Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard (1930), French film director, a leading figure in the New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. The son of a doctor, Godard began to write for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s. Here he met the future directors Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut, both of whom assisted him with his first feature A bout de souffle (Breathless; 1959). The new techniques of shooting and editing explored here were further developed in such films as Contempt (1963) and Alphaville (1965). Godard’s work of the late 1960s and 1970s became still more uncompromising, reflecting his conversion to Maoist politics. After some years of willing obscurity, he returned to more mainstream film-making with such movies as Suave qui pent (Slow Motion; 1980), Hail Mary (1984), a controversial up-dating of the Nativity story, and Nouvelle vague (1990). His work has been widely influential.
