Jean-Luc Godard didn’t just make films differently — he made films about the act of making films, about what images mean and who gets to construct them and what cinema owes its audience and what it owes history. For sixty years he pulled at that thread, and by the end, with The Image Book, he’d arrived somewhere so far from Breathless that only the restlessness connects them. That restlessness is the whole career.
Breathless, in 1960, was the provocation that announced him — jump cuts that violated every editing convention, a plot that kept stopping to think about itself, a romance that refused to behave like one. It felt improvised and was meticulously constructed, which is exactly the trick. The films that followed in the early 60s — Vivre sa Vie, Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Pierrot le Fou — came at a rate that seems impossible in retrospect, each one doing something different with the same set of obsessions: cinema, politics, women, America, language, the gap between images and what they claim to show.
After 1968, he more or less abandoned commercial filmmaking entirely, working in collectives, on video, in essay form. This is where casual Godard audiences tend to stop, and serious ones begin. The Dziga Vertov Group films are genuinely difficult. But Every Man for Himself in 1980 was a partial return, and Passion, First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary confirmed he hadn’t finished. Then Histoire(s) du cinéma across the 1990s may be his actual masterpiece, and if it’s not that, it’s his most ambitious work; eight parts, a video essay about the whole history of film and its relationship to the 20th century’s catastrophes.
He died in 2022 by assisted suicide in Switzerland, having chosen the terms of his exit as deliberately as he’d chosen everything else. It felt entirely consistent.
Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022)
- 1957 – All the Boys Are Called Patrick
- 1958 – Charlotte et Son Jules
- 1960 – Breathless
- 1961 – Une Femme est une femme
- 1962 – Vivre sa vie
- 1963 – Les Carabiniers
- 1963 – Contempt
- 1963 – Le Petit Soldat
- 1963 – Ro.Go.Pa.G.
- 1964 – Bande à part
- 1964 – A Married Woman
- 1965 – Alphaville
- 1965 – Paris vu par…
- 1965 – Pierrot le fou
- 1966 – Made in U.S.A.
- 1966 – Masculin féminin
- 1967 – 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
- 1967 – La Chinoise
- 1967 – Loin du Vietnam
- 1967 – The Oldest Profession
- 1967 – Weekend
- 1968 – Un Film comme les autres
- 1968 – Sympathy for the Devil
- 1969 – Le Gai Savoir
- 1969 – Love and Anger
- 1970 – British Sounds
- 1970 – Pravda
- 1970 – Wind from the East
- 1971 – 1 P.M.
- 1971 – Lotte in Italia
- 1972 – Letter to Jane
- 1972 – Tout va bien
- 1975 – Numéro deux
- 1976 – Ici et ailleurs
- 1976 – Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication [TV]
- 1977-78 – France/tour/detour/deux/enfants [TV]
- 1980 – Sauve qui peut (la vie)
- 1982 – Passion
- 1982 – Passion Amour/Travail
- 1982 – Scénario du film ‘Passion’
- 1983 – Prénom Carmen
- 1985 – Détective
- 1985 – Hail Mary
- 1985 – Soft and Hard
- 1986 – Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma [TV]
- 1987 – Keep Your Right Up
- 1987 – King Lear
- 1988 – Puissance de la parole
- 1988-98 – Histoire(s) du cinéma
- 1990 – Nouvelle vague
- 1991 – Germany Year 90 Nine Zero
- 1993 – Je vous salue, Sarajevo [VIDEO]
- 1993 – Oh, Woe is Me
- 1994 – JLG/JLG
- 2000 – The Old Place
- 2000 – Origins of the 21st Century
- 2001 – In Praise of Love
- 2001 – Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma
- 2002 – Dans le noir du temps
- 2002 – Liberty and Homeland
- 2002 – Ten Minutes Older: The Cello
- 2004 – Notre musique
- 2006 – Reportage amateur (Maquette expo)
- 2010 – Film socialisme
- 2013 – 3x3D
- 2014 – Goodbye to Language
- 2015 – Remerciements de Jean-Luc Godard à son Prix d’honneur du cinéma suisse
- 2018 – The Image Book
- 2022 – Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’
- 2024 – Exposé du film annonce du film Scénario
- 2024 – Scénarios
- Cinema as Political and Philosophical Argument: Godard never treated film as entertainment. Every formal choice he made (From jump cuts to intertitles) is an argument about what images mean, who constructs them and what cinema owes (And doesn’t owe) its audience and history. The medium itself is always the subject underneath whatever nominal subject is onscreen.
- Collage and Quotation: The stereotypical Godard film is littered with quotes from other texts: Literature, advertising, philosophy, news footage and even his own films. This is the sort of thing that was groundbreaking when he did it, but is now very common in cinema thanks to him. But unlike many of his imitators, his use of quotation isn’t decoration; it’s a method.
- Political Consciousness: Though Godard began his filmmaking career flirting with the right wing, Marxism dominated his filmmaking, especially from 1966 to 1976. His films engage with representation, theory and consumer culture constantly.
- The Essay Film: Godard’s work, especially post-May 68, dissolves the boundary between fiction and essay. His films think out loud, contradict themselves, cite their sources and refuse stable meaning. Histoire(s) du cinéma is the fullest realisation, but the instinct is there from the beginning.
- Refusal of Resolution: Godard’s films rarely end. They stop, dissolve, or make a joke of closure. The late video work with its layered pixelation and disjunctive sound takes this furthest, but the refusal to harmonise image, sound and meaning is constant across six decades.
Biography
Coming soon
Bronze Screen Dream 