Jean-Luc Godard would have loved to be elected professor at the College de France. With the (a little clumsy) help of Pierre Bourdieu, the idea took shape in 1997. “I confess that I would have been happy, will say Godard shortly after, because the cinema would have entered the College de France with me. »
The attempt is a failure: the filmmaker is campaigning, but it is an ephemeral turn of the track. The scientists of the venerable institution were not against it, but most literary people opposed it. “It’s a shame, I would have done it, concludes JLG. To earn a living and that interested me: to have, for a few years, a good salary for little work, while talking nonsense and also something other than nonsense…” (Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc GodardEd. of Cahiers du cinema, 2001).
If there is therefore no “inaugural lesson” from Jean-Luc Godard, the man, the filmmaker, the thinker, has never stopped making them, often in the form of word games, jokes, of paradoxes, composing a booklet which, since “Cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second” at “Not just an image, a just image”has established itself as the haiku breviary of contemporary times for the use of “professionals of the profession”but not only…
Godard has expressed his love of the formula, which goes back to his childhood practice of playing words: “I have a penchant for the aphorism, the synthesis, the proverb. The aphorism summarizes something while allowing other developments. Like a knot: it could be tied in other directions, but when it’s done, the shoe holds. It is not only the thought, it is the trace of the thought. (Jean-Luc Godard by Jean-Luc Godard). A way of thinking and a way of thinking that Godard often used in an original way: media, television, radio, tribunician intervention. He imposed this character of the evil genius of communication, the troublemaker of images.
This role of buffoon, of returning to the system its four truths, carrying on him the fabric of the myth, thinker of the cinema, is well spotted by Serge Daney, in Cannes, in 1985. “A conference by Godard is a rite in itself, one of the few that still cheers up festival-goers worn down by the showbiz language. Why does the rite work so well? Because Godard plays the game, because he takes all questions seriously. He simply displaces them surreptitiously, he ironically ironies them and even answers them sincerely. As we say in tennis, he “returns all the balls”. If cinema were a kingdom, Godard would be its madman, the one we expect him to show mastery by saying that the king is naked, by telling the truth in an unpredictable and funny way. He succeeds in enlisting the pun in the service of truth. And vice versa. Semi-candid, he acts as if he understands nothing of this role of master in which everyone wants to put him. There is politics in there, the humorous remnants (from Brecht to Mao) of a somewhat terrible utopia and a daily questioning of cinema and audiovisual practices. (ReleaseMay 13, 1985).
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