JEAN-LUC GODARD

Has any other director ever owned a decade like Godard did the 1960s?

The very definition of a Parisian intellectual, the 20-something Godard became a critic for film mag Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, alongside fellow future directors Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. Rubbishing the era’s French cinema, Godard’s prose revered Hollywood and popularised the idea of auteur directors. When Truffaut turned filmmaker with The 400 Blows (1959), it was only a matter of time before Godard followed.

Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless (À Bout De Souffle) , showed he could walk the walk. It was nothing less than his sharp criticism in film form, shot with insolent cool and intent on redefining cinema with its attention-grabbing use of the jump cut. Later films would be awash with captions, slogans, colour filters and sudden bursts of silence or music: anything that interrupted the usual way of doing things.

He released 19 features (and several shorts) during the 1960s, many of them classics. The varied run takes in movie-biz satire (Contempt ), lovers-on-the-run romance (Pierrot Le Fou) and even sci-fi (Alphaville), all subverted and augmented with Godard’s nonstop invention.

After 1967’s Week-end , Godard fled from mainstream cinema to make increasingly oblique essay films, full of Marxist rhetoric and formal experimentation. Since the 1980s he’s toned down the political extremes without compromising on making challenging material. This reputation for difficulty has made Godard a figure of worship in academic circles but has arguably made him less beloved to movie geeks than Bergman or Fellini.

Now 90, Godard is the last man standing of Europe’s post-war arthouse boom. He’s never stopped working; 2014’s Goodbye To Language  pushed the boundaries of 3D, while his most recent (2018’s The Image Book) earned Godard a Special Palme d’Or at Cannes. This year, during the Covid-enforced lockdown, Godard reaffirmed his mystique by holding court on his life and art during an extended Instagram Live lecture. Simon Kinnear Has any director ever owned a decade quite like Godard did the 1960s?

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