Jean-Luc Godard, a pioneer of the 1960sFrench New Wavefilm movement, has remained a working filmmaker for almost seven decades. He has directed, written, produced, and edited dozens of films and changed cinema forever. Every film Godard made between his beautifulfirst full-length feature,Breathless(1960), and his most recent work, the 2018 avant-garde essayThe Image Book, is worth seeing.
Godard entered the movie industry as a critic for the influential French film magazineCahiers du Cinémain the 1950s, like Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, who also have become members of the French New Wave movement. Godard and his colleagues have inspired many other filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Quentin Tarantino, to be playful with the form. Tarantino even named his film company, A Band Apart, based on the French title of Godard’s filmBand of Outsiders.
Godard’s early films,Breathless,A Woman Is a Woman,My Life to Live,Contempt,Band of Outsiders,Pierrot le Fou,Masculine Feminine, and others, are groundbreaking – but a radical period in Godard’s filmography with political films and the filmmaker’s steps away from conventional narrative cinema later are great too. Let’s look at the best movies from Godard, ranked.
8The Image Book
The great experimental filmThe Image Book(Le Livre d’image)is Godard’s latest work. At the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the jury awarded this avant-garde movie with the first-ever Special Palme d’Or.The Image Bookis a collage film essay that reflects on the cinema and its inability to recognize the violence of the 20th and 21st centuries, including its failure to account for the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. “It’s the work of a filmmaker who’s looking back at his films and the films of his times — and looking ahead to radical changes to come in the cinema and in the world at large,“The New Yorkerwrote.
Related:Here Are 10 Movies Every Wannabe Filmmaker Needs to Watch
In 2021,90-year-old Godard saidthat he is finishing his movie life by doing two last scripts. “Jean-Luc told me he wanted to come back to his origin”, frequent Godard collaborator Fabrice Aragno opened up toVarietyabout Godard’s “final gesture.” Hopefully, this means thatThe Image Bookis not the last word from this master.
7Every Man for Himself
Inspired by the May 68 protest movement in France, in the 1970s Godard made a series of films with strong political messages. After his experimental, quasi-Maoist political films, the filmmaker returned to the classic film circuit in the 1980s and presented what he called his “second first film”,Every Man for Himself. The movie focuses on the sexual and professional lives of three characters — a filmmaker named, pointedly, Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc), his ex-girlfriend Denise (Nathalie Baye), and the prostitute Isabelle (played by Isabelle Huppert).Every Man for Himselfproves that Godard’s magic of the 1960s didn’t die out. It is a stunning film.
6Alphaville
Uniting agreat neo-noirstyle within a sci-fi dystopia, the 1965Alphavilleis like no other Godard film. It is one of the most unusual science fiction movies, which draws the audience into a world located on a different planet and ruled by a tyrannical supercomputer, created by an evil scientist named Von Braun. Secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is sent to Alphaville to destroy the supercomputer; Caution is aided in his mission by Von Braun’s daughter (Anna Karina).Alphavilleis a strange but beautiful film about love, language, and genre, and won the Golden Bear award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.
Godard’s only big-budget picture that looks like a Hollywood movie, the 1963Contempt(Le Mépris)stars Brigitte Bardot as a dissatisfied wife of playwright Paul (Michel Piccoli), who is hired by a corrupt producer (Jack Palance) to rework the script ofThe Odysseyfor director Fritz Lang’s (playing himself) film. Godard examines the destruction of Paul and his wife’s marriage and shows the actual process of filmmaking.Contemptis simply one of the most brilliant reflections on the impossibility of love.
4Pierrot le Fou
The 1965 romantic crime comedyPierrot le Foufollows unhappily married man Ferdinand (played by Godard’sNew Wave star Jean-Paul Belmondo), who decides to run away with his ex-lover Marianne (Anna Karina), a girl chased by gangsters. Their crazy journey to nowhere is full of violence and loneliness. In a cameo, American film director Samuel Fuller tells Ferdinand, “Film is like a battleground. Love, hate, action, violence and death, in one word: emotions.” It is a perfect definition ofPierrot le Fou, a film with bold visual style and the usual Godard trademarks, such as working without a screenplay and featuring characters who break the fourth wall.
3Band of Outsiders
Godard’s fresh interpretation of the gangster genre, the 1965 filmBand of Outsiders(Bande à part)is a charming and jazzy story about three youngsters who commit a robbery. “It’s as if a French poet took an ordinary banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines,“The New Republicsaid of the film.Band of Outsidersbecame iconic not just in the French film canon, but in the American film canon too: the dance scene inBand of Outsidersinfluenced a similar scene in Tarantino’sPulp Fiction, and the film has inspired a whole wive of romanticized crime drama, fromNatural Born KillerstoTrue Romance.
2My Life to Live
From 1961 to 1965, Anna Karina was Godard’s wife, muse, and the leading actress in his most important works. The role in the 1962 dramaMy Life to Live(Vivre sa vie)is arguably the apotheosis of her career. In this film, Karina is outstanding as Parisian girl Nana who dreams of becoming an actress but fails and ends up as a prostitute. It is a melancholic, honest, and moving movie with the iconic scene, where Nana cries as the real actress cries while watchingThe Passion of Joan of Arcin the cinema.
Related:These Are Some of the Best French Movies on Netflix
1Breathless
Godard’sBreathless(À bout de soufflé)is often cited as one of the best and most important films ever made. In his first full-length feature, the filmmaker mashed up the American crime films and burgeoning French New Wave aesthetic. Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, the 1960 crime drama starts as a gangster film and becomes a romance before ultimately commenting on cinema itself. Godard’s beautiful masterpiece rewrote the rules of filmmaking and announced the arrival of a new cinematic language.
