Film auteur Jean Luc-Godard, perhaps the biggest name of the French New Wave, has sadly passed away at the age of 91. He was the last living director of the French New Wave, which also included directors such as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, and Éric Rohmer. Godard is survived by his long-time partner, the Swiss filmmaker, Anne-Marie Miéville. Godard was formerly married to his frequent collaborator, actress Anna Karina. She starred in several of his movies including, Pierrot le Fou, The Little Solider, and A Woman Is a Woman. Karina died aged 79 in December 2019.
Godard spent his career steadily making genre-defying, thought-provoking works of cinema since the 1960s. Few filmmakers can claim as adventurous a career as he can, with the stylistic and thematic range of his work being as diverse as it comes. From the pop-art sensibilities of his mid-60s work like Pierrot Le Fou to his volatile political films of the early 70s and the increasingly abstract projects that followed, Godard’s movies are simultaneously recognizable and impossible to pin down. Even if each release is unpredictable, he still retains a trademark style that has gone on to influence multiple generations of filmmakers. One can easily see Godard in the film-obsessed genre-blending of Quentin Tarantino, the subversive, the rebellious rule-breaking of Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch’s unapologetic hipness, or Wong Kar-Wai's hyper-stylized aesthetic. Really, it would be hard for any contemporary filmmaker to not be influenced by Godard, even if indirectly.
But the work of Godard himself is entirely inimitable. Especially during his first decade as a filmmaker in which he made an impressive 15 features in seven short years, the enfant terrible of French cinema worked with a consistency that didn’t sacrifice quality in favor of quantity. Instead of one or the other, Godard chose both and made during this time some of the most influential works in all cinema. Not having stopped to breathe for longer than a few years, Godard’s complete body of work is undeniably intimidating. Fortunately, we’ve assembled eleven of the essential Godard pictures to be enjoyed.
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Breathless (1960)
Breathless is one of those movies that, to some degree, it’s hard not to take for granted—or at least underappreciate for its sheer invention alone. If you watch movies, you’ve seen some effects of its influence. To say that Godard rewrote the rules of cinema with his debut feature might sound hyperbolic, but it surely isn’t. There’s the style, with all the jarring jump-cuts, upbeat jazziness, and freestyle handheld camerawork. And there are the stars, Jean-Paul Belmondo (who would soon explode into international stardom) and Jean Seberg. There then is its attitude, too cool to care, aloof, nihilistic. It’s spontaneous, improvisational, and its characters—neither heroes nor anti-heroes, just people—possess an infectious charisma. Breathless is a comedic, richly layered rallying cry for the birth of a new type of cinema.
Band of Outsiders (1964)
Christening himself “Jean-Luc ‘Cinema’ Godard” in the opening credits, the French filmmaker showcases a bag of stylistic tricks in Band of Outsiders. In what is one of his most iconic and influential pictures, Godard follows a couple of film-obsessed slackers (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) as they include a young woman (Anna Karina) in their plans to commit a robbery. What could have otherwise been a straight-laced caper became a cool-as-hell romp through Parisian streets with three hip youngsters. There’s so much to love here, with the trademark “minute of silence”, the sprint through the Louvre, or the iconic Madison dance. It’s one of Godard’s most accessible works, and certainly his most charming.
Contempt (1963)
Adapted from an Italian novel by Alberto Moravia, Contempt places a troubled film production (an adaptation of the Odyssey) alongside a dwindling marriage with magnificent results. A playwright (Michel Piccoli) tasked with adapting the epic play to the screen finds himself plagued with seemingly endless issues with the production, including a loud-mouthed American producer (Jack Palance) a stubborn director (Fritz Lang, gloriously playing himself), and a dissatisfied wife (Brigitte Bardo). What’s amazing is how many things Contempt is at once: it’s a romantic tragedy, a criticism of the film industry, a thesis on the concept of literary adaptation, and a love letter to film itself. It’s the only time that Godard ever flirted with making a big-budget picture. It’s a staggering accomplishment and one of the greatest films ever made.
Vivre Sa Vie (1962)
Vivre Sa Vie stars a never-better Anna Karina as Nana, a Parisian woman who turns to sex work when she falls in dire need of money. Through the course of 12 chapters, the film watches Nana with a documentarian approach, capturing her actions in crisp black-and-white cinematography. Godard plays with form and structure by utilizing his now-famous jump edits, camera movements, and many other stylistic devices to reinforce the fictional nature of the work. At the center of the film, though, is Karina, whose performance creates a charming, sympathetic character worth studying. She laughs and cries, dances and philosophizes, smokes, drinks, and lives. And for a little over 80 minutes, soundtracked by an orchestral score from the fabulous Michel Legrand, we get to live with her.
Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
In the spirit of his previous multi-genre pictures, Godard creates an infectiously charming film with Pierrot Le Fou. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina star as a pair of star-crossed lovers who lam it after a series of unfavorable encounters with arms dealers. High-brow culture is mashed against the low-brow, and cartoons and Laurel and Hardy routines find a spot next to the fine art of Diego Vel ázquez. With enough spontaneous musical numbers, dramatic action sequences, and fourth-wall breaks to satisfy any film lover, Pierrot Le Fou is Godard at his pop-art and post-modernist peak. It’s cinema for cinema’s sake, and, to quote American director Samuel Fuller (who makes a cameo appearance as himself), “one word: emotion.”
Alphaville (1965)
Of course, Godard has never been one for sticking to traditional genre guidelines, so it’s no surprise that his foray into science-fiction is unpredictable. Fusing noirish elements into its dystopian view of the future, Alphaville plucks the fictional character Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) from his hard-boiled detective books (written by British crime writer Peter Cheyney) and places him in the titular Alphaville as he searches for the creator of the dictatorial computer program Alpha 60. The result is a bold juxtaposition of past and future, with Caution’s old-school tough-guy-isms being pitted against Alpha 60’s cold, inhuman intellectualism. With its boxy, expressionist black-and-white cinematography and its futuristic aesthetic, Alphaville is a treat sure to delight Godard fans and sci-fi junkies alike.
Masculin Féminin (1966)
1960’s French youth culture is captured with much versimilitude in Masculin Féminin. When a young political idealist (Jean-Pierre Léaud) becomes infatuated with an upcoming pop singer (Chantal Goya), the two quickly discover how different their unwavering beliefs are. Godard captures the angst (and joie de vivre) of the youngsters while examining the political and cultural movements of the era. The characters are interviewed directly in a faux-documentarian manner, letting them voice their opinions on a wide variety of topics. It’s a breezy, lightweight film that also offers its fair share of weighty themes buried within.
Weekend (1967)
Weekend is a chaotic drive through an anarchic vision of 1967 France, in which a bourgeoise couple (Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne) hoping to secure an inheritance from a dying patriarch. In what is one of Godard’s most unapologetically fierce films, the narrative descends into utter insanity. Real mixes with the surreal as the journey becomes increasingly fantastical. Characters from other works of literature appear and disappear seemingly at random. A series of violent car accidents punctuate the narrative segments which themselves are threaded only loosely together. In what begins with a slow-moving long take through a prolonged traffic jam and ends with a title card declaring the end of cinema, Weekend is an angry, apocalyptic vision of French society and a searing indictment of classism.
La Chinoise (1967)
One of Godard’s last steps before embracing his intellectual and political period that would last over a decade, La Chinoise further strips the veneer of traditional narrative from Godard’s work. The film is centered around a group of Mao-reading French university students as they have political and philosophical dialogues with one another. With Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud starring as two of the disgruntled students, this fierce work toes the line between serious politicism and popish hipness. Godard mixes his complicated political theories with sight gags and cinematic allusions. It’s a fresh and youthful film that assembles most of what Godard had been doing in the past decade into a single work.
King Lear (1987)
Godard’s production of King Lear is far less an adaptation of the play than it is a complete abandonment of the adaptation process itself. Really, there’s practically nothing even remotely resembling Shakespeare’s play left. Instead, the film is a relentless barrage of strange imagery, quotes, and extratextual references. Though a true synopsis is essentially impossible here, it can most simply be said that the film follows William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth (Peter Sellars) as he attempts to reassemble his playwright ancestor’s works following an apocalyptic event. What follows is a borderline incomprehensible vision from one of cinema’s most daring artists. With appearances from Norman Mailer, Molly Ringwald, and Godard himself, King Lear is a multigenerational canon of culture that is quite truly unlike anything else that’s ever been put to film.
Goodbye to Language (2014)
This deep into his career as a filmmaker, Godard has long since abandoned traditional narrative movies in favor of visual essays and minimally-plotted pieces of moving philosophy. In Goodbye to Language, he once again pushes his technical experimentation even further by utilizing 3D cinematography in intentionally disjointed images. With a laundry list of literary, cultural, and philosophical references that serve as an encyclopedic insight into Godard’s seemingly limitless brilliance—as well as a truly revolutionary method of layering 3D shots in order to convey an idea—Goodbye to Language captures the inherent poetry of a moving image and studies (once again) the fallibility of words.
An icon of cinema, and a true master of his art, Jean-Luc Godard was a director like no other. Needless to say, Jean-Luc Godard has left us a varied, vibrant, and memorable body of work that will be celebrated long past his death.
