A perpetual innovator who indelibly altered the nature of his craft, French director Jean-Luc Godard stood at the forefront of the French New Wave, the late-1950s movement that included Fran'ois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and other former film critics from the journal...
[more]A perpetual innovator who indelibly altered the nature of his craft, French director Jean-Luc Godard stood at the forefront of the French New Wave, the late-1950s movement that included Fran'ois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, and other former film critics from the journal Cahiers du Cinema who refracted the medium into a fine art with both broad technical strokes and subtle textual flourishes. His debut film, "Breathless" (1959), which will always remain his benchmark work, is an introspective homage to the gangster film, featuring an almost comically cool Jean-Paul Belmondo as the Existentialist outlaw who hides out in a Paris apartment with his American muse, a lovely Jean Seberg in a cropped haircut. In a typically light philosophical moment, she blithely intones, "Sometimes I wonder if I'm unhappy because I'm not free, or I'm not free because I'm unhappy."
Godard reinvigorated the art of filmmaking by constructing artistic collages that combine image, sound, and music to convey both text and subtext. His sometimes ironic, sometimes reverential, dialogue with pop culture set the mood for the movement. His stylistic use of the jump cut, the ten-minute tracking shot, and fractured time sequences patented a look that has been imitated and honored up to the present day by everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Wong Kar-Wai.
The ultimate glory of Godard lies in his versatility. From "Contempt" (1963), his art-house elegy to the film industry (with Brigitte Bardot as the neglected wife of an embittered filmmaker and Jack Palance as a slick American producer) to "Alphaville" (1965), his science-fiction commentary on the coming computer age (with its barren, futuristic society at the mercy of supercomputer Alpha 60), Godard forces viewers to stop, look, and listen as their own culture is critiqued. Godard earned his status as a fixture of the avant-garde, dictating his own style and exalting the film medium above all others by declaring that "cinema is neither an art nor a technique, but a mystery."
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