Jean-Luc Godard

Godard began as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, attacking the stodgy "Tradition of Quality" in French cinema and championing Hitchcock and Hawks instead. Then he and his fellow critics picked up cameras themselves. Breathless in 1960 brought him global attention, a milestone that experimented with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork in ways that redrew what film could be. Through the 1960s he made a string of works with actress and wife Anna Karina - Vivre sa vie, Bande à part, Pierrot le Fou - that Filmmaker magazine would call arguably the most influential body of work in cinema history. By 1969 his Marxist politics had hardened and he formed the Dziga Vertov Group to make radical political films, though his later work softened into a humanist lens on conflict and representation. He married three times, all to women who appeared in his films, and spent his final decades with Anne-Marie Miéville. He died in Switzerland in September 2022, leaving behind one of the largest bodies of critical analysis devoted to any filmmaker and a vocabulary that reshaped how we talk about movies.