Mean Streets, by Martin Scorsese (1973) After a series of short films, the young Martin embarked on feature films with a boxing film, then a drama about the world of work. It is with his third film, his first considered cult before chaining the masterpieces, that he tackles what will be the DNA of his filmography: gangster films. Except that Mean Streets has an aftertaste of Godard in many ways. It’s a film that is full of cinematic inspirations, sometimes even right down to the editing – one thinks of the film’s opening sequence, where the three jump cuts are obviously reminiscent of the structure of Breathless. But beyond that, in the way Scorsese has of breaking the rules of mafia films, on the very characteristics of the character, there is a risk-taking and a desire to break the codes that we find in Godard. Note that in his second film, Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese was already inspired by a feature film by the Franco-Swiss director – by Vivre sa vie, in this case. And the filmmaker has never hidden his love for the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Pulp Fiction, by Quentin Tarantino (1993) Godard was not a fan of Tarantino, and he made no secret of it. But that did not prevent the American filmmaker from adoring his Franco-Swiss colleague, whom he even found revolutionary – unlike Truffaut, whom he compared to a clumsy amateur. A love that obviously transpired in his daily life, the filmmaker having named his production company A Band Apart in homage to Godard’s film Bande à part, but above all in his films, starting with, of course, Pulp Fiction. from a concrete point of view, where it copies pays homage to a precise scene – the one where Mia (Uma Thurman) is at home, and where she dances, throws a vinyl and hangs around the house waiting for Vincent (John Travolta) sort of the toilet – from the film Vivre sa vie, by Godard, therefore. We could also cite the dance scene by Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey and Anna Karina in Bande à part, which recalls the famous Pulp Fiction twist. But also, more broadly, in the way that Tarantino has, as for Scorsese , to make a comment on the old cinema, by innovating, by breaking the fourth wall, with an overflowing inventiveness. A direct and assumed descendant of Godard’s cinema. Chungking Express, by Wong Kar-wai It is not only through the prism of the plot of the Hong Kong filmmaker’s fourth feature that the parallel with Godard holds. Admittedly, Chungking Express paints a portrait of two wandering lovers in a city undergoing metamorphosis. Of course we think of Breathless. But even visually, this masterpiece by Kar-wai, as the co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once said, will draw on Godard’s cinema. From ellipses to voice-overs to narrative breaks that cut off continuity and references to everything, Chungking Express is a direct child of the filmmaker.Mauvais sang, by Leos CaraxFrom his first feature film, the director of Les Amants du Pont- Neuf or, more recently, the incredible Annette recalled his heritage for Godard. After all, Carax started out as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Not surprising to find in Boy Meets Girl a close shot of the eye of the female character close to the mouth of the male character – one of the most beautiful shots of A married woman. But it is in Mauvais sang that the o find the most beautiful declaration of love in Godard, and mainly in Alphaville. For this interpretation of SF in a dystopian universe without bombast, in normality. In a world where humans have no hope. All in a coating, an atmosphere, an editing infused with Godard’s cinema. Even more, at the time of the film’s release, in 1986, Carax explained: “I don’t feel in any way contemporary with the films that are released. […] Mauvais sang is a film that loved cinema, but does not like today’s cinema. And that’s important to me. Not to isolate me or other directors to think badly of me, but so that the people who will like it see it as it is.”Stranger Than Paradise, by Jim JarmuschThe link between the second feature film by Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Coffee and Cigarettes or even Only Lovers Left Alive) and Godard, it’s still Jarmusch who talks about mine, like here, in 2017, in the lines of the New York Times: “At the end of de souffle was a real formal inspiration for me. With this film, he didn’t have enough money to shoot with sound. Everything is dubbed a posteriori, so that he can go out in the street and film as if he were in the middle of a war, a bit like I was able to do when I started out. And he uses the ellipses to facilitate his ability to mount something no matter what. When I did Stranger Than Paradise, I did the reverse of that. I had so little film to shoot that I realized that if I did all the scenes in one take, I could do a long with the amount of material I had. It came from Godard’s inventiveness to let the form be influenced by the limits I had to shoot.”
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