Godard, Jean-Luc (1930- ), French film director. The son of a doctor and a banker's daughter, Godard was educated in Switzerland and at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied ethnology. While at university he devoted most of his time to cinema visits, and after graduating wrote film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma and other magazines. After working on a dam-construction site in Switzerland in 1952, he made a film documentary about the project with the money he earned, and later a short fictional film.

Returning to Paris and more film reviewing, and after making a couple more short films, Godard then made his first feature film through the backing of François Truffaut. À Bout de Souffle (1960; Breathless) developed the new trend of more spontaneous film-making that had begun in the 1950s with its jump cuts, much use of hand-held cameras, and shooting without special lighting (see New Wave). His subsequent films, such as Vivre sa Vie (1962), which were very influential at the time, developed a very personal and advanced style that mixed fiction with semi-documentary sections, inter-titles, and authorial comment. Most starred his then-wife, Anna Karina.

By Weekend (1968), Godard had picked up on the extreme left-wing (Maoist) politics popular with Parisian university students, such as his new wife, Anne Wiazemsky, and his subsequent films were intended to be “revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences”. They were shot extremely cheaply on 16-mm film, and were even more radical in form than before. Some, such as Pravda (1969), were made as collaborative works, with directorial credit assigned to the “Dziga-Vertov Group” (named after the Russian documentarist Dziga Vertov). Jean-Pierre Gorin, a leading figure among one section of the young Parisian far left, formed an extremely close relationship with Godard for some years, and co-directed Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane with him in 1972. Later, in the 1970s, after splitting from Gorin, and his marriage to Anne-Marie Miéville, who became his new creative partner, Godard experimented with long video productions of a less political and more didactic nature, although they were still formally innovative. Then, with a move back to Switzerland and Sauve qui Peut (la Vie) (1980; Slow Motion), he returned to standard 35-mm production of films more like those of his first period. Godard always made brief Hitchcock-type appearances in his own films, but he took bigger roles in his later films, from Prénom Carmen (1983; First Name Carmen) to King Lear (1987) and Hélas Pour Moi! (1993; Woe is Me!). By this time, his work had become increasingly marginal, and his audience had largely abandoned him.

Since the late 1990s, he has achieved something of a renaissance. In 1998 he completed an experimental eight-part series of videos Histoire(s) du Cinéma on the history of cinema. He followed this with Éloge de l'Amour (2001; In Praise of Love), a feature film shot half in conventional black and white 35-mm film and half in colour saturated digital video; and Notre Musique (2004), a meditation on war and peace divided into three kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.

Awards and honours Godard has received include the 1994 Special Award given by the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle and in both 1997 and 1998 honorary Césars, the main national cinema award in France. In 2001 an international conference For Ever Godard was held at London’s Tate Modern to celebrate Godard’s 50-year contribution to cinema and audio-visual art, and in 2006 the Pompidou Centre in Paris hosted a retrospective of his work, which included a newly commissioned video essay, Vrai Faux Passeport, and an installation by the director, Voyages en Utopie.