Jean-Luc Godard

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 — eight parts, a video essay about the whole history of film and its relationship to the 20th century’s catastrophes — which may be his actual masterpiece and is certainly his most ambitious work.

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 Subject: More than almost any other filmmaker, Godard made the medium itself his primary subject. From Contempt‘s meditation on commercial filmmaking to Histoire(s) du cinéma‘s vast reckoning with what movies meant to the 20th century, the question of what images do and who controls them runs through everything.
Political Consciousness and Capitalism: Particularly from the mid-60s onward, Godard’s films engage directly with Marxist thought, consumer culture and the political implications of representation. La Chinoise, Weekend and the Dziga Vertov Group films treat cinema as a political act rather than entertainment.
The Male Gaze and Female Experience: Godard’s relationship with his female characters is complicated and central — Vivre sa Vie, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Every Man for Himself are all serious engagements with how women are looked at, commodified and constrained, even as his own films are not innocent of the same charges.
Language and Meaning: Text, quotation, intertitles, direct address — Godard consistently interrogates the relationship between words and images, often placing them in deliberate tension. His films quote Brecht, Borges, Marx and B-movies with equal seriousness.
History and Memory: Particularly in the later work, Godard is preoccupied with what cinema failed to record or failed to prevent — the Holocaust haunts Histoire(s) du cinéma and In Praise of Love in ways that are more felt than stated.

Jump Cutting and Discontinuous Editing: The jump cut in Breathless wasn’t accidental or purely aesthetic — it was a refusal of classical cinema’s invisible grammar, forcing the viewer to be aware they’re watching a constructed thing. Godard never stopped using editing as a form of argument.
Direct Address and Brechtian Distanciation: Characters speak to camera, actors acknowledge the crew, the fictional frame is punctured repeatedly. The aim is consistent with Brecht’s theatrical theory — prevent identification, provoke thought.
Collage and Juxtaposition: Images, sounds, text and music are layered and set against each other rather than harmonised. The friction between elements is the meaning rather than an obstacle to it.
Location as Idea: Godard shoots on location but rarely for realism — the Parisian streets of Breathless, the apartment of 2 or 3 Things, the island of Contempt are all places that mean something beyond their physical presence.
Video and Late Form: From the 1970s onward, Godard embraced video as a medium with its own possibilities rather than just a cheaper film substitute. The pixelation, the layering, the different quality of the image in Histoire(s) and Goodbye to Language are integral to the work not incidental to it.

The Essay Film: More than any other narrative filmmaker, Godard dissolved the boundary between fiction and essay. His films think out loud, contradict themselves, cite their sources and refuse to resolve into stable meaning.
Music as Counterpoint: Godard rarely uses music to underscore emotion in the conventional sense — more often it cuts against the image, arrives unexpectedly or stops abruptly, creating unease rather than reinforcement.
The Quotation: Godard’s films are built from other texts — literature, philosophy, previous films, advertising, news footage. The quotation isn’t decoration but method; meaning is produced by collision and context.
Collaborative Antagonism: His working relationships — with Karina, with Miéville, with his producers — were often defined by creative friction that became productive. The films bear the marks of struggle rather than smooth execution.
Refusal of Closure: Godard’s films rarely end in any conventional sense — they stop, or dissolve, or make a joke of their own ending. The refusal of resolution is itself a political and aesthetic position.