Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic who was one of the leading figures of the French New Wave movement in France during the late 1950s and the ’60s. He was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, to a wealthy family of Swiss bankers and doctors. He developed an interest in cinema at an early age and started writing film reviews for various magazines. He also made some short films with his friends, including François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. In 1959, he made his first feature film, Breathless, which became a sensation and a landmark of modern cinema. He followed it with other innovative and influential films such as Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967), and many more. His films often challenged the conventions of traditional Hollywood and French cinema, and explored themes such as politics, philosophy, art, love, violence, and history. He also experimented with narrative, editing, sound, and camera work, creating a distinctive style that influenced generations of filmmakers. He was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville. He collaborated with Miéville on many projects, including the monumental video series Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), which was a personal and critical history of cinema. He also formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers in 1969 to promote political cinema. He continued to make films until his death in 2022 at the age of 91. He received many awards and honors for his work, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1983, the Honorary Academy Award in 2010, and the Honorary César in 1987 and 1998. He was widely regarded as one of the most influential and important filmmakers of all time.