方を示し、「携帯電話の登場により、今は全ての人が監督になった」と語った。【翻訳編集ＡＦＰＢＢＮｅｗｓ】
〔ＡＦＰ＝時事〕（2022/09/14-14:11）

Jean-Luc Godard -- who has died at 91 -- was the rebel spirit who drove the French New Wave, firing out a volley of films in the 1960s that rewrote the rules of cinema.
Between Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) in 1960 and the student protests of 1968, Godard exhilarated audiences as he shook the film world with his technical innovations and savage, occasionally lyrical, satires.
Sometimes working on two movies at the same time, he ranged over crime, politics and prostitution in a burst of creative energy that would inspire two generations of directors.
Godard's witty aphorisms like a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end -- but not necessarily in that order, became lodestars for filmmakers from Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.
But the flame that had burned so bright in the 1960s veered off into revolutionary politics and Maoist obscurantism in the 1970s, and he came to be seen almost as a tragicomic figure.
Godard spent several years experimenting with video before returning to commercial filmmaking -- of a kind -- in 1979.
- Modern prophet -
But the freshness was gone and critics accused him of becoming too elliptical, with some branding his early films misogynist.
Yet the increasingly reclusive Godard persevered down his singular path, before reinventing himself in his later years as a gnomic cigar-chomping prophet.
He shot his critically acclaimed Film Socialisme on board the Costa Concordia cruise ship in 2009, declaring that capitalism was heading for the rocks. When the ship ran aground three years later, it wasn't just his small band of disciples who treated him as a visionary.
Born in Paris into a well-to-do Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930, Godard was lucky enough to spend World War II at Nyons in neutral Switzerland, returning to the French capital in 1949 to study ethnology at the Sorbonne.
But his real education was in the little cinemas of the Latin Quarter where he first ran into Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, all future luminaries of the French cinema.
He fell in love with American action cinema and began writing criticism under the pseudonym Hans Lucas with Truffaut, Rivette and Rohmer for small magazines like the Cahiers du Cinema, where they plotted to revolutionise the art.
After a failed attempt to make his first film in America, he went to work on a dam in Switzerland and saved enough money to make a film about it, Operation Concrete (1954).
It helped lay the foundation for his rapid ascent that would see him hailed as the leader of the French New Wave when Breathless was released in 1960.
- 'The Picasso of cinema' -
That swaggering story of a small-time crook on the run who romances a young American in Paris was a major landmark in French cinema, heralding the arrival of a generation of irreverent young film-makers determined to break with the past.
So big was its impact that Truffaut called Godard cinema's Picasso, someone who had sown chaos... and made everything possible. As often with Godard, their friendship later turned sour, with Truffaut branding him a shit after the pair fell out in 1973.
By shooting on the fly in outdoor locations and improvising endlessly, Godard rewrote the rulebook and helped popularise the idea of the director as auteur, the creative force behind everything on the screen.
Breathless also gave the first big break to Jean-Paul Belmondo, who would later star in Godard's masterpiece and most personal film Pierrot le Fou (1965), which explored the pain of his break-up with the Danish actress Anna Karina.
From the start, Godard's career was dogged by controversy. Le Petit Soldat (1960), with its references to the Algerian war, was banned by the French authorities for three years and Une Femme Mariee (A married woman, 1964) had its title changed from La Femme Mariee by censors concerned that its adulterous heroine might be taken for the typical French wife.
But after Weekend (1967), a gory examination of the obsession with cars scattered with surrealistic traffic accidents, his work too often appeared self-indulgent.
Indeed, Godard became something of an intellectual oddity, emerging every few years from his bolthole in Rolle on the shores of Lake Geneva to lob a verbal grenade or two.
It was this tragic, cartoonish Godard on the slide who features in Godard Mon Amour, the 2017 comedy about him by Michel Hazanavicius, the Oscar-winning maker of The Artist.
But by then Godard was having the last laugh, with his reputation somewhat restored by a series of low-budget metaphorical films that questioned our image-saturated world.
Film is over, he told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2011, recanting his oft-quoted maxim that photography is truth, and the cinema is truth 24 times per second.
With mobile phones, everyone is now an auteur, he said.