Jean-Luc Godard, the French filmmaker who died at the age of 91, did not make films for a lazy audience. To watch a Godard film, like the frenetic Band of Outsiders (1964) or the chaotic Weekend (1967) was to put in work as a viewer. Godard broke the straightforward, clean narrative grammar of cinema that audiences had been used to, and challenged them to meet him halfway in constructing a whole new cinematic syntax. He punched at the four walls within which a film was supposed to be contained, daring cinegoers to recognise the artifice that was cinema and take pleasure not just in the finished product but the nuts, bolts and clapboards that its making involved
Godard broke onto the scene with Breathless (1960) with its headlong pacing and revolutionary jump-cuts, and helped kickstart the French New Wave in cinema that would completely change what the medium meant. His impatience with rules also made Godard a notoriously difficult man to know — he fell out with long-time friend and collaborator Francois Truffaut after accusing him of being “a liar” in his art and then demanding money to complete a film “so that the public doesn’t get the idea we all make films like you”.
For Godard — and many who followed him, from Lars von Trier to Quentin Tarantino, and Abbas Kiarostami to Anurag Kashyap — a film was the director’s vision come to life. He was an oracle of cinema, who both foresaw and initiated the exciting and many-forked road that the medium would follow in the second half of the 20th century.
