This week, the world lost one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, Jean-Luc Godard. A filmmaker who could easily rank amongst the Mount Rushmore of cinematic auteurs, Godard was a seminal figure of the revolutionary Nouvelle Vague film movement.
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Like most directors of the Nouvelle Vague movement, Godard began his career as a highly influential film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma before transitioning to directing his own films. Godard combined existential philosophy and Marxist politics with unorthodox editing, camerawork, sound design, and narrative structure to create a wholly unique cinematic language. His invaluable influence on film has inspired a multitude of directors, including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Jim Jarmusch, to name a few.
10 Godard Gets Banned In France With His Second Film Le Petit Soldat
Le petit soldat was the second feature film Godard directed, yet it was the fourth film of his to be released. Despite being filmed in 1960, Le petit soldat was banned in France until 1963. The film was controversial due to its depiction of the Algerian War and the graphic nature of its torture scenes.
Le petit soldat is also notable for addressing the ever-present Godard theme of the nature of cinema. As articulated by the film's protagonist Bruno, "Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second." The film marked the first collaboration between Godard and his future wife Anna Karina, who would go on to star in multiple of his classic films.
9 Masculin Féminin Depicts The Children Of Marx And Coca-Cola
Masculin Féminin features Godard examining the complexities of 1960s French culture through the lens of French youth. The film is famous for labeling the French youth "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola" due to the dichotomous influences of communist politics and American capitalism that was invading France.
RELATED: 10 Times Steven Spielberg Was The Best Director AliveThe primary plot follows a young man who falls in love with a pop singer, although Masculin Féminin is perhaps best remembered for the cinéma vérité style interviews spread throughout the film. These interviews cover a variety of topics, including politics, sex, and music.
8 A Woman Is a Woman Represents Godard At His Most Playful
A Woman Is a Woman is a homage to American musicals and represents Godard at his most playful. Instead of the heavy-handed philosophical and political themes usually present in Godard films, the movie contains experimentation with editing, color, and the Cinemascope format.
A Woman Is a Woman is full of self-referential cinematic techniques such as discontinuous editing, fourth wall breaking, and abrupt sound cuts that make the audience well aware they are watching an artificially created production. Anna Karina earned the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin International Film Festival for her starring performance.
7 Godard Combines Science Fiction And Film Noir In Alphaville
As the 1960s progressed, Godard's films became increasingly experimental. As a result, Alphaville is anything but a conventional science fiction film. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, Alphaville stars Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, a Sam Spade-esque secret agent tasked with freeing a city from tyrannical rule.
Alphaville is unique among science fiction films because it does not contain any special effects or futuristic sets. Instead, Godard opted to film the movie on the streets of Paris. Even though the film takes place in the future, using real locations enhances the film's themes of political oppression, totalitarianism, and the meaning of existence in the modern world.
6 Band Of Outsiders Inspires One Of Pulp Fiction's Most Enduring Scenes
Band of Outsiders is one of Godard's most accessible films and features several iconic scenes that have been repeatedly referenced in pop culture. Most notably, Band of Outsiderscontains a café dance sequence that served as the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's dance sequence between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.
RELATED: 10 Movies Almost Directed By Someone ElseSome of Band of Outsiders' other famous scenes include the minute's silence sequence where Godard cuts all sound in the film and the running through the Lourve Museum, where the characters attempt to break the world record of nine minutes and forty-five seconds.
5 Godard Examines The Film Industry With Contempt
Consistently included on lists of the greatest films of all time, Contempt was named the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe by scholar Colin MacCabe. Contempt was Godard's first attempt at making a film with a substantial budget. The film had a tumultuous production filled with constant conflicts between Godard and famed producer Carlo Ponti.
Contempt juxtaposes the collapse of a romantic relationship with meditations on the relationship between art and commerce. The film's most praised sequence is a thirty-four-minute-long argument between the two protagonists in which Godard uses the claustrophobic space of an apartment to highlight the decline of the relationship.
4 Pierrot Le Fou Is The Ultimate Postmodern Cinematic Experience
Pierrot le Fou is the ultimate postmodern cinematic experience, a movie full of fourth wall breaking, pop culture references, and abstract editing. The film also represents the pinnacle of Godard's pop art aesthetic. Every single frame of this film is immaculate to look at.
Always a critic of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, Godard's Pierrot le Fou includes a brilliantly executed sequence where the film's protagonist attends a dinner party in which all the guests speak as if they are in a television commercial advertising a product, displaying society's obsession with consumerism.
3 Vivre Sa Vie Is An Episodic Tale Of A Woman's Descent Into Prostitution
Influential film critic Susan Sontag once called Vivre sa vie "one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of." Vivre sa vie is told in twelve segments that depict the life of a woman who eventually turns to a life of prostitution.
Again starring Anna Karina, Vivre sa vie is another great example of Godard's experimentation with cinematic form. The film is shot in a documentary style with a unique narrative structure, unconventional lighting techniques, and disjointed editing such as jump cuts.
2 Weekend Is One Of The Angriest Films Ever Made
Weekend is an apocalyptic film that explores how the violence and hatred that capitalism breeds will lead to the end of humanity. The late 1960s marked the end of Godard's playful films and the beginning of his radical period of filmmaking. Godard was a radical filmmaker starting with his debut film, but his late 1960s films and 1970s films took the blending of politics and art to unprecedented heights.
RELATED: 10 Directors Fans Want To See Take On Superhero MoviesNamed on Premiere Magazine's list of the 25 Most Dangerous Movies Ever Made, Weekend's most famous scene is a continuous tracking shot of a traffic jam that climaxes with one of the most profound images in film history.
1 Breathless Changed Filmmaking Forever
Breathless is every bit as important to the history of cinema as The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. Although not the first film of the Nouvelle Vague, history has proven Breathless to be the most influential film of the entire movement.
Breathless made Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays a Humphrey Bogart wannabe, an international superstar. The film's jarring use of jump cuts, on-location shooting, use of natural lighting, and handheld camera usage revolutionized how films would be made going forward. In the 2012 Sight and Sound film poll, Breathless was ranked the 13th greatest film ever made.
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