Film · European
1930–2022 · French-Swiss
French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague); later political and essay cinema
Jean-Luc Godard began as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma and became the most restlessly experimental director of the French New Wave. His 1960 debut made the jump cut a signature and broke the rules of continuity editing wholesale; over the next sixty years he moved from playful genre pastiche through Maoist agitprop to dense video essays, remaining the figure quizzes reach for when they want "the most radical of the Nouvelle Vague".
A car thief who rubs his thumb across his lip in imitation of Bogart, and an American girl selling the Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées (1960)
Breathless (À bout de souffle) — from a treatment by Truffaut, shot in a wheelchair on borrowed film stock, and famously cut down with jump cuts
Brigitte Bardot, a screenwriter's collapsing marriage, and a red car outside a modernist villa on Capri (1963)
Contempt (Le Mépris) — his most expensive film, with Fritz Lang appearing as himself and Georges Delerue's theme
Three friends run through the Louvre in nine minutes forty-three seconds and dance the Madison in a café (1964)
Band of Outsiders (Bande à part) — the Louvre dash and the minute of silence
A trench-coated secret agent drives an American car into a future city governed by a computer called Alpha 60 (1965)
Alphaville — science fiction shot in present-day Paris with no sets
A man leaves a party, drives south with a babysitter, and ends by painting his face blue and wrapping dynamite round his head (1965)
Pierrot le Fou — Belmondo and Karina, in Techniscope and saturated colour
A weekend drive becomes a vast lateral tracking shot along a traffic jam, and ends with cannibal guerrillas and the title card 'End of Cinema' (1967)
Week-end — the last film of his commercial period before the Dziga Vertov Group
A 3D film in which a dog wanders between two couples and the stereoscopic image splits into two pictures at once (2014)
Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage) — shared the Jury Prize at Cannes