Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard
Godard in 1968
Born	(1930-12-03)3 December 1930 Paris, France
Died	13 September 2022(2022-09-13) (aged 91) Rolle, Vaud, Switzerland
Citizenship	France Switzerland
Occupations	Film director screenwriter film critic
Years active	1950–2022
Movement	French New Wave
Spouses	Anna Karina ​ ​ (m. 1961; div. 1965)​ Anne Wiazemsky ​ ​ (m. 1967; div. 1979)​
Partner	Anne-Marie Miéville (1978–2022; his death)
Relatives	Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (cousin) Alex Kuczynski (cousin once removed)
Signature

Jean-Luc Godard (UK: /ˈɡɒdɑː/ GOD-ar, US: /ɡoʊˈdɑːr/ goh-DAR; French: [ʒɑ̃ lyk ɡɔdaʁ]; 3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s,^[1] alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.^[2] According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork.^[2][3]

During his early career as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality" and championed Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.^[1][4] In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films,^[1] challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema.^[5] Godard first received global acclaim for Breathless (1960), a milestone in the New Wave movement.^[2] His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism^[6] and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works.^[7] After the New Wave, his politics were less radical, and his later films came to be about human conflict and artistic representation "from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective."^[7] He explained that "As a critic, I thought of myself as a film-maker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed."^[8]

Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina who claimed that he was abusive towards her^[9][10][11] and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville.^[12] His collaborations with Karina in Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.^[13] In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time.^[14]

He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century."^[15] His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary."^[16] In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award.^[17] He was known for his aphorisms, such as "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun" and "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order."^[18] However, critics have also claimed that Godard's films contain prevailing themes of misogyny and sexism towards women. ^[19][20]