From Martin Scorsese to Richard Linklater, the eternal breath of Jean-Luc Godard in American cinema

Jean-Luc Godard is not a favorite director of the New Wave. 65-year-old Richard Linklater prefers François Truffaut. When the American director began releasing his first films in the early 1990s, Idler (1990), Rebel generation (1993) or Before sunrise (1995), Jean-Luc Godard seemed to him “the hermit settled in Switzerland”, unattainable, therefore.

Nothing in common with the itinerant Godard of the 1960s. The one who in February 1968 arrived in New York on the occasion of a retrospective of his films at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the grand opening of which, according to a magazine journalist Eye, “Looked like a Beatles concert.” The next day, Godard gave a conference at New York University, which was attended by two young, as yet unknown directors, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma.

At the time, French regularly visited American campuses on the East Coast or in California, but he also visited Texas, Kansas and Minnesota. Those who joined the Maoists paid between $1,000 and $1,500 for a conference. saw this as a significant reward a “revolutionary tax”, method of use “Yankee capitalist beast.”

A wonderful moment of cinema

“I guarantee you recalls Richard Linklater, met in June in Parisall the producers I’ve met in my career know I was suffocating. They may have made the worst blockbusters or Z series, they may be ignorant, they know this Godard movie. » Then it gradually became rarer across the Atlantic.

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