Style is the reality which the mind claims for itself.

Au revoir, Jean-Luc Godard

Godard with Anna Karina, his wife in the ‘60s, and muse

“If you want to say something, there is only one solution: say it.” - Godard

I must have discovered Godard when I was in high school in the ‘80s. Back then, New York City had many revival houses — the Thalia, the Metro, Theater 80 St Marks, the Regency — where you could see classics of world cinema along with experimental oddities. My friends and I used to frequent these rundown theaters in the afternoons, after school, religiously, several times a week. We would gulp down entire retrospectives of Bunuel, Godard, Fellini, Woody Allen, Kubrick, Fassbinder, Herzog, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, etcetera. Hundreds of hours of devotion, spent in the flickering darkness.

Mainly we saw foreign films, mostly European. We loved the diverse, alien sensibilities of the European auteurs, even when we didn’t quite understand them, or when we grasped them in our own peculiar way. For instance, Fassbinder somehow seemed like the ultimate comedian to us. We would giggle all the way through his long, tortuous melodramas.

As an artist, I still intend to find my way back to Godard — secretly I always wanted to make movies. The films I still yearn to make would be similar, in some ways, to his. In his work, I find qualities of experiment, freedom, awkwardness, grace, and curiosity that I still cherish and cultivate. They are glamorous, rhythmically hypnotic, chic, seductive, and open-ended.

“For me, making films and not making films are not two different ways of life. Filming should be a part of living, something normal and natural.” - Godard

Godard was the ultimate cineaste, a high priest of the cinematic art. Even now, watching Masculine Feminine or Two or Three Things I Know about Her or many others, I am inspired all over again. I sense my creative hunger deepening, my aesthetic antennae extending. His work makes me long, even now, to experience certain relationships and communities, make new creative discoveries — to live into ideas aesthetically. And just to live.