Godardorama

In 1988, approaching what he called ‘the dawn of the twilight’ of his life, Jean-Luc Godard had cause to reflect on an earlier dawn – Parisian cinephilia during the 1950s, the little world of screening rooms, notably Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française, and journals, above all Cahiers du Cinéma, that incubated the coterie or movement known to the world as the French New Wave. The movies that poured into France after the Liberation were thrillingly rich and various and unfamiliar, but as he told the interviewer Serge Daney, they also provided a ‘deliverance’ from a source of ‘terror’ – ‘we felt, sitting in those screenings, that we no longer had to write’. In literature, there were criteria, inherited standards. In cinema, ‘you were allowed to do things without class, that made no sense.’ Watching Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), he thought: ‘A man and a woman in a car.’ Or just ‘a man and a woman.’ ‘I knew that I could do it.’