At the vanguard of international filmmaking for six decades and counting, French New Wave titan Jean-Luc Godard has exerted an incalculable influence on modern cinema that refuses to wane. With his groundbreaking 1960 debut feature, BREATHLESS, Godard merged elements of high and low culture with an anything-goes abandon that set the template for generations of filmmakers. It marked the beginning of an explosively innovative decade that witnessed his output grow increasingly radical, both aesthetically (VIVRE SA VIE, CONTEMPT, ALPHAVILLE) and politically (PIERROT LE FOU, LA CHINOISE, WEEKEND), until by 1968 he had forsworn commercial cinema altogether, forming a leftist filmmaking collective (the Dziga Vertov Group) and producing films like the scathing anticapitalist screed TOUT VA BIEN. Eternally on the cutting edge, Godard has recently explored the outermost possibilities of digital filmmaking in visually and philosophically adventurous works like GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE and THE IMAGE BOOK, confirming his status as our greatest lyricist on historical trauma, religion, and the legacy of cinema.
The defining voice of the French New Wave discusses his iconoclastic, ever-evolving approach to filmmaking in this selection of archival interviews.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • France • 1960
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger
There was before BREATHLESS, and there was after BREATHLESS. Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspi...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1961 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy
With A WOMAN IS A WOMAN, compulsively innovative director Jean-Luc Godard presents “a neorealist musical—that is, a contradiction in terms.” Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean-Paul...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1962 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, André Labarthe
VIVRE SA VIE (a.k.a. MY LIFE TO LIVE) was a turning point for Jean-Luc Godard and remains one of his most dynamic films, combining brilliant visual design with a tragic character study. The lovely Anna ...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1963 • France
Starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance
Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. CONTEMPT stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European direct...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1963 • France
Starring Michel Subor, Anna Karina, Henri-Jacques Huet
Before his convention-shattering debut, BREATHLESS, had even premiered, Jean-Luc Godard leapt into the making of his second feature, a thriller that would tackle the most controversial subject in F...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1964 • France
Starring Anna Karina, Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur
Four years after BREATHLESS, Jean-Luc Godard reimagined the gangster film even more radically with BAND OF OUTSIDERS. In it, two restless young men (Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) enlist the object of bo...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Graziella Galvani
Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeois world behind. Yet ...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1965 • France
Starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff
A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert
With MASCULIN FÉMININ (“Masculine Feminine”), ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engag...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Joseph Gerhard
In 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (2 OU 3 CHOSES QUE JE SAIS D’ELLE), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, langu...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967 • France
Starring Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne
This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin • 1972 • France, Italy
Starring Jane Fonda, Yves Montand
In 1972, newly radicalized Hollywood star Jane Fonda joined forces with cinematic innovator Jean-Luc Godard and collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin in an unholy artistic alliance that resulted i...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1980 • France
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye
After a decade in the wilds of avant-garde and early video experimentation, Jean-Luc Godard returned to commercial cinema with this star-driven work of social commentary, while remaining defiant...
