Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard is a Swiss filmmaker born in 1930 in Paris and considered one of the greatest essayists of cinema. He began his career in the 1950s as a film critic, notably at the Cahiers du cinéma alongside François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette. His first feature film, Breathless, made in 1959, was a great success and became one of the founding films of the French New Wave. This was the beginning of a series of films in which Godard rethought cinema by reinventing the narrative form, notably The Little Soldier (1960), A Woman Is a Woman (1961), The Carabineers (1963), Contempt (1963) and Pierrot le Fou (1965). In May 1968, Godard was an active activist and took part in the protest at the Cannes Film Festival with François Truffaut. In 1973, he began working with the scriptwriter Anne-Marie Miéville, who became his partner. Together they made several docu-dramas, between video and television. Video allowed him to work alone on the entire production chain of his films. Between 1988 and 1998, he made Histoire(s) du cinéma, a series of films devoted to the cinema. In 2001, he presented In Praise of Love at Cannes, in 2010 Film socialisme, and in 2014, Goodbye to Language, for which he won the Jury Prize. He returned to Cannes in 2018 with The Image Book, which won a special Palme d'Or. Jean-Luc Godard died on 13 September 2022.