Jean Luc Godard

I don’t know what to say about him. He died at age 91, through assisted suicide, one report said because, he said, he was “exhausted”. I don't know if he had any condition other than being 91.

In a documentary about Agnes Varda, he left her a rude note on his door when she went to see him at his home somewhere. I don’t know what his problem was or if Agnes read too much into it. There was the unkind letter he wrote to Truffaut after the success of Day for Night. I thought he made a pretty good point. Truffaut was a well-known swinger, but his character, the director he played, was the only one in the movie who didn't have a sex scene. We kept seeing  him alone in bed dreaming of cinema. 

I haven’t seen too many of Godard’s movies. I saw the beginning of Every Man for Himself and turned it off. I watched Contempt and thought it was weird that Jack Palance was in a high brow French art film.

I liked Breathless and I would have liked Alphaville if it had been a straight movie and less of an allegory. 

At some point, Godard started filming everything static camera which worked very well most of the time, but it didn’t work terribly well in parts of Hail Mary. That movie was set in what was then the present day. A virgin named Mary becomes pregnant. It’s a mystery to her boyfriend, Joseph. It was condemned by the Catholic Church in part because Mary keeps taking her clothes off.

I liked Film socialisme. I watched one of his movies with Woody Allen, something about King Lear, but I didn’t understand it and Allen was wasted in it. And I liked Detective with 40-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud in the title role but haven't been able to find it again.