Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard (, ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic.

Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile (née Monod) and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician.

His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, and his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas.

She was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod.

Other relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod, and pastor Frédéric Monod.

On his father's side, he is a first cousin of former Prime Minister and later President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard was in France, and returned to Switzerland with difficulty.

He spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva.

Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland.

The Cinémathèque was founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936; Work and Culture was a workers' education group for which André Bazin had organised wartime film screenings and discussions and which had become a model for the film clubs that had risen throughout France after the Liberation; CCQL, founded in about 1947 or 1948, was animated and intellectually led by Maurice Schérer.

At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut.

Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance.

Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of André Malraux's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema, and his reading of La Revue du cinéma, which was relaunched in 1946.

In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite.

He lodged with the writer Jean Schlumberger.

Having failed his baccalauréat exam in 1948 he returned to Switzerland.

He studied in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up.

He spent time in Geneva also with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco.

His elder sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, which he did, in an abstract style.

After time spent at a boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949.

He registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), but did not attend class.

In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs (film societies) were gaining prominence.

Godard began attending these clubs—the Cinémathèque Française, Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), Work and Culture ciné club, and others—which became his regular haunts.

He said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case anymore. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."

He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy.

He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.

According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork.

His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014).

During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Godard criticised mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which de-emphasised innovation and experimentation.

In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema.

Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless, helping to establish the New Wave movement.

His collaborations with Karina — which included such critically acclaimed films as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) — were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine.

His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works.

After the New Wave, his politics were less radical, and his later films came to be about human conflict and artistic representation "from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective."

Godard 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.

In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time.

He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century."

His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary."

In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award.