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Jean-Luc Godard

 

TSPDT Rating
Director / Screenwriter / Actor / Editor / Producer / Cinematographer
1930 -
Born December 3, Paris, France
Key Production Countries: France, Switzerland, Italy 
Key Genres: Drama, Avant-garde/Experimental, Psychological Drama, Essay Film, Urban Drama, Satire, Documentary, Romantic Drama, Showbiz Drama, Short Film
Key Collaborators: Raoul Coutard (Cinematographer), Agnes Guillemot (Editor), Georges de Beauregard (Producer), Anna Karina (Leading Player), Jean-Pierre Leaud (Leading Character Player), Laszlo Szabo (Leading Character Player), Alain Sarde (Producer), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Leading Player), Juliet Berto (Leading Character Player), Francoise Collin (Editor)
Highly Recommended: Breathless (1959), Une Femme est une femme (1961), Contempt (1963), Bande à part (1964), Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin Feminin (1966)
Recommended: Made in U.S.A. (1966), La Chinoise (1967), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)
Worth a Look: Charlotte and Veronique, or All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1957), Charlotte et Son Jules (1960), Le Petit Soldat (1960), Les Carabiniers (1963), A Married Woman (1964), Alphaville (1965), Week-End (1967), Le Gai Savoir (1968), British Sounds (1970), Tout va bien (1972) [co-directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin], Numero Deux (1975), Passion (1982), Scenario du Film Passion (1982), Prenom Carmen (1983), Hail Mary (1985), Nouvelle Vague (1990), JLG/JLG (1995), In Praise of Love (2001), Notre Musique (2004)
Links: [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Cinema = Jean-Luc Godard = Cinema ] [ BFI's Godard Page ] [ The Godard Experience ] [ Guardian Article (2003) ] [ 1997 Interview - Cigar Aficionado Magazine ] [ Gerald Peary Essay ] [ Wikipedia ] [ Times Online Article (2006) ] [ New York Times Article (2008) ]
Books: [ Godard on Godard ] [ The Film of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible ] [ The Films of Jean-Luc Godard ] [ Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy ] [ For Ever Godard ] [ Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard ] [ Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century ] [ Jean-Luc Godard: The Future(s) of Film, Three Interviews, 2000-01 ] [ Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Interviews With Filmmakers Series) ]
DVD's: [ Amazon ]
1,000 Greatest Films: Breathless (1959), Une Femme est une femme (1961), Contempt (1963), Vivre sa vie (1963), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le fou (1965), Masculin Feminin (1966), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), Week-End (1967), Le Vent d'est (1969), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), Passion (1982), Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)
21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films: In Praise of Love (2001), Notre Musique (2004)
  
Breathless (1959)Une Femme est une Femme (1960)Pierrot le fou (1965)Contempt (1963)
 
     
  "Godard is the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject. He emerged from the darkness of the Cinémathèque rather than from any plausible biographical background...Filmmaking for Godard is neither occupation nor vocation, it is existence itself. His inescapable dialectic is in terms of cinema and his politics have arisen - disastrously, I think - from cinema theory." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)  
     
  "Whether he delights or irritates you, Godard sits securely in the front rank of screen originals, and it is good that he succeeded in rejoining the mainstream of French cinema in 1980 after more than ten years' self-exile to its fringes...Nonetheless the quality of his films has been much more variable in recent times compared to his heyday of the 1960s, including a disastrous modernised sideshoot of King Lear." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "If influence on the development of world cinema is the criterion, then Jean-Luc Godard is certainly the most important filmmaker of the past thirty years; he is also one of the most problematic...As ex-Cahiers du Cinema critic and New Wave filmmaker, Godard was initially linked with Truffaut and Chabrol in a kind of revolutionary triumvirate; it is easy, in retrospect, to see that Godard was from the start the truly radical figure, the "revolution" of his colleagues operating purely on the aesthetic level and easily assimilable to the mainstream." -  Robin Wood and Rob Edelman (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "Godard is one of the most important filmmakers in cinema history. He has made audiences think about how films are made in a series of dramatic essays on subjects ranging from the Hollywood gangster film to the musical, the Marxist struggle, and films, filming, and filmmakers themselves." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "For me, discovering cinema was directly connected to his films. I was living in Paris at the time. When Made in USA opened, I went to the first show - it was around noon - and I sat there until midnight. I saw it six times in a row." - Wim Wenders  
     
  "The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't." - Jean-Luc Godard  
     
  "To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated." - Jean-Luc Godard  
     
 
 
 
 
 

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"A film is a petrified fountain of thought." - Jean Cocteau   "If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed." - Stanley Kubrick