Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) was a French-Swiss filmmaker whose work reshaped the language of cinema more thoroughly than that of almost any director of the twentieth century. A leading figure of the Nouvelle Vague — the French New Wave that emerged at the end of the 1950s — he spent his career treating film not as a vehicle for storytelling alone but as a medium for thought: a place to argue, quote, contradict, and reflect on its own making. Few filmmakers have been more closely identified with the idea that cinema is also a form of criticism and of philosophy.

Godard came to film through writing, as a critic for the journal Cahiers du cinéma, before directing his first short, the documentary Opération Béton (1954), shot while he worked as a laborer on the Grande Dixence dam in Switzerland. His debut feature, À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), broke open the conventions of narrative cinema with its jump cuts, handheld camera, and casual address to the viewer, and announced a decade of restless invention that included Le Mépris(1963), Pierrot le fou (1965), and Week-end (1967). After the upheavals of May 1968 he turned to militant, collective filmmaking with the Dziga Vertov Group, and from the 1970s, working with Anne-Marie Miéville, increasingly toward video and the essay form — culminating in the monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), a meditation on the medium's whole century.

Godard's films were shown and debated at the major festivals throughout his life; he received an honorary Academy Award in 2010, and his late works Adieu au langage (2014) and Le Livre d'image (2018) were honored at Cannes. He died in 2022 in Rolle, Switzerland.