Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930. He grew up in a Franco-Swiss family and, after studying ethnology at the Sorbonne, became interested in cinema. Godard began his career by writing film criticism for the celebrated magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, a journal that played an important role in the development of auteur theory and a new way of seeing cinema.

Alongside filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer, Godard was one of the principal figures of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and the 1960s. His first major feature film, «Breathless» (1960), became a turning point in cinema history through its use of jump cuts, non-linear narrative, and its rejection of established filmmaking conventions.

In the following decades, Godard continued to experiment with both form and subject matter. Films such as «Contempt» (1963), «Pierrot le Fou» (1965), «Two or Three Things I Know About Her» (1967), «Weekend» (1967), and «Histoire(s) du cinéma» (1988–1998) demonstrate his interest in examining the relationship of cinema to politics, philosophy, language, media, and society.

Godard’s cinema often erases the boundaries between fiction and essay, image and thought, entertainment and social criticism. He used cinema not merely as a tool of storytelling, but as a way of thinking about the world, addressing themes such as capitalism, war, ideology, love, memory, and the role of images in human life.

In his final years, Godard increasingly made experimental and video works and continued to criticize prevailing forms of image production and consumption. He died in Rolle, Switzerland, in 2022 and is recognized as one of the most important and controversial filmmakers of the twentieth century.